Finance committee  We're going through a fundamental shift in terms of how we pay for housing, think about housing and think about quality of life. I'll give you a personal anecdote with respect to that. I have a 23-year-old daughter. When we were presenting to the city our project in the north of the city, Tyndale Green—which has six-storey and eight-storey buildings in a walkable community with, at the centre of the development, an affordable day care, a new community centre, a café and food—my daughter, who grew up in a single-family home at Yonge and Eglinton, in the core of the city, texted me and said, “Mom, can I live there?”

Finance committee  That is entirely correct.

Finance committee  I think you raise a critical catch-22. Part of this has to do with the desire by most municipalities to minimize their own tax increases, and as a result, one of the easy ways they've been able to pay for infrastructure without anyone really noticing is by increasing development charges on new projects and using those development charges to subsidize the building of infrastructure: ensuring the toilets will flush, ensuring the water will come out of the taps when you build the new building.

Finance committee  It does, and it also has an unintended consequence of maintaining people in too much housing. Because of the land transfer tax, households who previously would have downsized—because there are empty bedrooms, the kids have moved out—now have a disincentive to downsize because they're going to be taxed in doing so.

Finance committee  Access to capital is really critical for the delivery of affordable housing specifically. The cost of capital can be the deterrent to being able to build that housing. The RCFI program, which delivered a significant amount of rental housing specifically in the city of Toronto over the course of the past decade, has more recently been criticized, because it also delivered luxury rental housing.

Finance committee  I apologize. It is the rental construction financing incentive, which essentially is a CMHC program that allows for interest-free borrowing for the construction costs of rental housing. This was a way of getting around the challenge of borrowing for the construction period, which in a condo is less of a challenge, because the monies from the pre-sale are used to finance the construction.

Finance committee  Absolutely. I mentioned there are things we need to do with land, which is the zoning. There are things we need to do with design, building different types of housing, from secondary suites to six-storey buildings. There are also financial mechanisms that need to change. The model you referenced is the model that's used south of the border.

Finance committee  It's a really critical question. The good news is that in many Canadian cities, we've already crossed the Rubicon in terms of recognizing that we need higher-density development. That is for two reasons. One is that newcomers are obviously priced out of housing, but it's also that people are seeing the next generation of Canadians being priced out of housing and are recognizing that we need a fundamentally different approach.

Finance committee  Through the chair, yes, absolutely. Many of the projects that are currently on hold are on hold precisely because of inflation and the cost of borrowing. Undoubtedly, those projects would be viable once again if inflation were reduced.

Finance committee  I can't speak for other developers, but I know that there have been some significant announcements in the city of Toronto whereby developers are re-evaluating condo projects and now looking at the viability of building rental projects instead, as we have done as well. Probably the most significant impact has to do with financing and the allocation of capital.

Finance committee  That's absolutely correct.

Finance committee  Absolutely, yes.

Finance committee  That's correct. I think it's important to stress—and I think there were some other speakers who alluded to this—that we actually have a shortage of supply across the entire housing spectrum, and when you build affordable rentals, it means fewer people on social housing wait-lists, because they can now access affordable rentals.

Finance committee  Well, there are a couple of things.... One is that if the objective is to incentivize affordable rental housing specifically, there's a whole variety of measures that are required in order to make that achievable. For example, on our projects, not unlike what Maureen mentioned, there are incentives in the city of Toronto that make that viable.

Finance committee  Good afternoon, honourable members. It's wonderful to be here today. You will hear some of the themes my colleague just outlined reiterated in my presentation. I'm trained as a professional planner, but I've now switched teams and I'm a developer, developing housing in the GTA.