Pickleball or housing? Debate in this Ontario city shows dilemma municipalities face

A Peterborough councillor recently surprised some of his fellow council members when he proposed an unexpected solution in a search for answers to his city’s housing crisis.

Keith Riel proposed that the city put off six infrastructure projects ranging from pickleball courts to road improvements, which would have potentially freed up close to $16 million.

“I felt there was some projects, even though they’re great projects — there’s nothing wrong with them — I just felt that we could defer them,” he said. “Certainly use the $15.95 million for housing and homelessness.”

But some members of council were caught off guard by Riel’s proposal and balked at the idea as city staff also noted that some of the funds meant for these projects came from other levels of government and could not simply be switched over to a housing project.

“A lot of people have already made their mind up, especially on the Bournemouth pickleball courts. So it was kind of a flyer, if you want to use that word, for me,” Riel recently told Global News.

“Just a sober second thought that either you can come along with me now and vote tonight, because in two months, you’re going to have to do the same thing and face the same reality.”

The night he made the proposal, councillors were debating the 2025 budget, deciding whether to put a hard cap of five per cent on increasing property taxes next year.

The dilemma that Peterborough council is facing is playing out all across Ontario as cities and towns attempt to deal with the housing crisis, which has seen the rising cost of both owning and renting homes fall out of people’s grasp.

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“I think this whole situation draws attention to how dire the problem of homelessness is, and how limited are the resources that municipalities have to deal with this issue,” said Myer Siemiatycki, professor emeritus of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University.

He said the fact that Peterborough, which has a population of around 80,000 people, is struggling with a housing crisis shows that it is not just a problem for Canada’s largest cities.

“We typically, I think, associate homelessness with our largest cities in the country – the Torontos, Vancouvers, Montreal,” Siemiatycki said.

“Peterborough, it turns out, has the second-highest per capita rate of emergency shelters in the province of Ontario. So this is a problem that exists in communities large and small across Ontario.”

The issue has been boiling up for a long time now, according to Laura Pin, an assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo.

“We have a period from the early 1990s to the early 2010s where the federal government basically built no social housing,” she said. “And now we’re shocked that we have an affordable housing crisis that’s playing out in our local communities. And so a lot of folks could say, this is exactly what we would predict would have happened.“

Pin noted that municipalities have had an increasing level of responsibilities on their plate, which has created dilemmas like the one Peterborough is facing.

“Municipalities historically have been responsible for things like local roads, sewer, recreation facilities,” she said. “And right now, I think municipalities are in a really tough situation because they’re increasingly responsible for more social services and more of the housing portfolio without commensurate revenue-raising tools.”

There are few revenue tools available to municipalities outside of property taxes as upper levels of government get the lion’s share of the tax money.

“Of all the tax revenues that the people of Canada throw into a pot, less than $0.10 goes to municipalities,” Siemiatycki said.

“The property tax cannot generate the funds that are needed to keep up with infrastructure and with a whole range of social issues and challenges that manifest themselves and play out at the municipal level.”

The municipalities were even more handcuffed when the Ford government took away the development charges in 2022.

“Bill 23 that the provincial government passed in 2022, which cut development charges, that also has implications here, in so far as development charges were one of the ways that municipalities paid for infrastructure,” Pin said.

Something like a pickleball court or airport maintenance may not seem important, but these are also necessary infrastructure for community building.

“I think those are really important for the livability of the community,” Pin said. “But the reality is that right now, the municipalities are facing the housing crisis in really direct ways, without the resources, I think, to effectively combat some of the issues that they’re seeing.”

Siemiatycki also said municipal governments should not be neglecting one area to address another and that it was time for the upper levels of government to fill in.

“It shouldn’t come to starving necessary other municipal services to address the homelessness problem,” he said. “Municipalities need the resources, the funding, the support from senior levels of government in order to tackle, the housing problem, which is lived and experienced at the municipal level. ”

With the absence of more assistance from the provincial and federal governments, municipalities like Peterborough are left looking for solutions to the housing crisis.

“Building new housing or investing in housing, it really is a cash-intensive process. It requires a degree of revenue raising that’s really difficult for municipalities.” Pin said. “And I think a lot of municipalities are trying to think creatively about this, but not being able to leverage income tax puts municipalities in a difficult position.”