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Ontario proposes counting retirement homes, student housing towards housing targets

Posted:April 9, 2024 | 5:43 PM
By:Roger Collins

Updated: 29 October 2024

Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra speaks during a press conference in Toronto on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. Municipal councils across Ontario that have been urging the province to give them the ability to impose stricter sanctions on unethical councillors will have to wait a while longer (The Canadian Press).

Ontario’s government may soon start counting new student housing and retirement homes towards its goal of building 1.5 million homes in the next 10 years.

The province’s minister of municipal affairs and housing said that his government was considering tracking other possible housing starts beyond what the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) currently tracks in a letter issued to Mississauga’s acting mayor last month.

The CMHC measures housing starts as new single-family homes, townhouses, small condos or apartment buildings with 5 or more units.

While including student housing and retirement homes towards Ontario’s housing targets would undoubtedly bolster the figures on paper and perhaps even unlock additional funding for certain municipalities, some saw the move as misrepresentative.

“Instead of stepping up and taking leadership to actually build more homes, this government is busy fudging the numbers,” Ontario Greens Leader Mike Schreiner wrote following the announcement. “What’s next, counting tents?”

It isn’t the first time political ire has been stirred up over the way the province uses CMHC definitions to evaluate homebuilding.

Tensions between Matt Mahoney, Mississauga’s acting mayor, and the minister came to a head earlier this year after Minister Paul Calandra confirmed that Mississauga would be ineligible for provincial funding due to having too few housing starts in 2023.

“Given your Ministry’s decision to deem Mississauga ineligible for the Building Faster Fund, it is critical that we focus on the importance of meaningful and accurate data,” Mahoney wrote.

The stance the acting mayor took was that the province’s metric on housing starts wasn’t fair and that it “created winners and losers based on a market forces out of the control of municipalities.”

A similar incident took place in Burlington around the same time after the city was notified it was not eligible to receive funding from the province’s Building Faster Fund for its shortage of housing starts.

“The metric they are using to judge us and award money is foundations poured,” Mayor Marianne Meed Ward told CHCH News at the time.

“We don’t pour foundations. It’s not appropriate to judge us on something that’s out of our control,” she added, instead pointing to the amount of building permits the city had issued as a better way to measure its progress in creating new housing.

Mississauga’s acting mayor took a similar stance on the issue, pointing to the amount of building permits it had issued and saying that it had taken other approaches to increase housing, such as streamlining its permitting process or expanding housing permissions in the city.

“We have approved more than 31,000 residential units in the last three years through our
development application review process,” Mahoney wrote. “While this is a tremendous number of approved applications, the City has limited control over market forces and the business and financial decisions of the development/building industry.”

Calandra responded the following day through a series of posts on social media.

In his posts, the minister criticized the policies of Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie, former mayor of Mississauga, as part of the reason why the city failed to hit the necessary targets to be eligible for funding, writing that “in her last month of mayor, Bonnie Crombie only had 12 housing starts in the city.”

Her record speaks for itself. She’s called proposed homes an “abomination,” and she’s opposed thousands of new homes for the people of Mississauga. She would do to Ontario what she did to Mississauga.

— Paul Calandra (@PaulCalandra) February 23, 2024

Tuesday’s statement from Calandra is just one of the initiatives Ontario’s leadership has taken recently.

On Monday, Calandra announced an amendment the Ontario Building Code to allow for 18-storey mass timber constructions, an increase to the previous 12-storey limit.