Ontario housing legislation: Bill 185

Hesitant compared to BC

The Covid/remote-work demand shock in small-town Ontario

John Michael McGrath, TVO: The Ford government’s scattershot housing bill does not enough of too much.

The Ford government in Ontario introduced their latest housing legislation last week, Bill 185.

The good:

• Third-party groups will no longer be able to appeal land-use decisions to the Ontario Land Use Tribunal.

• Universities and colleges will be exempt from planning controls.

• Parking minimums are prohibited near major transit stations. Projects can still include parking spaces based on their assessment of market needs, but they will not be required. (It’s expensive to build underground parking spaces.)

• The province can exempt “additional residential units” (laneway houses, garden suites, basement suites) from site planning rules, which municipalities can use to block housing.

As McGrath notes, there’s a number of reversals of previous policies. For example, municipal development charges will no longer be frozen.

There’s a new “use it or lose it” policy: a municipality can specify that a site plan or draft plan of subdivision will expire after three years.

McGrath concludes:

None of those items from the government’s plan is bad. They’re just not sufficient. In the face of a housing crisis that is, every year, driving thousands of Ontario residents to more affordable communities in other provinces, the Ford government is fiddling with the dials of housing policy, seemingly unsure of what it’s doing or even what it’s trying to do.

Every new announcement is at least half composed of reversals of announcements from six, 12, or 18 months ago, and the genuinely novel and important bits — like this plan’s focus on water and sewer infrastructure — will require a commitment to long-term consistency that this government will have a hard time providing. The rest is simply timid half-measures.

More

• Text of the legislation.

• Ontario housing bill would bring in ‘use it or lose it’ rules to spur construction. Jeff Gray, Globe and Mail.

• First Reading of Bill 185 and the Draft 2024 Provincial Planning Statement. Aird Berlis.

• Continuing to cut through the red tape – Ontario’s Bill 185: Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act, 2024. Dentons.