Strong words were spoken on the topic of housing at the March 31 Wellington County council meeting.
“Right now being able to afford to live in Wellington County is one of our most urgent issues,” stated Warden Kelly Linton in his opening remarks.
Noting the proliferation of a “not in my backyard (NIMBY)” attitude stymies efforts to provide more diverse housing options, Linton pointed out addressing that counter-productive school of thought is among the things the county can do to work toward a solution to a growing housing crisis.
That the local situation has reached crisis proportions is undeniable. The average sale price of a home in Wellington County was just over $820,000 in November, a 25% year-over-year increase from the previous year. Across Ontario, home prices have increased by 180% over 10 years, while incomes have gone up by only 38%.
The issue, of course, goes far beyond NIMBYism. The fact we don’t have enough housing for our current, let alone projected, population is a failure of planning, driven largely by politics, at every level of government over numerous decades.
Both the county and its member municipalities do have a role to play in promoting the creation of lower-cost housing options and they appear in many instances to be stepping up to the plate.
Last month the county launched a community awareness campaign aimed at furthering public understanding of the range of options that can be considered to meet local housing needs.
The county has also made it easier to create second units in existing dwellings, a move which should positively impact the rental market.
Increasingly, champions of what has been dubbed “attainable housing” can be found at council tables around the county, as local councillors stand up to blowback from current residents on virtually any housing proposal involving multi-unit dwellings.
“We need to think carefully about how we’re going to accommodate people. If the nature of our housing will have to change to make housing more attainable, what does that mean, for our communities?” asked Wellington North Mayor Andy Lennox during a discussion on county-wide growth projections at the March 31 meeting.
“We’ve really got to work hard, in my opinion, getting our residents used to the idea that the look and feel of housing may have to change in order to accommodate people to work in our businesses, to meet the needs of our communities.”
Not all the work can be done at the local level of course. A shift in attitude and focus at upper tiers of government is also required.
Many feel the province missed a chance to make a significant difference when the More Homes for Everyone Act was introduced on March 30. The legislation outlines a four-year plan the municipal affairs minister says will get houses built faster, with a focus on cutting red tape and a series of consultations with stakeholders, as well as flashier initiatives like bumping the non-resident speculation tax rate to 20 per cent.
However the act fails to include numerous recommendations from a recent housing affordability task force report, such as:
– requiring municipalities with populations over 100,000 to allow up to four units and four storeys on any single residential lot;
– setting minimum zoning standards province-wide that would prevent municipalities from using everything from lot size to shade impacts to control development; and
– excluding projects of 10 units or fewer from site plan approval if they otherwise conform with zoning and official plan policies.
It will take more than words to begin to bring a spiraling housing market back under some semblance of control. It will take action and it appears that governments are at last ready to head down that path.
Whether they’ll have the will to make truly meaningful changes and stick to their guns remains to be seen, but we can at least see tentative steps heading in the right direction.
