Everyone must take action on affordable housing
In the avalanche of news about Patrick Brown’s attempts to clear his name of multiple scandals this week, one particular piece of attempted vindication stuck out to me. “Let me be clear, like many young Canadians,” he wrote in response to suspicions raised about his finances, “my family loaned me the money to help with the down payment on my house.”
Unlike so much we have learned or heard alleged about Brown in recent weeks, this one sticks out because the excuse is so plausible, so normal. Relat- able, even.
He’s a 40-year-old man who has climbed nearly to the absolute height of his profession? A lawyer by training who has held elected office for almost 20 years? Someone who has held a series of highprofile, six-figure-paying, taxpayer-funded jobs for more than a decade? Is also the co-owner of a bar?
This is a guy who needs help raising the rent? Sounds about right. If he’s buying a house in Toronto cottage country, many Torontonians are by now conditioned to think, of course he’s gonna need rich parents.
How else is a successful, highly paid professional going to buy in this market, if not with a loan from the bank of Mom and Dad?
And you know, in a nutshell, there’s the problem.
Not Patrick Brown’s problem, obviously — though clearly he has many. And not the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario’s problem, though they have even more (starting with Brown).
It’s our problem. As a city, as a region, as a province.
The fact that it is completely mundane for a potential premier of Ontario to claim he cannot afford GTA real estate on his own income is everyone’s problem. It ought to be an issue — arguably the issue — in the upcoming provincial and municipal elections.
That the various likely players in those elections are currently spending most of their time debating sexual education, federal carbon taxes and restricting car traffic on a couple of key main streets might indicate they are clueless. At least when it comes to finding a solution. They must be aware of the problem by now.
In a report released this week, the Toronto Region Board of Trade reports that among young professionals they surveyed between the ages of 18 and 39, 42 per cent of them said they were likely to leave the region because of the high cost of housing.
That too, by now, will seem almost mundane — it’s become a favourite Toronto pastime to wistfully peruse MLS real estate listings for oceanfront mansions in New Brunswick that carry for less than the monthly rent on a Scarborough basement apartment. Most of us know friends and family members with marketable skills who have headed away to relatively more affordable places such as Hamilton, Montreal, Chicago or even New York City.
That’s right, even the Big Apple, long many people’s working definition of an absurdly expensive place to live, now scores better than Toronto on the Median Multiple affordability measure which divides home costs by average income.
Vacancy rates for rental apartments are at longtime lows and average two-bedroom apartments are now well over $2,000 a month. Even with a recent apparent cooling of the sales market, the seven-figure housing prices for tiny local homes remain well known — and completely out of reach. And if more than four in 10 professionals are considering moving because housing’s too expensive, consider the plight of our poor and working-class residents, who find nothing at all in their price range, decades-long waiting lists for social housing and overcrowded emergency shelters.
The answer, of course, is to build places for people to live. The board of trade report suggests a series of measures to make it easier and more attractive to build new resale homes and purpose-built rental apartments closer to transit. That’s a good start in a city where proposals for midrise midtown luxury rentals still face such serious NIMBY opposition that developers often relent and build low-density single-family homes instead.
We also need some kind of strategy, right away, for affordable subsidized rental units. For both high and low ends of the market, easier and quicker approvals and enticements for things such as laneway houses and duplexes (as the board of trade suggests), as well as rooming houses, in-law suites and basement apartments, may help — especially if regulations preventing such units from becoming hotel-style rental units are enforced.
These smaller measures are less visible than big condo towers, but they can add up: the board of trade report notes that a single new home per hectare across the city would create room for 45,000 new people. In a region that’s expected to grow by 120,000 people a year, that doesn’t prevent things from getting worse. But it’s better than nothing.
We need better than that to deal with a problem that has become so pervasive it affects everyone from street-corner panhandlers to candidates for high office. Housing affordability is one of our biggest problems, threatening the quality of life of many millions of residents.
The question this election season is, what are we going to do about it?