As we’ve been knocking on doors in Waterloo these past few weeks, one of the concerns we hear most often is the lack of affordability of housing in the region. Folks who are renting lament that they will never be able to afford a home of their own, and even those who are comfortably settled in homes of their own worry that their children will struggle to afford a place to live.
According to statistics from the Canadian Real Estate Association, the average sale price of a residential property in Kitchener-Waterloo was just over $950,000 in January of this year. This represents a near-doubling of the average sale price from two years before, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, when the average price was just over $550,000.
This upward climb in housing prices is driving up rent prices as well. According to statistics on zumper.com, which aggregates online rental price data, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Waterloo has climbed from approximately $1500 per month in early 2020 to a current rate of around $1800 per month in April 2022. These increases in the cost of housing are making it unrealistic for many people to even consider living in a place of their own.
Clearly, swift action is needed in order to address this crisis. This post is intended to share, in simple terms, what the Green Party of Ontario’s housing strategy aims to do about this problem.
One of the factors driving up housing prices at the moment is a lack of housing supply. To put it frankly, the population of Ontario is growing faster than the supply of housing is, leaving more people to compete to pay for fewer places to live. Clearly then, we need to increase the housing supply in the province, but this must be done in a thoughtful way. Paving over existing agricultural land for new single-family housing developments is not the way to proceed, because it only increases urban sprawl while driving up the cost of food when the land used to produce that food is converted.
In order to promote active, connected, livable communities, one of the Green Party’s main answers to the crisis is to “intensify” development in existing urban areas. In particular, the party’s housing plan speaks of the “missing middle” in communities. It is common to see single-family dwellings on a property, and high-rise developments are another popular option, but new triplex and fourplex developments are much less common. Part of the problem is that municipal zoning laws often require property owners to go through an approval process before building such units on a property zoned for a single-family dwelling. The Green Party would remove those restrictions, meaning that anyone could build a triplex or fourplex on any residentially zoned area. This has a lot of potential to increase housing supply without taking away existing agricultural and natural areas.
The Green Party’s plan also calls for re-instating the province’s “brownfield remediation fund”, which would support cities in safely building affordable housing on former industrial sites in existing neighbourhoods. This would allow people to live on land that would otherwise sit completely idle. The province itself owns a considerable amount of land across Ontario, some of which is vacant or under-used, and the Greens propose to make this land available for affordable housing developments as well.
In order to make sure that a significant fraction of new housing built is affordable, the Green Party also wants to require a minimum of 20% affordable units in all housing projects over a certain size, while incentivizing owners of single-family homes to add affordable rental units into their primary residence, such as “tiny homes” and basement apartments.
The Green plan also includes measures to crack down on housing speculation and the commercialization of the housing market. This includes creating a province-wide vacant home tax, an anti-flipping tax, and regulating the short-term rental market (limiting the ability of property owners to use properties exclusively for AirBnb listings, for example). All of this can help free up the existing supply of housing to those who need it.
Finally, on the rental side of the housing market, the Green plan calls for the reinstatement of rent controls on all rental units, as well as the development of clear rules for above-guideline rent increases, in order to deter landlords from evicting long-standing tenants just for the sake of increasing the rent.
Like most things in life, the current housing affordability crisis is complicated, and no single policy will fix everything. However, this gives you a sense of how the Greens wish to tackle this problem! You can read the full housing plan here. If you have any thoughts, proposals, or concerns with anything mentioned in this plan, we would love to hear from you. Our society only becomes stronger when we talk about and work through these issues together.