Latest / The Missing Middle Podcast / Housing Promises: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Missing

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Housing Promises: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Missing · The Missing Middle Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost election day across Ontario.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: We're just 10 days out.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: And for the past few weeks, I've been emailing campaigns with one request.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Send us your housing platform.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: We now have documents from many campaigns and offices in nine cities in this province.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Some said specific numbers and timelines, and some sent just a slogan.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Housing is one of the few areas where a mayor has real levers.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: They have real powers.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you learn a lot from whether a candidate is willing to use those levers and powers, whether they try to blame another level of government, or whether they choose to not say anything of substance at all.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: So today on Demographics, we're going through these plans to help you figure out what to look for in a candidate's plan if you, like me, are a one-issue voter on housing.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Demographics, hosted by Mike Moffitt and Kara Stern.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a policy nerd, so I spend way too much time scrutinizing candidate platforms.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: But Kara, you're also into housing and almost as nerdy as I am.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're going through these uh platforms that all of these various candidates sent to you, like what specifically were you looking for?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there are kind of three things that I look for when I'm trying to see if their housing policy will help the middle class.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: So one of them is whether they remove barriers to building in neighborhoods where people actually want to live.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Does it cut the taxes and fees that adds tens of thousands of dollars to a new home to make it cheaper to build?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: And does it shorten the time from proposal to the time that they actually have shovels in the ground?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's uh I'd say pretty much my list too.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mostly want to know whether the plan is grounded in reality and acknowledges that, yeah, we need more social housing, but we really need uh more homes that middle class families can afford.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just one or the other, it's both.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: I also want to know if they're making expensive promises, if they make it clear how they're going to pay for that promise.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: The plan should obviously recognize the limit of municipal powers and not promise things that can only be provided for by the federal or provincial government.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I want the plan to acknowledge that we have a particular shortage when it comes to family-sized homes, that cities shouldn't just be setting an arbitrary unit target saying, okay, we need, you know, 10,000 homes and then hitting that target by building a bunch of shoebox condo units and nothing else, which we've seen in many of our cities.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I compiled all of the different responses and I sent them to you.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to know what was your initial reaction when you saw these platforms?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm gonna do the ultimate Gen X thing while I wear my Atari shirt and quote something that hasn't been relevant since 1986.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: My thought was, where's the beef?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Hello?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Where's the beef?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I did find more to analyze on the social housing and homelessness side, and that's great.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: We we need many more policies in that area.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I noticed that too.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them, when they emailed me, I would respond saying, Hey, just wondering, is there anything for middle class home home buyers or middle class families really, not just necessarily home buyers, also renters?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Despite the lack of content to analyze from some people, there were some proposals that I thought were worth discussing.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start with one that made both of us pretty annoyed.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you guys uh selected this uh just to set me off.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: From Mississauga candidate uh Alvin Tejo, this is a guy who spearheaded upzoning in Mississauga to allow for fourplexes citywide.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he's historically been pretty good on housing.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: He's young, he seems to understand how challenging it is uh for young families.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yet he proposed this idea, and I'll have you walk us through it, that is all about basically taking uh resources from those who are already struggling to afford a home and giving those resources to people who are already well housed.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think his idea caught more attention because we, you know, you get frustrated when someone you know understands it, proposes something that you're like goes against the thing that you say you believe in.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: But basically what he did was propose a plan that allowed seniors to defer their property taxes if they've owned their Mississauga home for at least 20 years and they live in it as their primary residence, and they don't own multiple properties.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: So they keep paying their property taxes, but the bill would never go up.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And every future increase would be added and deferred to later.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: So he says that means that young families wouldn't be subsidizing it because the city still collects the money down the road.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that argument really frustrates me because the city and taxpayers do subsidize it because what the city is essentially doing here is giving an interest-free loan to seniors.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: So if the city's cost of borrowing is say five or six percent, then every year, every$100 that they're deferring interest-free, that's costing the city five or six bucks in interest, and everyone else has to pay for it.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he's a candidate who understands the need for infill before many others did.