Thanks, Chair.
My thanks to the witnesses for coming today and for providing some crucial testimony. It's fascinating. Sometimes the testimony is contradictory, depending on the panel, but I think that's important. It just highlights how complicated our country is and how diverse our country is.
Here's what I wanted to hit at. Being an Ontario MP, a rural MP, and being a couple of hours north of the epicentre of Toronto—no digs at my colleagues who are from the more populated areas—I will say that the pandemic has really exacerbated movement into more rural communities. That has been one of the key factors in driving up house prices as people have moved out of the bigger cities.
For example, the average price in my rural community of Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound has now topped over $760,000, which is an increase of over 23% in just the first three months of 2021. When you get down into some of the other types of properties, single family homes are a bit lower, at just over $600,000, but are up 28% year over year. Townhouses or row units are almost $500,000, which is an increase of 40%, and apartments are $386,000, a 46% increase. The supply in my area is the lowest it has been in three decades, with 388 residential units available for sale at the end of March.
My point is just to highlight some of the challenges we're having. The things I'm hearing from not-for-profits, social housing developers and others are that for the not-for-profits, rezoning costs with municipalities are costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. They've got the land and they've purchased it, but it's costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars to rezone. Also, just getting access to the loans, along with the approval timelines, and the access for both developing and just normal housing, and the regulations, etc., and so on....
I guess my first question for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario is two questions, because, based on your testimony here, you're talking about the use of the housing accelerator fund for everything from purchasing to resources, hiring, digitization and so on. I guess it's fair to say that you want the program to be as flexible as possible. My second question to you would be, from a rural versus urban percentage, what kind of access or percentage breakdown of the housing accelerator fund do you think...?