Toronto’s next mayor take note: Most of us want more housing built — but not near us

I know this is a short mayoral election campaign we have ahead of us — compared to the marathons we are used to in competitive races — but still: it’s too early in the contest for polls to tell us much about how events are likely to play out.

And polls so far aren’t telling us much: a Mainstreet Research survey conducted Feb. 19 (of 1,701 adults, considered accurate within plus or minus 2.4 percentage points at a 95 per cent confidence level) put most of the names of possible contenders in front of voters and found not a single one of them with more than eight per cent support.

The overwhelming winner of the poll, “if the election were held today,” was “Undecided” (at 53 per cent). The campaign is going to matter.

Still, some of the issues that might come up, also covered by the poll, could be instructive, at least a bit.

It was the questions about housing policy in the survey that caught my eye. Housing was to be former mayor John Tory’s great emphasis in the coming term, and two of his closest council housing lieutenants are considering running to take his place. Moreover, in polls over recent years and in the run-up to last year’s election, “housing affordability” and “affordability” have topped lists of voter concerns, with homelessness also on the list of priorities.

Let me say a few things I consider self-evident (though they may not be to everyone). In a city where (according to Rent Panda’s Canada Monthly Rental Report) the average rent now exceeds the average income, and where to afford to buy an average home you’d need a household income that’s 2.6 times the median (according to a National Bank of Canada estimate), any discussion of affordability is about housing affordability. Paying $90 to fill the gas tank or $6 for milk stings, but when the estimated mortgage payments on a detached home are more than $80,000 per year ($6,741 per month), all the rest of it is a rounding error.

Besides, municipal policy has little effect on inflation in consumer goods prices. But the city government can have a huge impact on housing costs.

Next: the way to bring housing costs down is to build a lot of housing. The way to ensure a supply of deeply affordable housing is to build a lot of housing, and subsidize some of it for low income people. The way to vastly reduce homelessness is to build a lot of housing, and subsidize some of it for low income people, and especially so for homeless people or those who risk becoming homeless. I realize there are people who still think high rents and housing prices are not a function of supply and demand, and who think homelessness is driven more by mental health and substance abuse than housing supply. I think those people are wrong. Housing may well not be sufficient to solve every problem facing our poorest residents, but it is necessary to have a chance to solve those problems.

(There’s been a lot of study on this. I recommend readers looking for a roundup of relevant stats in the form of persuasive arguments look up the articles “Housing Breaks People’s Brains” by Jerusalem Demsas in the Atlantic and “Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong” by Aaron Carr in the Noahpinion substack feed.)

So here’s the good news: the idea we might need lots more housing seems to have sunk in here. The Mainstreet poll shows a plurality of Toronto voters (47 per cent) think the city is building too little housing. (Thirty per cent think the city is building the right amount, while only 23 per cent think it’s building too much.) That’s not perfect agreement, but building more housing gets as much support in the poll as every single potential mayoral candidate combined — that’s a start.

But then there’s bad news: when asked if the city should build housing in their own neighbourhoods, 73 per cent of voters said “not in my backyard.” Oh, lord.

Occasionally you see polls that say people are broadly in favour of higher taxes, but they don’t want their own taxes raised. Or that people are broadly in favour of government saving money by cutting services, but they strongly disfavour cutting any of the services they use. On some level, we recognize a need, but on another level we don’t want any change to our own circumstances to address that need.

Here’s the thing: the city has been allowing the building of giant condo towers only in a few specific areas and corridors of the city for decades. Not only is it not enough, it creates absurd concentrations of height and density that may not be healthy for the city in the long term. Actually increasing the supply enough to address affordability across the city, and building strong neighbourhoods across the city, means building housing across the city. In the 2022 election, both leading candidates agreed on this. If you’re not in favour of allowing more housing to be built in your own neighbourhood, you likely aren’t actually in favour of seriously addressing housing affordability in the city.

The good news, from many people’s perspectives, is this doesn’t have to mean a 90-storey glass tower at the end of your block. But it likely does mean duplexes and triplexes on residential streets, walk-up apartment buildings, rooming houses. If you’ve sat through even a few minutes of a meeting about whether to allow two townhouses to be built on a massive old single family lot, you know this is contentious. But if you’ve spent any time in the most desirable parts of the city, you know these kinds of housing can be great contributors to the character of excellent places to live.

There’s every reason to suspect housing will be a big issue in the coming election, even if which candidates can emerge as contenders is still hazy. But for those trying to emerge, it looks like any candidate with a serious approach to affordability will have some persuading to do. Luckily, campaigns are an ideal time to do that.

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