Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Edward Goldstein. I'm the president of Redwood Corporation, a family-owned business that develops land and builds subdivisions, plazas and purpose-built rentals.
In trying to prepare my presentation to this committee, I reviewed the comments of some of the other presenters and some of the questions that followed. One of the questions was in regard to a statement from CIBC that questioned the ability of the construction industry to be able to respond to the increased demand for housing and the resulting supply shortage. I believe that the question should have been about the ability of municipal governments to respond to this shortage by providing approvals in a timely and efficient manner to address the lack of supply.
I understand that there are currently shortages of labour and materials, but construction cannot occur until approvals have been obtained. My experience is that approvals are rare and require an inordinate amount of time to achieve. For instance, one of our developments is waiting for comments from the heritage group in a municipality, which sat with it for 18 months before deciding it had no comments. The site plan approval process was unable to continue during this time. This seems to be occurring on regular basis these days with many municipal departments.
There is an obvious shortage of purpose-built rentals in many of the large urban areas in Canada. My company had to rezone a site across from a regional shopping mall. It was a 4.8-acre site with 700,000 square feet of residential building area for rental housing in three 20-storey towers, and it attracted only 50 people to the public meeting, all of whom were interested only in when it was going to be built and when they could get a unit. That was five years ago. Currently the application is still being reviewed by staff and the project cannot begin construction. This is for a project to which there have been no objections from the public or any ratepayer groups, and the demand for the units has been demonstrated. Costs have risen dramatically during this time.
In addition, municipalities are inconsistent with their use of lot levies to generate income from developments. Some municipalities understand that the way in which they assess levies allows them to influence the areas and types of developments that developers propose. They understand that by paying levies on behalf of projects they wish to encourage, they achieve a payback in terms of the ability to obtain property taxes quicker than they would otherwise. This results in a quick return of their investment. This kind of forward thinking should be used more often and by more municipalities.
Some municipalities and regions charge different levy rates for units in multiresidential buildings based on their square footage. Developers are therefore discouraged from building larger, family-sized dwellings, of which there is little supply. Levies in one region in the greater Toronto area are expected to rise 16% for units under 700 square feet and 30% for units over 700 square feet at the next bylaw review. This seems to be counterintuitive to increasing the supply of affordable family dwelling units. I would also like to note that there are no size qualifications for levies charged on single-family, detached dwelling units.
The goals of the three levels of government must be aligned when money is given for large infrastructure projects. There's no point in funding rapid transit or highways when municipalities don't take full advantage of these expenditures in their planning process. Arbitrary height restrictions along subway or LRT routes should be less restrictive and allow more density. This would allow better access and more usage. It seems to me that the relationship between federal and provincial governments and developers is much more constructive than that between the developers and municipalities. This relationship seems to be adversarial in many cases. Much of the work done by the municipality is redundant and inefficient and adds excessive cost to projects. It exposes the municipality to additional liability as well.
The term affordability is misleading. I believe that what we are experiencing is a lack of availability of certain housing types that are required by different people. For instance, we think that affordability applies to home ownership, so we make funding available to allow more people to purchase their own homes, such as single-family, detached houses, townhomes or condominiums. In reality, many people, such as seniors or people who no longer require their own homes and are on a fixed income, would like to get out of the responsibilities of home ownership. They opt for a rental property because there's no requirement for a down payment or monthly condominium fees. There is a critical shortage of this product at this time. Municipalities should be sensitive to the needs and requirements of all people. This would increase the supply of resale homes as people move to a product more suitable to them.
Let's not forget that any two people making the same amount of annual income could have different ideas as to what is affordable or not, based on the lifestyle decisions they make. Any program that tries to define units as being affordable runs the risk of supplying units to persons for whom it was not invested in.
In summary, I believe that the committee should address the standardization of procedures with which municipalities examine development applications and the use of deadlines to speed up the process, the relationship between infrastructure spending and how municipalities utilize it, re-examination of procedures used to set levies and the uses for which they are required. In addition, consideration should be given to the fact that existing rental stock is aging and that much of it was built with data technology that doesn't meet our current carbon use and safety technology.
Thank you for your time.