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: He understands uh the need to, you know, help people who are struggling to afford to buy a home, but yet, you know, he's kind of throwing them under the bus here to appeal to seniors uh in order to win an election.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, what really frustrates me is that we have politicians and municipalities who constantly talk about the fact that uh we need seniors to downsize.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And they put it in their official plans.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: They basically say, we don't need to build that many single-family homes because all the seniors are going to downsize and all the young families can move into those homes.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: But then they uh put in these policies in place to make sure that seniors don't downsize.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one of the things that has caused the shortage of family homes, is that our official plans both kind of assume seniors will downsize, but then these other policies prevent seniors from downsizing.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's just an incoherent mess of policies.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: His defense was that this is similar to other cities' deferral programs, which lots of other cities have, but I don't know of any other that has a 20-year tenure requirement.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but if you just play out the situation, like imagine you're 70 years old and you've lived in your home for 25 years, kids have moved out, three bedrooms are sitting empty, and every year you stay, your tax bill stays flat and that deferred balance grows.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then you know, as soon as you sell to downsize, not only do you have to pay that bill, but you also lose the opportunity to defer going forward.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you know, I as a parent and even my own childhood, I remember that the argument that mom, the other kids were doing it too, was never a defense.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: If seniors want to stay in those homes, it's their right to, but we shouldn't be subsidizing that.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is a terrible, terrible idea.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: He got flamed on social media for it.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he was appropriately roasted.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's move on to something that we did like.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Brad Bradford's proposal for removing the Toronto portion of land transfer taxes on the first$1.1 million of a home's value and completely eliminating them if they're under that.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: And he got that price from looking at the average sale price in 2025.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: So that applies to people who are buying principal residences, including first-time buyers.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't apply to investment properties.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we like this because land transfer taxes discourage people from right-sizing their homes by taxing moving.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it should be well understood by now that if you want less of something, you tax it.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: You want less smoking, you raise the tax on cigarettes.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: You want fewer carbon emissions, you price carbon.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want people to buy and sell homes less often, you put a tax on home sales, which essentially is the land transfer tax.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: So if you get rid of the land transfer tax, people are going to move more often.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to right size their property.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, at a high level, I like it.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: But my only question is like, how on earth is he gonna pay for it?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it's true that the city of Toronto is the only municipality in Ontario that has a land transfer tax.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: I believe it's the only one that's actually even allowed to have a land transfer tax.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: The city collects an absolute ton of money from it.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, how does that revenue get replaced?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what spending is reduced to make up for the shortfall?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: I really don't get a sense for that.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's estimating that it'll cost around$300 million.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he says he'll pay for it through his plan to turn Toronto water into a public utility.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then he says he's going to change how big projects are funded, which it sounds like essentially taking on long-term debt to pay for capital expenses instead of paying for it out of the year's budget.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I'm certainly all for municipal service corporations, uh, but not none of that really uh answers the question.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Those reforms are really kind of lowering development charges.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: They're not really changing the sort of operating uh cost of you know how how a city operates.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: So it just feels like a lot of those kind of Rube Goldberg devices that's like hugely complex and like stuff is moving all over the place.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't get it.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't get it.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how anybody else uh is supposed to.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: But that said, I love the high-level idea.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Limiting land transfer tax, that's a good thing.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Finding better ways to pay for infrastructure, also a good thing.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I just don't know how those puzzle pieces fit together.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, now I want to go to back to the bad and maybe the worst one I saw, which was the incumbent mayor, uh candidate Drew Dilkins in Windsor.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And he promised that if council puts citywide forplexes on the table, as many cities have in Canada, he will use his strong mayor powers to veto it.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sadly, I'm not surprised given uh both the mayor and and most of Windsor Council's longstanding opposition to foreplexes.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: They famously got into a bit of a dispute uh with the federal government on the housing accelerator over the foreplex piece.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, for what it's worth, uh, you know, I think sometimes we we focus too much on kind of unit counts.