Thanks for the opportunity to speak to the committee today.
My name is Jason Thorne and I'm the general manager of planning and economic development at the City of Hamilton.
In this role I lead a department that's responsible for all aspects of planning approvals, as well as economic development, administering the city's development incentive programs, and managing the city's real estate portfolio. Increasing annual housing production, addressing affordability, ensuring timely development approvals and building complete livable sustainable communities are all goals that my council has given to me and to my department.
Hopefully some of our experience will be of value to this committee.
I'm going to outline this morning five comments that I hope you will consider as you develop this important program.
First and foremost, I would urge you to be clear in the goals that you're hoping to achieve. In my view, just building more of the same should not be that goal. I do agree with the urgency of increasing overall housing supply, but that alone will not address affordability, and that alone will not ensure that we achieve livable and sustainable communities. It's important not to lose sight of other key policy goals. It's important to increase housing supply in a manner that also meets the climate crisis and does not incentivize energy-inefficient housing or low-density housing in far-flung, car-dependent locations.
It's also important to increase housing supply in a manner that actually targets affordability.
Secondly, I'll talk about development approvals. Much can be, should be, and is being done to streamline the development approvals process, but I caution you to be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that widespread deregulation will somehow unlock housing supply. Much of the planning approvals process is in place to catch and correct issues with development that, if not caught, could have significant negative impacts.
I can speak to you from the front lines of the planning approvals process, and I can tell you that significant public interest is served in making sure that new development goes through a fulsome review. Even when done expeditiously, faster approvals do not necessarily equal new construction, because municipalities are not able to ensure that approved development actually happens.
In Hamilton, we've already undertaken Lean Six Sigma reviews of our processes, shifted to digital portals for building permit submissions, pre-zoned most of our city and granted “as of right” permissions for secondary dwelling units like basement apartments and laneway housing. We are currently preparing zoning changes to permit the conversion of existing homes into duplexes, triplexes or fourplexes.
That said, there are ways the housing accelerator program could help. It could include funding to enable municipal staff to carry out development reviews; support for digital application platforms, municipal infrastructure and growth modelling; and efforts to expand the labour pool of professionals such as planners and engineers, who are in desperately short supply right now.
My third comment for you relates to an area that I would recommend be a central plank of the housing accelerator program, and that's land and property acquisition. That means funding to support municipalities and non-profit housing providers in acquiring and assembling vacant or underutilized lands, de-risking them, and then getting them onto the market as affordable and mixed-market affordable housing. That also means funding to acquire existing market affordable rental units to protect our existing below-market housing supply.
Fourth, the program could add significant value by partnering with local municipalities in targeted development incentive programs. In Hamilton, we have 20 years of experience and success with using targeted incentive programs to bring housing to market, but right now we're doing it entirely on our own. We offer zero-interest loans, tax grants and development charge exemptions to incentivize development in market-challenged areas, grant programs to clean up brownfields, fee incentives to create laneway homes and basement apartments, and grants for the adaptive reuse of heritage buildings. These programs have been hugely successfully in catalyzing development in our city, but all of them are funded solely by the municipality.
I'll end with a fifth and final comment, and that is not to tie the program, or the federal funding, to arbitrary unit production goals. I would caution you to think carefully about going down a path of what I have heard referred to as “dollars for doors”, and I say this for a number of reasons.
Pure quantity of units is not the only goal. These units must meet the needs of the market. They must provide housing for a mix of incomes, a mix of tenures and a mix of family types and household sizes. They need to be designed and located in a manner that meets those other critical policy goals, like climate change.
Making funding dependent on delivering units could give developers significant leverage over municipalities in the approvals process. This could lead to pressure on municipalities to compromise important matters of public interest, such as environmental protections, in order to get builders to build so that municipalities can access federal funds. A dollars for doors approach would put municipalities in an untenable situation with respect to the public that we serve. Residents would be looking to the municipality to make sound, principled, planning decisions while at the same time knowing that we would, in effect, be getting paid to say yes.
I leave those five comments with you for your consideration, and I'd be happy to take questions at the appropriate time.