City orders manual count of actual housing starts
Discrepancy with federal numbers puts millions in funding in jeopardy
The City of Windsor has assigned an employee to manually count housing starts in light of conflicting numbers between the municipality and a federal Crown agency that could jeopardize future funding.
If it reaches its housing targets, Windsor may be eligible for up to $10 million over three years from Ontario's Building Faster Fund. But who keeps track of the city's new housing starts and how those units are counted have caused a stir at city hall for several months.
On Monday, council heard that city staff first identified a “discrepancy” back in October between the number of building permits issued last year and the number of housing starts recorded by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
“We have spent the last couple of months reopening every single permit from 2023 and manually counting the number of units attached to every single permit,” said Jelena Payne, the city's commissioner of economic development and innovation.
The city issued building permits for 1,154 housing units in 2023, Payne said.
During the same period, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation recorded only 346 housing starts in Windsor, short of its provincially set target of 953.
Over the last several months, Payne said, city administration has had multiple meetings with representatives from both CMHC and Ontario's Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, “trying to clarify building permits versus building starts.” This week, the city is submitting its data to CMHC to “rectify those numbers”
Earlier this month, a spokesperson with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation told the Star the organization hires people to go out and count housing starts. To do so, it uses building permits provided by municipal planning departments.
Public controversy over how many new housing units are actually being built erupted on Jan. 31 when federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser informed Mayor Drew Dilkens that the government was denying the city millions through Ottawa's Housing Accelerator Fund.
At one point, Windsor was said to be eligible for up to $70 million in grant money, but when the national program became oversubscribed, that number eventually dropped to $30 million.
However, Windsor ended up with nothing, the minister explaining in a letter to the mayor that “only the most ambitious communities will receive funding.”
Cities that were successful in their applications to the fund agreed to change zoning bylaws to allow four housing units on any residential lot — something the Windsor council majority refused to do, arguing it was to protect the character of neighbourhoods.
In his letter to Dilkens, Fraser referenced Ontario's online housing tracker, which uses data collected by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
The CMHC defines a housing start as the “beginning of construction work” on a building where a housing unit will be located. That means the concrete foundation has been poured or the construction equivalent for a building without a basement.
The organization said it collects housing start data through monthly visits to sites for which permits have been issued.
Following Monday's council meeting, Mayor Dilkens told reporters that discrepancies in housing numbers recorded by CMHC is an issue “all municipalities across Ontario are talking about,” and that has been raised by Ontario's Big City Mayors group.
“We feel comfortable that we have a pathway with CMHC moving forward that should eliminate the gaps that have been happening for the last couple of years,” Dilkens said.
“In order to pull a building permit, you have to put a considerable amount of money on the table. Developers and builders would never pull the permit unless they were going to move forward, because there's no refund on these things.
“At the end of the day, the best measure (of housing being built), from our perspective, is when people pull permits — that means they're ready to move forward.”