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?”
I think this is very important, because it reflects two things.
It reflects how young people think differently about housing than we might have in the past. They want something different from what many of us may have thought about in the past in terms of housing, and they think differently from how many new immigrants thought about housing in the past: the Canadian dream of a single-family home. That has shifted significantly. Today, we know access to stable housing in an environment where people can be part of a community, and where the home can be affordable over time, is the key priority.
One of the ways we achieve that is by building higher-density communities focused not around the car but around community places, community spaces, high-quality public parks and, where possible, public transit and cycling infrastructure. We know there is an entire generation—and newcomers—who are very passionate about that part of the Canadian dream. One way we know this is by looking at home prices in communities that offer all those amenities. They are the highest. One of the fastest-growing areas in Canada is the 12 or 14 square kilometres of downtown Toronto where nearly 500,000 people live—in 14 square kilometres. Seventy-five per cent of the residents in that area do not own a car. They primarily walk or take transit to get to work.
Shifting our thinking about housing in a fundamentally different way, then designing and delivering that housing in a different way, is more affordable from the perspective of overall household costs, and it fits with our sustainability objectives as a country.