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are more important things like harmonization, height limits.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't even think we should have unit counts, uh, but that's a discussion for another time.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, overall, you know, I think my big frustration is that, okay, you don't want that, but what are you going to do?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like Windsor is one of the least affordable markets in Canada based on home prices relative to incomes because it's one of the lower income places in the province.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you have high home prices, you have relatively low incomes.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't see any municipal politician in the Windsor area who has a plan to address that or even really seems to care.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I really don't understand.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I know as a Londoner, it's my job to, you know, pound on Windsor, and I'm playing that role here.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't get what they're doing down there.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: I can't let this one go without pointing out that Doug Ford said strong mayor powers were only supposed to be used to align with provincial policy.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: When council goes against something that doesn't align with it, the mayors can use it to veto that or override council.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: They're supposed to be for increasing housing supply, not decreasing it.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I'd love to see him come out and say something, but I think I'm gonna be waiting a little while for it.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: Here's one I really like though.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Jim Lee in Oshawa, who's currently a city councilor, he wrote back to me highlighting what the city can do and what's really out of the jurisdiction.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a great start to point out like what he can actually do.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: We do like that a lot.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things he said that he wanted to focus on is as of right fourplexes, garden suites, and mid-rise on transit corridors, ending the year-long rezoning and infill fights that kill small projects before they start.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: And he also highlighted how Oshawa currently doesn't have any development charges if you're building in their downtown core.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that's part of an effort to incentivize building there.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so he said he wanted to expand that to rental and missing middle homes citywide.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: He says the money will come from the provincial federal infrastructure funding that rewards these cuts so the existing tax base wouldn't have to cover the hole it creates in the budget.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, first, municipalities do have the ability to set development charges at different rates in different parts of the city.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the city of Ottawa, he mentions Oshawa, you know, Ottawa does this as well.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Homes built near downtown pay a lower development charge rate than the homes out in the suburbs.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, you can set different rates uh for different housing types.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: So all of that is doable.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of it is actually a good idea.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: But once again, I come to this question like, how are you going to pay for it?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: I have an idea what he means.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: The money will come from provincial federal infrastructure deals that cities are getting some money out of this kind of three-year DC reduction plan.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: But those deals all have conditions attached on how the money is used.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: So a city or a mayor can't simply just do whatever it wants with it.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's got to live up to the agreed upon terms.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't see how that's the case here.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we'd love to learn more, but my understanding is that a city just can't do that.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if it can't do that, then it would uh have to, you know, lower development charges in some areas and raise them in others.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that might be worth doing, but that's not coming from provincial or federal money.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: There's another response I wanted to highlight that's in Guelph.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Can you choose?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: He noted that he wanted to improve the approvals process to make the guidelines clearer so projects can move faster.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people actually mentioned things about the approvals timeline because that seems to be a thing where there's a lot of red tape that the municipalities can correct without really getting a ton of opposition.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: But one thing I really didn't like is that he highlighted the need to prioritize density, including infill along arterial roads with what he called a more quote tailored approach to established neighborhoods, which kind of sounds to me like probably not allowing a lot of multiplexes.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't love the idea that, like, if you can't afford your own single detached house or, you know, single family home, not only do you need to accept a smaller unit, but you have to live on busier roads, which are not as nice for families.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: I know a lot of people look for quieter streets where they feel comfortable having their kids outside, but also like for pollution, if you can spread people out throughout the city and give everyone the opportunity to live in all different kinds of parts of the city, not just like, oh, you know, people who didn't get in early enough have to live on busy streets and everyone else gets to live in quiet neighborhoods.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: This really bothers me.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: It bothers me a lot.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it's something that we see from specifically progressive politicians and progressive urban planners.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons why we had zoning, like one of the big arguments for zoning, is that, you know, you don't want neighborhoods next to a dirty polluting factory, right?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: The the whole kind of point of zoning was to keep these land uses away from each other and basically keep people away from sources of pollution.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, over the last 20 years, we flipped that on our head.