Ford’s housing promise is unravelling
So much for getting government rules out of the way of solving housing crisis
Doug Ford won re-election on a promise and a prayer.
Vote for me and I’ll build 1.5 million homes in a decade. Promise!
Pray for the premier. Now he needs a miracle — an epiphany over Easter — to light the way.
So he can get out of the way. Ford likes to see himself as a builder, but he’s become a blocker. Instead of dismantling barriers to housing density, he erects new obstacles.
After his disastrous detour on the Greenbelt, Ford’s latest diversion is his fervent opposition to fourplexes. It is a heavy-handed takedown of gentle density that makes no sense when people are desperate for affordable housing.
A fourplex seems too complex for the premier, so here’s a primer: Just as a duplex delivers double happiness to family dwellings, a fourplex allows four dwellings comfortably on a plot of land where once there was only one.
The government’s own housing task force recommended that fourplexes gain blanket approval across the province “as of right,” precluding municipalities from freezing them out. Ford’s Tories quietly ignored the recommendation for years, until Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie formally embraced the idea this month.
As mayor of Mississauga, she had previously enabled fourplexes. As an aspiring premier of the province, she wants them accepted provincewide automatically.
For Ford, who reflectively rejects anything Crombie proposes, it was the kiss of death. The premier now sees fourplexes not as salvation, but abomination.
He lambasted the idea as a “massive mistake,” blustering that it would destroy neighbourhoods. More precisely, he sensed a way to drive a political wedge against his partisan rivals, conflating fourplexes with four storeys.
“I can assure you, 1,000 per cent, you go in the middle of communities and start putting up four-storey, six-storey, eight-storey buildings right deep in the communities, there’s going to be a lot of shouting and screaming,” the premier proclaimed.
“It’s off the table for us,” Ford continued. “We’re going to build homes, single dwelling homes, townhomes, that’s what we’re focused on.”
Except that his focus on single dwellings — and unsightly suburban sprawl — means he’s falling further behind in his sacred promise to build homes fast.
More to the point, Ford’s fixation on “eight-storey towers” doesn’t add up. Fourplexes have four units, not necessarily four storeys — and certainly not six or eight, unless the premier is seeing double.
In any case, oversized monster homes already invade many cityscapes, while luxury duplexes tower over our streets. What could possibly be wrong with fourplexes housing a few more folks for the buck?
The answer is NIMBY-ism, which Ford has condemned in the past but now sees as a way to whip up neighbour against neighbour, politician against politician. Will Ford Nation now become a BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Near Anything) republic?
Ford’s housing planning is unravelling. As a populist, he sensed early the public’s hunger for housing and made it core to his brand, vowing to “get it done.”
But governing isn’t politicking. Policy-making isn’t sloganeering.
Building housing isn’t like delivering “buck a beer” or “beer in corner stores” — simplistic promises that quickly proved too complex to deliver on.
Yet it is in the nature of the premier to choose shortcuts when tackling long-term challenges. When Ford decided to carve up parts of the Greenbelt, the problem wasn’t just that he broke a public promise to protect choice lands — rezoning them for a song while developers profiteered — but that he couldn’t possibly keep his subsequent promise to deliver more housing faster.
Even if a public backlash hadn’t forced him to back down, the Greenbelt boondoggle was never going to be built up as quickly as promised. The premier was lucky to pull the plug when he did, hoping the public would forget the fiasco, rather than face voter wrath ahead of the 2026 election for breaking two separate promises — to protect it, and to build on it — in good time.
The lack of planning is catching up to this Progressive Conservative government. The federal Liberal government sees fourplexes as a pre-requisite for access to the Housing Accelerator Fund, and big cities such as Mississauga and Toronto have bowed to the demand.
Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser poked the premier last week by pointing that Ontario is “lagging desperately” on its own objectives. The lack of a coherent provincial plan could imperil the $357 million Ottawa had allocated for funding of affordable housing in Ontario, Fraser warned.
The latest polls suggest voters may have already forgotten, or at least forgiven, the premier’s Greenbelt transgressions. But having sensed the public’s hunger for housing early on, he now lacks the good sense to see it through — and will ultimately be held to account.
