I'll build on the comments that were made by Michael earlier. I think he hit on some critical and salient points around the role that the federal government can play in relation to municipalities, including when infrastructure funding comes forward and tying that infrastructure funding to density requirements, which does not happen today.
We have billions of dollars being spent on transit infrastructure in areas where the local residents, very local, are opposing additional density. They're opposing the building of new housing. The federal government can play a very powerful role in linking those two things together. You want funding for major infrastructure projects, but you also need to be willing to upzone areas and absorb additional density in relation to that infrastructure that is being built.
There's another critical piece to this. The comment was made by one of my colleagues, as well, about using federal, provincial and municipal lands. We've been engaged in work with CMHC on looking at the 600 school sites in the city of Toronto. Just think about that nationally. There are 600 school sites in Toronto where the vast majority of land is underutilized, in part because the schools do not have enough density, so 50% of the buildings are sitting vacant.
We have been looking at how, through missing middle housing, mid-rise intensification, we can turn those schools into new communities that will add a population of students to use the existing buildings but will also add new housing on land that is owned by the government. What we found on the Elmbank school site, for example, which I referenced in my deputation, was that the tipping point between being able to make 25% of that development into affordable housing is the $18 million we would be required to spend in HST.
Now, ironically, if the government were to forgive the HST on the 25% affordable component, the government would still be delivered the HST on the other 75% of the housing units. There are approximately 838 housing units we're proposing in that development, but, as I mentioned, it's not yet buyable because of the $18 million required in HST.
That demonstrates that there's a lever that's pretty easy for the federal government to pull in order to incentivize some of these sites that are a bit trickier to deliver from a market viability perspective.