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Zoning nowadays is actually forcing people to live closest to the places that have the most pollution, which tends to be arterial roads.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: We've gone completely backwards and they're really also not good for kids.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: So couldn't agree with you more.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: I I think this focus on putting everybody on arterials is regressive as hell.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I'm totally against it.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know why it has so much support.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because it helps voters who currently have their homes in neighborhoods to not have to deal with change, and that's what they're trying to do here.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I understand why they do it politically, but it's not good policy.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And we know Guelph has a big problem.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like I just remember a few years ago a news story about a student's parent who rented him a parking spot so he can live in a camper van because there were no student rentals available.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that situation has improved in Guelph, but it is still very tight, and we know that it won't be fully fixed for a while.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, student housing shortages across southwestern Ontario have been really bad, but particularly in that kind of like Guelph, Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge area.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: They're massive.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of that is due to the international student debacle.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: We had hundreds of thousands of students come in and like no student housing built.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: It caused massive shortages, vacancies went to zero, and rents shot up, and they have come down a little bit, but you know, they are still really, really elevated.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Things are far more challenging than they should be.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it didn't just affect the student market.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: There, there's been this large loss of single family homes as all of these, you know, kind of older homes that were close to a college or close to a university, they got bought up by investors and turned into uh the fact of kind of student rentals.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it is a massive problem.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: It has gotten better in the last couple of years, but it's still really not an affordable situation for young students.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Just a reminder to people that that just shows that just because you don't build multiplexes doesn't mean the population won't grow.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's just going to mean that people who do come are going to be forced into worse situations.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: I keep seeing responses online, especially with Alberta, the province forcing cities to down zone.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: I keep seeing comments like, well, we don't want so many people moving here.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, that's not, it has nothing to do with that.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I guess if the prices are cheaper, people are more likely to move there, but we saw it didn't stop people who needed to live in those areas.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I would also point out that Danielle Smith also promised to double Alberta's uh population.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, they are talking out of both sides of their mouth uh a little bit there.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: I want to pretend for a moment that you have a blank slate to write the housing policy for a big city mayoral candidate.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: Give me a few policy points that would be things that you would definitely highlight.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, well, first of all, I wouldn't use this kind of same template in each city, uh, even if we're just limiting ourselves to large cities.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the context matters.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Say Ottawa.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like Ottawa's development charges are much lower than Toronto's, so that makes a difference.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, the city of Ottawa can choose to expand outward when it comes to building family homes.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the city of Toronto really can't unless we're, you know, calling up the Dutch and finding uh ways to drain parts of Lake Ontario.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're really kind of limited in where they can build.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: But I would also say I don't want to start with policy.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think it comes down to having a vision and then taking that vision and creating a plan that's based on reality.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, some of the realities I look for in other people's plans, and like I can give you a list here, is first, the plan should acknowledge that population growth is real and that we have a shortage of homes.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Second is that not all homes are created equal.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like we need a diversity of home types, we need more high-rise rentals, we need a lot of different things.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, we have to understand that we can't just house everyone in one type of home.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Third is that we should recognize that the biggest shortage of homes we have are for young middle class families, and they need three bedrooms, they need green space, they need places for their kids to play.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth is that the only way to get prices and rents down to a reasonable level is to make it cheaper to build homes.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's lowering construction taxes on homes, that's lowering land prices, it's making more efficient use of land, it's jury-mining approvals processes, all of these things.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And fifth, I think we also have to recognize that young families actually want to own a home and they're gonna leave to go to the places where they can get it.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, do we need more rentals?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: But we have to understand young middle class families want to own their own home nine out of 10 or so.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we can't ignore that reality.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: And our plans need to be based on that reality.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: I guess that there are differences in specifics in different cities, but it sounds like these are like kind of themes that go across them.