Toronto announces start of work on first Housing Now project
The City of Toronto has announced that construction is set to start next month on the first phase of an affordable-rental housing project.
The Housing Now Initiative encompasses work on three properties. Construction is expected to begin in July at 5207 Dundas St. W. and at two other shovel-ready sites, 50 Wilson Heights Blvd. and 140 Merton St., before the end of this year.
Toronto City Council adopted the Housing Now 2023 Progress Update report in May. The report provided an update on Housing Now and recommended urgent actions for all orders of government to unlock purpose-built affordable and market rental housing supply in all neighbourhoods across Toronto.
The city approved further support to unlock these sites. Implementation of these actions, if combined with investments from the provincial and federal governments, can result in the development of more than 16,000 homes, of which 12,000 are planned as purpose-built rental homes with almost 5,500 being affordable rental homes.
Toronto Council approved the Housing Now program in January 2019. The program aims to activate city-owned lands to stimulate the development of affordable rental housing within transit-oriented, mixed-income, mixed-use, complete communities. It is also a key housing supply program that supports the city’s HousingTO 2020-2030 Action Plan target of 40,000 new affordable rental homes and Housing Action Plan 2022-2026 target of 285,000 homes by 2031.
“Housing Now is a critical component of the HousingTO 2020-2030 Action Plan and an innovative way to leverage city land and resources to increase the necessary supply of permanent affordable rental housing in Toronto,” said Deputy Mayor Jennifer McKelvie. “We are delivering on our commitment to Housing Now by working quickly to begin construction on the three shovel-ready sites identified for this year.”
To date, the city has committed more than $1.3 billion in land value, capital funding and financial incentives to the program, making Housing Now one of the most significant municipal financial investments in housing underway today.
Since approval of the Housing Now Initiative in January 2019, council has allocated 21 prime transit-oriented sites. To date, 10 of these sites have been re-zoned and market offerings have been completed for six of them.
The city continues to work with non-profit and private sector developers to get shovels in the ground while navigating a number of external challenges. Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, significant increases in construction costs and interest rates, labour shortages and global supply chain disruptions have affected Housing Now projects.
The city says that legislative changes by other orders of government have also slowed down Housing Now progress. Recently, the Government of Canada made changes to the federal National Housing Co-Investment Fund that resulted in grant funding being capped at levels too low to support the cost of developing new affordable housing in the Toronto. At the same time, the province’s More Homes Built Faster Act eliminated housing services from development charges revenues, which was the city’s primary funding tool to support the delivery of new affordable rental housing supply.
The need for more purpose-built, affordable and market-rental housing in Toronto is urgent.
About 40 percent of the city’s renter households (around 220,000 households) live in unaffordable housing. The current residential vacancy rate in Toronto is around 1.7 percent. As well, more than 10,500 people are considered actively homeless.
Housing Now aims to deliver 10,000 affordable rental homes – one third of the total homes that will be delivered through the program – within mixed-income, mixed-use and complete communities by 2030. These homes will be affordable to a range of households with a range of incomes, include low- and moderate-income households.