Just over 100 days after taking office, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow has unveiled a plan she hopes will begin to address housing and homeless problems in the city.
On Tuesday, the City of Toronto published its first major housing plan under Chow’s premiership, with 22 separate recommendations designed to make housing both more affordable and more available.
The plan will cost an estimated $28.6 billion to $31.5 billion and relies on between $500 million to $800 million in funding from both the provincial and federal governments every year.
Chow, like many of her mayoral rivals in June, ran with solving Toronto’s housing as a key issue.
She promised during the campaign to strengthen rental protections and expedite housing approvals. She also promised the city would build 25,000 rent-controlled homes over eight years when she was elected.
The housing plan unveiled by the city on Tuesday includes a list of 52 places in Toronto, owned by city hall, that are ready to have housing built. It estimates between 16,000 and 17,500 rent-controlled homes can be built there.
It also recommends another 40 places that could eventually host housing and be “added to this pipeline.”
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The new housing plan suggests the city act as a developer and lead construction at five sites on Sherbourne Street, Queens Wharf Road, Dundas Street, Brock Avenue and Bellevue Avenue.
The city’s official statement announcing the plan said “decades of insufficient government investment” had led to crumbling affordability in the city.
A monthly aggregated report from Rentals.ca suggests the average rate for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto is $2,614 per month, up five per cent compared with October 2022. A two-bedroom costs around $3,411, the report said.
The average sale price of a home in the city, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, was $1.12 million in September.
“We urgently need to build more affordable housing faster, so people in our city can find a home they can afford,” Chow said in a statement Tuesday.
“That’s why we’re leading a generational shift in both how we deliver housing and the type of housing we’re going to build.”
Other changes in the report included ways to streamline and strengthen the city’s planning system, including a “higher degree of coordination” between city staff, agencies and corporations.
The city said it expected its housing plan to support it in reaching federally- and provincially-set housing targets.
More proposals on the report’s list of 22 include supporting the non-profit housing sector and streamlining technology involved in planning to speed up approvals.
Coun. Gord Perks, chair of the planning committee, said the housing plan was key to the city’s future and to solving issues like homelessness.
“Are you prepared to live in a city where our shelter system is bursting at the seams, where people are in camp over the winter, when people are going to emergency rooms to get housing?” he said Tuesday at Toronto city hall.
“I can’t live in that city, I don’t think Torontonians can live in that city. So let’s change it.”
Coun. Brad Bradford, who also ran for mayor in 2023 and was planning chair under former mayor John Tory, said he was unsure if the plan was realistic.
“I have a lot of doubts and frankly you talk to some folks in this building, they would have concerns about the ability to deliver on that as well,” he told reporters at city hall.
“We’re just not set up for it, there is not the in-house expertise to become a public builder.”
He said the private sector should have a bigger role, pouring cold water on the idea the city could address an issue developers have struggled to solve.
— with files from Global News’ Matthew Bingley
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