Peter Baugh

Toronto Life asked a group of housing people for their boldest ideas to address the housing crisis. Some good, some bad, some ugly. (Mostly good!) Check it out: torontolife.com/deep-dives/d… My reactions to each: 1. Mixed-use laneways. Allow housing, small businesses and live-work spaces along suitable lanes. Great idea. Sensible urbanism. Not hugely scalable, but still very much worth doing. More homes, more places for small businesses, more interesting neighbourhoods. 2. Fund community-led planning so residents can shape development. We need more and better as-of-right permissions. Better-funded neighbourhood meddling will take us in the wrong direction. Developers should know what they’re allowed to build without having to negotiate it with a neighbourhood coalition. 3. Bring governments, nonprofits, employers, developers and investors together to deliver affordable workforce housing. Meh. If we want more affordable housing, we should create a predictable, scalable tax credit system modelled on the US Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. Complex multiparty partnerships generally mean longer timelines and higher budgets. We should make affordable housing repeatable without having to assemble a bespoke coalition for every project. 4. Create a system of financing, approvals and support tailored to small builders. Yes, but we should reduce the regulatory burden on housing of all sizes and scales. Small builders feel fixed compliance costs most acutely. Plenty of those costs shouldn’t exist for anyone. 5. Remove mandatory amenity space where the surrounding neighbourhood already provides it. Yes. Obvious. The best amenity is a good price. The city itself is an amenity. In many cases, developers will still provide amenity space where it makes sense, just as they still provide resident parking even though it’s no longer required. Prioritize great parks, clean public spaces, and good public facilities. Let people decide whether they want to pay for a gym in their building. 6. Guarantee a Canada Housing Bond to finance permanently affordable homes. Maybe. I need to think about this some more. It is worth noting that broad-based affordability can only come from housing supply at scale. Whatever financing tools we adopt, we still need to make it possible to build a lot more homes. 7. Allow smaller elevators. Great idea. This is very important for making accessible housing viable at the missing middle to midrise scale. Smaller cars. Smaller shafts. Lower costs. More room for housing. We should be moving quickly on this. (Read this for more: centerforbuilding.org/public….) 8. Have government act as the first buyer for innovative construction methods. Bad idea. Government isn’t good at picking winners and losers. Adoption needs to be market-driven. We should remove obstacles to prefabrication. Standardize and liberalize codes. Do that work before subsidizing uneconomic production models. 9. Expand accessible rental housing, including accessible units in future public projects. The smart way to do this is to enable things like smaller elevators, which make accessibility financially and physically workable in more buildings. The dumb way would be to add requirements that make missing middle projects unviable. Accessibility rules need to account for whether the housing can actually get built. 10. Create a fast approval lane for trusted builders, using automated compliance reviews. Fast reviews for everyone. No two-tier system. AI should help get us to 24-48 hour permit reviews by the end of 2027, even with a human in the loop for final sign-off. That should be the standard service level. 11. Reform building rules and introduce predictable design standards to deliver affordability, speed and beauty. Agree on beauty. Much less convinced that we should start with another set of codes and design standards. The City has a history of getting these badly wrong: more articulation, more stepbacks and angular planes, and more material changes. Start with obvious things. Single-stair permissions would mean fewer multiplexes with four doors across the front face. Allow party walls and zero-metre side yard setbacks so more of the cladding budget can be directed to the street-facing facade. A lot of urban beauty comes from what happens in the public right-of-way. Narrow streets. Street trees. And the narrow lots lining them. Enable more narrow-lot development. There are concrete things we can fix before asking bureaucrats to prescribe beauty. 12. Use standardized prefab panels based on code-compliant housing designs. Sure. Sensible. Worth doing. And Janna is absolutely right about panelization making more sense than volumetric construction when accounting for transportation costs. 13. Enable office-to-residential conversions through zoning changes and financial incentives. Zoning changes, yes. Kill office replacement requirements and let suitable buildings convert. Financial incentives, no. Let the market work. What do you think?