EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Premier Doug Ford said this week he’s focused on single-family homes in his government’s quest to tackle the province’s housing shortage.
“We are not going to go into communities and build four-storey or six-storey buildings beside residences like this,” said Ford on Thursday, standing at a construction site where new homes are being built in Richmond Hill. “It's off the table for us. We're going to build homes, single-dwelling homes, townhomes — that's what we're gonna focus on.”
Shortly after he made those comments, two sources with ties to the Ford government told The Trillium that they reflect the premier's personal views on the types of homes people want to live in.
But, data and experts, including those on Ford’s housing affordability task force, warn that single-family homes can only play a supporting role if the province is going to solve its housing crisis anytime soon.
The province needs to build at least 150,000 new homes every year to meet its 2031 target.
Since 1980, there’s only been one year — 1987 — when provincial housing starts topped 100,000. Those numbers include all types of housing — detached homes, single-detached homes, row houses, and apartments.
That year was also the high watermark for detached and single-detached home construction. Just over 67,000 single-family homes were built. Single-family home starts haven’t topped 60,000 since then and have been on a steady decline since 2002.
In 2023, single-family homes accounted for just over 20 per cent of all homes built in the province, one of the lowest percentages on record.
Single-family homes used to make up a higher percentage of total housing starts but there’s been a “complete inversion” since the turn of the millennium, said Michael Collins-Williams, president of the West End Home Builders’ Association, an organization representing developers in the Hamilton-Halton region.
Collins-Williams said part of the shift was driven by public policy that favours density: the Growth Plan and Provincial Policy Statement that guide provincial planning policy in the Greater Golden Horseshoe and across the province.
It’s also reflective of people’s changing preferences.
“The market’s changed,” Collins-Williams said. “I think a lot of consumers have different expectations in terms of the choices of how they would like to live.”
“We really do prefer single-family detached homes in the suburbs. But there is a much broader segment of the population that — in 2024 versus 25 years ago — really does like the downtown, urban living,” he added.
Another challenge to relying on single-family homes is that they require a massive and expensive buildout of infrastructure like water treatment plants, according to Sean Galbraith, an urban planner specializing in developing multiplexes.
It’s more expensive to service single-family homes spread across a wide geographic area than more dense housing in areas where servicing capacity already exists, and it means using more land than is currently available for development, necessitating urban boundary expansions into farmland.
Those challenges are exacerbated by an existing labour shortage. There aren’t enough hands on deck to build the homes Ontario needs, let alone the added infrastructure.
“Nothing in our housing system is aligned to actually generate that. We don't have the builders. We don't have the crews. We don't have the materials. We don't have the land. We don't have the municipal infrastructure. We don't have the municipal capacity. And we keep adding more population,” said Galbraith.
There is enough land in the province to accommodate sprawling single-family homes, said Mike Moffatt, founding director of the PLACE Centre.
“You can do it without touching the Greenbelt," Moffatt added, but not without encroaching onto farm and industrial land.
Less industrial land would pose a problem for cities trying to attract companies to set up shop.
“Cities want to have a lot of development land for industry and if that gets used up by housing it’s going to be tough to attract those investments,” Moffatt said.
The Ford government has also spent considerable time and legislative effort keeping urban boundaries largely intact — after initially expanding them against municipalities' wishes, igniting a scandal.
In 2019, the province also moved to protect industrial and employment lands from housing development through changes to the growth plan, only to reverse itself in 2023.
On Friday, Ford was insistent at another press conference that buildings of four storeys and above don't belong in traditionally single-family home neighbourhoods. He also said it'll be left up to individual municipalities to choose to implement four units as of right.
Four units as of right means someone could split their existing home into four distinct units without triggering a municipal rezoning process. Four storeys as of right means someone could renovate their home or build a new one up to four storeys without municipal approval.
“You definitely don't need to have four storeys to have a fourplex, but it does increase the number of options. They are easier to build that way,” said Moffatt.
Allowing four units and four storeys on a single lot makes development easier because it cuts down on the land acquisition cost, Moffatt said. It would also allow for larger individual units, which families tend to prefer, he said.
While Ford has since clarified that his government is also all for more density near major transit routes, his housing task force had said legalizing multi-unit dwellings is the single biggest step the province could take to tackle the housing crisis.
On Friday, federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser wrote a letter to Ontario Housing Minister Paul Calandra saying Ottawa would withhold over $350 million unless the province moves faster to build affordable housing.
A bilateral agreement between the two governments commits the province to constructing nearly 20,000 affordable units by the end of 2025, of which less than 10 per cent has been built. Fraser said he needs to see a new plan to reach those targets by the end of the day.
Calandra responded, saying withholding the money would do nothing to help Ontario's housing woes and doesn't take into account the fact that Ontario's existing affordable housing stock is old and in need of significant repair. Simply focusing on building new units would take resources away from the necessary repairs, he said.
