Ontario for All

"The new provincial housing legislation is a lengthy and complex bill. While we welcome provincial efforts to grapple with the affordable housing crisis, and this bill does offer some areas of progress for affordable housing, it unfortunately also includes areas of considerable concern. The bill definitely takes important steps that will help expand supply and also create new units of affordable housing. Reduced taxes on nonprofit development and on affordable housing could lower costs and make more projects viable. As-of-right permissions for secondary suites should remove some barriers to new, more affordable homes. However, the bill also includes policies that have a negative impact on affordability. Unaddressed, the issues outlined in this letter will undermine the goals of this legislation, threatening its ability to create any net affordability in Ontario.

The bill undermines municipal programs that create affordable housing The bill, as it is currently written, would eliminate the charges that developers currently pay toward housing. This will, according to recent estimates, eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars that municipalities rely on for housing programs, and dramatically reduce municipal affordable housing efforts.

The bill also constrains municipal efforts to require affordable housing in new developments. The new limits on Inclusionary Zoning are well below the targets in bylaws that local governments have already passed - bylaws that were based on the local economic feasibility studies the Ministry required. It is worth underscoring that these bylaws are one of the only tools that municipalities have to create the much-needed affordable housing for people experiencing homelessness across Ontario.

These aspects of the bill will cut hundreds of millions of dollars from municipal investments in affordable housing and cancel plans that would have built thousands of new, permanently affordable homes. The bill will speed up the loss of existing affordable homes The bill gives the Minister the power to cancel rental housing protection programs that ensure that when apartment buildings are redeveloped, the affordable units are replaced at affordable prices. Those programs have saved over 4,000 affordable homes, and their loss would put more pressure "

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