Contrary to popular belief, Housing prices are more affected by municipal policies than federal ones. In fact, the biggest things we can do as a society to reduce costs are things we can do at the city level! You’ll know all of these if you’ve been around me over the last four years – I talk to everyone about these policies because they are so simple that people immediately understand how they can help!
This list is informed by years of research and conversations with everyone involved in this process, from city planners and developers to social workers and those living in shelters.
Parking Minimums and Zoning Reform
Zoning has been my white whale since I ran in 2022. I know your eyes may glaze over reading this, but zoning reform is something I think about all the time! Kitchener has done a lot of good in this area (minus them excluding some parts of wards 8 and 10), but it still has room to grow.
Parking minimums are leftover from an era when we didn’t know how much parking we needed. Some guy made up a number, the city next to them copied that number, the city next to THAT one copied that number, and so on.
Parking is also an extremely expensive part of construction. Parking lots can cost up to $8,000 per space, above-ground structures can cost up to $35,000, and underground lots can be $65,000. Per. Spot. That leads directly to apartments, condos, and townhomes costing much more than they would if they could skip some spaces. The science shows that parking minimums hurt housing development much more than it helps anyone else, and further reducing our minimums will allow for smaller projects to get greenlit.
We’ve removed our parking minimums in a lot of areas, but many places still require too many parking spots. If you’re building a foot too far from a Special Growth Area, you might have to pay hundreds of thousands more to develop a piece of land, and in many cases, you just won’t develop.
As councillor, I will push to use research proven numbers to remove parking minimums, allowing both lower cost development and more land for people to use and live on.
Co-ops
Co-operative housing is exactly what we need in a world of housing monopolies. I talk a lot about reducing the costs for developers to develop, but, as they say, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Co-ops in particular are a beautiful example of community, and are something the city needs to take a more active role in developing. They provide invaluable insights to a city: the occupants choose when there’s a rent increase, so by comparing to a co-op’s rates, you get an idea of how much inflation is actually affecting a market. If there are reasonable extra costs, purpose-built rentals and co-ops alike will reflect that – but if rents are increasing in one and not the other, something has likely gone wrong.
As councillor, I will push to assist the startup of local co-ops, in the form of grants and assisting setup, to help reduce the reliance on for-profit rentals.
Social Housing
Social housing is another dial we need to use. Not only is it the right thing to do, but housing folk who need it has been proven to lower costs to health care, policing, property damage, and other areas where the cost of homelessness is felt.
There’s also another aspect of social housing I think is missed by a lot of people: if corporations can make millions off of rental income and property ownership, the city can break even. Building more housing, like what we’re doing with the new fire hall, is an obvious choice.
As councillor, I’ll push for every new city-owned project to consider adding housing while being built. That will allow us to start building up a housing stock to provide for more price stabilization.
Revamping the Approval Process
This is something that industry professionals ask for constantly. The time required alone prevents an unknowable number of units from being built – time is money! Every step of the process can take months, months that increase the costs of a project. And they can count on that every time, from public pushback to confusing rules that are different in every city. It’s no wonder small and medium-sized projects are so rare! We need to work both with developers and city staff to find ways to make the entire process easier.
As councillor, I will push for hard timelines on staff review for small and medium-sized projects, so developers aren’t left absorbing months of holding costs on process alone.
Conclusion
I can’t write about every single little thing we can do, but these are the things I’ve been reading about for years. There are plenty of options that are unknown to me now that I will hear about from you at the doors, from city staff, or that another city will pull off, and I’ll always seek to learn more and pull from every source of knowledge!