Premier announces funding aimed at cutting red tape at provincial housing summit

Ontarians are feeling the crunch of high demand and low supply in the housing market, and in Waterloo Region the gap has risen to record levels in the past year.

Premier Doug Ford and the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark hosted a closed door virtual housing affordability summit Wednesday afternoon, alongside Ontario mayors, promising to make change on the issue.

In his opening statement, Premier Ford admitted the housing crisis can't be solved in one day.

The pair said a long-term plan is needed and this summit is about opening the lines of communication, trying to find the best ways to build more home as quickly as possible.

"Ontario has the lowest number of homes per capita in the country,” Clark said, referring to a recent report from Scotiabank. “According to their report, Ontario would need an additional 1.2 million homes to match the average ratio of homes per capita as our province's G7 peers.”

In an effort to increase that supply, the province made two funding promises.

The first, $45 million for a new "streamline development approval fund" which will be split between Ontario’s 39 largest municipalities to use as they wish as long as it speeds up housing applications.

"That will help the provinces largest municipalities unlock housing supply by cutting the red tape that continues to stifle progress and will improve the local processes for getting residential and industrial developments underway,” Ford said.

The second, an extra $8 million towards the "Audit and Accountability Fund," an account Mayor Berry Vrbanovic says has already helped the City of Kitchener approve projects faster.

Vrbanovic says pre-pandemic, Kitchener decided to use money they were given from the "Audit and Accountability Fund" to complete a development services review

“It made a number of changes including automization of our development processes and that certainly helped us significantly,” he said.

Time from pre-submission consultation to receiving approval and principal “has gone from 202 days to 133 days on the average project, which has decreased it by about 60 per cent," Vrbanovic said.

In Waterloo Region, lack of supply supported a record breaking year for both home prices and the number of homes sold in 2021.

In December, the average sale price for all residential properties in the Kitchener-Waterloo area was roughly $850,000.

Kitchener-Waterloo Association of Realtors President, Megan Bell argues simply building more homes, isn't good enough.

“It’s the type of home that’s being built," Bell said.

She says there are many facets that need to be considered in order to slow down the crisis and speed up the number of homes available.

“If you want to take a war time bungalow and knock it down and build a bigger house you can,” she used as an example. “But that same bungalow that would make a great duplex, we have to go through a lot of red tape just to get there and then it also costs more money.”

Bell commented that zoning can a big piece of red tape in terms of trying to increase the number of units available.

When Clark was asked what a short term solution to the housing crisis could be, "there’s a lot of levers here,” he responded.

With that, he mentioned the current shortage of skilled workers.

“I think we need some help from the federal government,” he went on to say.

“Also, the supply chain is something that I think was of concern to a number of mayors."

Ford reiterated that every municipality has different needs when it comes to housing, “there is no one size fits all solution.”

And that new homes can’t be built over night, just as Rome wasn’t built in a day.

“There’s no silver bullet to fixing a problem that has been in the making for decades."

Vrbanovic and his fellow Waterloo Region mayors are hoping to bring all levels of government together on this issue.