NEWS

Prefabricated construction, where large panels are built in a factory, trucked to the site and snapped into place like an oversized Lego set, has long been touted as a solution to the housing crisis because the speed and repeatability of the process keeps costs down.

We don’t have to wait until all our suburbs are rebuilt to become European-style walkable utopias; it’s possible to get people out of their cars in a matter of months simply by running buses more frequently.

We are writing in opposition to the Ontario Government’s combined sewer overflow work (CSO) at 955 Lakeshore Boulevard West (Ontario Place) that has the clear potential to spread polluted water, including sewer run off, into the West Channel around West Island at Ontario Place and the planned ‘new beach’.

Combined overflow outlets run counter to herculean efforts to clean up Lake Ontario: the discharge will pollute a heavily used part of the waterfront.

With 5.8 million new homes needed in Canada by 2031, and the homebuilding sector increasingly under the gun to produce more units, it is time to look towards offsite construction.

This building method – whereby most of a home is manufactured in a plant and trucked to a location – is certainly not the only solution to what ails the housing sector, but it could move the needle.

In Ontario, the recent fall economic statement indicated that the province is falling further behind the target of producing 1.5 million homes over 10 years by 2031 and is no longer expected to hit its target for this year.

The Ontario government indicated that it now only expects to hit 81,300 housing starts in 2024, well short of the 150,000 new homes per year that the province needs to achieve its goal.

Under cover of darkness, Infrastructure Ontario began the removal of 865 trees at Ontario Place on the evening of Wednesday, October 2, 2024. Within a single day, workers had cut down the vast majority of those trees.

The work—which includes the removal of every single tree on the western portion of the waterfront site adjacent downtown Toronto—is part of the approximately $200-million in site preparations that taxpayers are funding to prepare the land for Therme, an Austrian spa company, to develop a stadium-sized indoor waterpark on the site.

The next day, October 3, the Province released the details of its 95-year lease with Therme…

A provincial law change that curtailed third-party groups’ ability to appeal development decisions has left environmental and ratepayer groups saying they’ve been silenced in a move that puts developer interests ahead of citizen concerns.

Ontario residents can no longer appeal development decisions at the Ontario Land Tribunal — a quasi-judicial body designed to adjudicate planning and other land disputes — after the Doug Ford government introduced legislation that removes the ability of third-parties such as ratepayer groups or environmental groups to do so.

Interventions in municipal land use planning, particularly in the Greater Toronto Area, by the government of Ontario Premier Doug Ford over the past five years set in motion an enormous, unplanned experiment in what happens when the development industry is given almost everything it wants in a region subject to intense urban growth pressures.

The results of that experiment are now becoming apparent, and they are not good.

Move away from “sprawl and tall” and start building for end users, not investors. Focus on not-for-profit housing, and harness the savings.

Solving Canada’s housing affordability crisis requires addressing the mismatch of housing supply and need.

For too long, we have focused on building “sprawl and tall” – expensive houses further afield and small, costly units in high-rise buildings while neglecting critical segments of our housing system needed to accommodate a range of household incomes and sizes.

Groups frustrated by the Ford government’s “sledgehammer” approach limiting development appeals say they’re now powerless to prevent urban sprawl, loss of farmland, and squandered green space in the province.

Among other changes, Ontario’s Bill 185, known as the “Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act” limits third-party challenges to municipal plans and zoning heard by the Ontario Land Tribunal and dismissed appeals scheduled after April 10. The new rules were introduced by the provincial government to expedite construction of 1.5 million homes by 2031.

A new type of home called a fourplex is being hailed as the answer to Canada’s acute housing shortage. But why is there so much opposition?

Angela Jiang says she is much happier since she moved out of a high-rise apartment building.

She used to live on the 68th floor of a condo tower in downtown Toronto, but five years ago she relocated to a four-unit residential building called a fourplex, in the city’s more low-rise midtown area.