Ford vowed on the campaign trail to “get it done.” Now he needs to get out of the way.
Last August Doug Ford said, “We need a wartime effort right now in all fronts — we all have to be working together,” to solve Ontario’s housing crisis as it trumps all other concerns.
Six months later the war is over and our erstwhile Field Marshal Ford is making a cowardly retreat at the sight of the enemy: fourplexes.
Fourplexes: The stuff of nightmares, never to be mentioned around children or the old. Fourplexes sounded that scary last week when Ford announced his government would not introduce legislation to allow their construction nearly everywhere.
So much for freedom and getting government regulation out of the way. Funny how rhetoric and action don’t match. This is the same premier who justified his now-scandalous push to develop the Greenbelt because Ontario needs more housing. With his comments, Ford is showing how insincere he was: this is not a war on all fronts.
Ford has continually referred to “four-storey towers,” muddling the issue, later saying he was OK with four units on a property — but not towers — while still ruling out the “as-of-right” policy to allow either of them.
Some detached homes are four storeys, so the notion of a four-storey tower is also confusing here. Even in Ford’s backyard, not far from his home and riding, there are fourplexes. Zoning along Royal York Road, north of Humbertown to Anglesey Boulevard, has long permitted up to four units per building. Some have multiple mailboxes at the front door (a telltale sign of more than one unit), but they look like standard houses, modest compared to today’s bloated McMansions. There are apartment buildings nearby, too.
The enemy is within Etobicoke, yet surely Ford would agree that Etobicoke is just fine. The sky didn’t fall. Society did not collapse. In fact, it’s better for it because more people can live in Etobicoke. So why is he beating a muddled retreat on this issue?
Populism and NIMBYism is the reason.
Multi-unit housing exists across Ontario today and often blends into neighbourhoods seamlessly, sometimes even appearing like detached homes. That’s fine, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with fourplexes or even modest apartment buildings looking like apartments. There are hundreds and hundreds of mixed residential streets, four storeys or more, that are perfectly fine and beautiful places to live.
In Toronto and across Ontario, a deep bias exists against apartments. Like many politicians, local or otherwise, Ford listens attentively to people who own standalone houses. The NIMBY outcry against multiunit housing, the very anti-housing sentiment he once took aim at, unleashing his blusterous rhetoric against, has cowed him. Ford warned of “shouting and screaming” if fourplexes are allowed. A real leader who cared about Ontario’s future would stand strong, though.
A lot of people, myself included, thought Ford might get the housing crisis right. He might be the strong leader we needed, one who could tell those comfortable shouters and screamers that the housing crisis is important enough to override their petty concerns. He’s not that leader, though.
He is, to use another populist term of the moment, a real gatekeeper.
Ford said his government will focus on single-dwelling homes and townhouses. Ford built his political career claiming to champion the “little guy,” but you know who builds smaller multiplex housing in existing neighbourhoods, one at a time? The little guy. Small, independent contractors and business people. The backbone of the province.
Wandering around Ontario, it doesn’t take long to see the names of the big-time multimillionaire and multibillionaire developers on new subdivision projects, building detached homes and townhouse, undertakings often bigger than the little guys can ever manage. There isn’t much room in Ontario cities for single-dwelling houses anymore so building them means sprawl and big developers.
Sorry, little guys and your projects.
Fourplexes and the like won’t solve the housing crisis alone, but Ford’s “war effort” also doesn’t include a massive push to build public and affordable housing either, and there is no mass revival of co-op housing, or any other “fronts” on housing that make a real impact. There’s just the status quo.
Defending fourplexes was a defining moment for Ford and Ontario and he muddled it. One of the great fault lines in Canadian society is housing.
I actually fear the damage its scarcity and unaffordability is already doing, as people who are comfortably housed continually kick the ladder away from anybody who is trying to achieve the same, with Ford on their side. This especially means young people.
An Ontario without real, bold and brave housing solutions has little future for them. That’s bad for Ontario’s happiness, Ontario’s prosperity and Ontario’s social cohesion. Housing trouble sows seeds of discontent.
This was an easy thing for Ford to do, but he was cowed. That bodes poorly for the even tougher decisions that are needed in Ontario. little