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: But how do you turn that into actual policy?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so there are a lot of policies to get us there, and obviously they should be talking about policy.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I think it's important for politicians to set that vision and describe the problem.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think they got to commit to revising official plans, that those official plans should recognize the reality of the population of population growth.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Those official plans should be more explicit about the need for families with kids.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they should acknowledge that children have different needs than the rest of us, and that we need green space.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that sounds kind of high level, but by itself, when when you start to put these conditions in official plans, that forces necessary changes, like a rezoning or expanding urban growth boundaries in order to be able to house everyone in the plan.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Second of all, uh, I would implement something called form-based zoning for new low-rise neighborhoods.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's just basically aligning zoning and the building code to make it easier to build homes for families with kids of a lot of different types, and that's a whole episode we can do on that.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: That we have done on it.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll probably do again.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: You had mentioned that a lot of the candidates had uh promised to cut approval times.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: That is something that I think we can do, and uh, you know, I think they can be specific about it.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Edmonton is uh using AI, and other cities are using AI where they can find these little errors quickly and you know, edit things in hours, which it often takes humans weeks to do.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that can really streamline processes.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think we need to review development charge plans.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a lot of development charge plans are collecting money for projects that will never get built, right?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we're taxing developers for infrastructure.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: That infrastructure is never going to get built.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's inappropriate.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's it makes our homes cost too much.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, on development charges, I do like, you know, what some of the candidates are doing around this kind of, you know, changing different rates depending on the area, the type of home.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's important.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: What I would specifically like is for us to charge less for entry-level homes and higher for McMansions.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's never made sense to me that a 1,200 square foot bungalow and a 12,000 square foot McMansion pay the exact dollar amount in development charges.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's completely regressive.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: It makes no sense.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: If we could have a more sensible system, it would encourage the building of small but still family-sized homes.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of things I could do, but that's just kind of a short list of things that would actually make a difference and are aligned with the vision and the identification of problems that uh a candidate should be talking about.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: I suspect one of the problems is that as much as I like all these specifics, I wonder whether good housing policy can win elections or if it's the kind of thing where politicians just need to, you know, have big promises about the kind of city they expect to have.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we want this many more homes, you want a city where people can afford this and keep quiet about the specifics until they've been elected because they don't want to set off people who are likely to vote and who maybe don't want change.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and I to be clear, I think it's both bad politics and bad policy to make a lot of these big promises.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't think, first of all, people find them necessarily that credible.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: And from a policy point of view, like I actually think it's part of the problem because there is no one big fix to the housing crisis.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's no like saying, okay, if you do this one big thing, it will fix everything.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: That'd be so nice.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: It would be so nice, uh, though it would put us out of work.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that wouldn't be good.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, sometimes there's benefits to having these very complex system-level issues where dozens of little changes are are needed.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: So it's why creating the vision is so important where you can say, okay, this is what we're trying to accomplish, and this is how we we get there.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I do think there are areas where politics and policy align, that something can both be good politics and good policy.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: I do think that reforming development charges to lower the price of starter homes, I think that's like something like 80, 90% of people can agree on.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, every person I talk to uh on housing, whether they are mad at the government or mad at developers or mad at me or whoever, you know, always say, like, why can't we build those kind of small bungalows like we did in the 50s and 60s?
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the politician could say, well, part of the reason is is tax policy, and here's how I would fix it.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Is that going to move a ton of votes?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Not necessarily, but I think it would be popular enough, and I think it would have very, very little opposition.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess you get people who are analyzing the plans when you're specific to be able to say, this is good, this could actually work, and maybe that helps.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks everyone for watching and listening.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Our producer is Meredith Martin, and this episode was edited by Canadian Civil.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you have any thoughts or questions about 1980s Wendy's commercials, please leave us a comment on YouTube.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll see you next time.