Ontario takes aim at delays in municipal approval processes as part of housing bill

Ontario is taking aim at costly delays in the municipal approval process as part of a wider plan to tackle a worsening housing crisis but its setting aside many of the more controversial proposals made by its own task force on affordability.

The Ford government’s “More Homes for Everyone Plan” was tabled at Queen’s Park for the first time on Wednesday afternoon.

It includes dozens of actionable items, many of which are aimed at reducing red tape and speeding up the approval process as a way to accelerate development.

The plan, however, omits many of the recommendations made by the Ford government’s housing affordability task force in a report released last month, including the elimination of municipal policies that prioritize preserving "neighbourhood character” in planning decisions and a commitment to building 1.5 million homes over the next decade.

Also notably absent is a task force recommendation that would have allowed so-called “as of right” zoning which automatically permits developers to build up to four units with a maximum of four storeys on a single residential lot, essentially sidestepping the municipal approval process.

“We have to work in in conjunction with Ontario's 444 municipalities and we have heard very clearly that perhaps the recommendations were a bit too bold for some communities,” Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark told reporters at Queen’s Park on Wednesday. “So we are going to have to go back and consult with them and work with them because if we are going to deal with the housing crisis in Ontario we have to have municipalities in our corner.”

Task force recommendations will still serve as long-term roadmap: Clark

Clark said that while the 55 recommendations made by the task force will serve as a “long-term roadmap” to address affordability in Ontario, the bill tabled today provides an opportunity for some more “immediate changes” to “get shovels into the ground faster.”

If passed into law, the plan would see the City of Toronto Act and the provincial Planning Act amended so that “site plan control” issues, which concern a development’s compatibility with the surrounding neighbourhood, would be ruled on by city staff and not city councillors.

It should be noted that Toronto City Council already delegates “site plan control” decisions to planning staff but a ward councillor is currently permitted to request that any application instead be decided on by city council.

Further regulatory changes would then be implemented in 2023 requiring municipalities to make decisions on rezoning applications within a set period of time.

Under the new provincially-mandated timelines, municipalities would be required by law to refund 50 per cent of rezoning fees should they not make a decision on the application within 90 days. They would then have to refund 75 per cent of fees if a decision is not reached within 150 days and 100 per cent of fees if there is still no decision after 210 days.

Officials say that the change is intended to help speed up rezoning decisions, which currently take an average of nine to 25 months in the GTA and needlessly inflate costs.

In fact, they point to one study by the Ontario Association of Architects which suggests that the cost of delays between site plan application and approval add up to $1,930 a month for each unit in a 100-unit condominium building.

“We need to have more homes built, we need to have shovels in the ground faster and all of our consultations have acknowledged that it takes way too long to get housing built,” Clark said on Wednesday.

Building code changes proposed

In addition to the regulatory changes aimed at reducing red tape at the municipal level, the Ontario government is also promising to invest $19 million in helping the Ontario Land Tribunal and the Landlord and Tenant Board to reduce a backlog in cases.

The Ford government is also proposing several changes to the building code, which it says would “save downstream costs for homebuyers and renters.”

Those include permitting 12-storey mass timber buildings and exploring the possibility of allowing one single means of egress in midrise buildings between four and six storeys.

The hope, is that the package of initiatives taken together will boost supply and eventually brings down the cost of living in the GTA, where the average price of a home recently surpassed $1.3 million.

Speaking with CP24 earlier on Wednesday, BMO Capital Markets' senior economist Robert Kavcic said that while a full-scale correction in the GTA is unlikely prices should begin to decrease in the near-term due to the Bank of Canada’s current interest rate hiking cycle and various government interventions, including Ontario’s previously announced plan to increase its tax on foreign home buyers.

“We are not talking about any kind of crash or major damage inducing decline in house prices like we saw in the U.S. 10 or 15 years ago. The market here is just fundamentally too well rooted in supply and demand fundamentals and demographic fundamentals. There is real fundamental strength here. The problem is that prices just ran ahead of those fundamentals over the last year since COVID started,” he said. “It's not a matter of toppling or, you know, quote unquote crashing the housing market; it is matter of taking an asset price that has got too frothy and just bringing it back down to reality.”