Fix Housing 11: Cities Need Help to Eliminate the Barriers to Housing
Change is hard. Empower a task force of community and industry partners to help identify and overcome the barriers that prevent homes from getting built.
Everyone has an opinion
There is no shortage of armchair experts who can tell you why housing is not getting built. Zoning. Development Charges. NIMBYs. The list goes on.
These are valid concerns. But they are likely not telling the whole story.
Local intelligence
There is a lot of local intelligence about why more home building is not happening that often does not get heard.
Builders can tell you first hand about the regulatory, technical and financial barriers that prevent them from building.
Local communities, and the elected officials who represent them, often have a knee jerk reaction to change. That is in part because the public engagement processes tend to be confrontial in nature, with a “winner takes all” approach. But when engaged constructively and cooperatively, local communities can be solutions oriented.
Housing policy experts are able to step back, bring in best practices from elsewhere and keep us focused on the big picture.
City staff hear many sides of the argument, but bureaucratic or political constraints may prevent them from advancing certain solutions.
The general public, and in particular those without a direct stake in a specific development, are often in a unique position to advocate for the common good.
Within these groups, there are pockets of deep understanding of why housing is not getting built.
Cities could do a better job of tapping into that local intelligence. And using the people with that intelligence to help drive through change.
A forum to identify the barriers to housing …
Imagine having a forum where stakeholders in a city could develop a common understanding of the barriers to getting homes built. A forum where interested parties could create a shared assessment of the problem and the required response to overcome those barriers.
This would be much more than the usual city-curated consultation process. City Council is, by definition, political. Politics inevitably makes it way into the official public engagement process.
Official consultations are generally designed to be contained and sanitized. Sometimes they are designed to support an already-decided way forward.
We’d suggest a different approach.
Cities could establish a multi-stakeholder group to develop a shared understanding of the local barriers to housing. Identify the big structural issues, but also the more technical challenges that builders face on a daily basis. Understand the concerns of local communities, and what it would take to get them on board.
Make the consultative group open to the parties listed earlier but also provide space for anyone to contribute. Don’t just make it about insiders.
Give the group a name that people can understand. Redtape Reduction Roundtable. Community Task Force on Getting Homes Built. Citywide Coalition for Housing Affordability. Anything that gets people to pay attention.
And while the city can play a role in convening the parties and launching the process, City Hall should remove itself from leading this group.
City Hall can be an enabler of housing but also a barrier. Politics can make it hard for City Hall to always be objective about what is in the public’s best interest.
For credibility, the consultative group should be arm’s length from the city.
City Hall can support the process and provide some admin services. Meeting spaces. A web presence. Translation services. That sort of stuff.
… and hold stakeholders to account
Perhaps most importantly, City Hall can provide the consultative group with the authority to report back on progress addressing the identified issues.
Cities need to respond to multiple demands, and so they make find it challenging to move as far and as fast on housing as they want to.
But cities could create the external pressure that ignites action, by empowering a multi-stakeholder group with the mandate to identify barriers and to report back on progress.
We’d propose giving a Redtape Reduction Roundtable, or whatever we choose to call it, the mandate and authority to report back on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. Provide an update to the public on how different stakeholders are moving forward on an agreed reform agenda. Not just the city, but also builders, communities, even financiers. Who is doing their part to address the housing challenge?
Ontario did a version of this
In 2021-22, the Ontario Government used an external housing task force to considerable effect. The Ontario Housing Affordability Task Force, a one-off group of experts mostly from the building industry, were able to help define the housing affordability challenge (although not so much the affordable housing challenge) into one word.
Supply.
Industry insiders understood the importance of housing supply, but relatively few others had such a clear and focused picture of why homes had become so unaffordable.
That task force had limitations. It was dominated by the building community, and reflected that industry’s priorities. It was a one-off, rather than an ongoing process. It had no mandate to follow up and shine a light on progress.
But the task force was an early prototype of how cities could use external industry and community expertise to help overcome the barriers to building.
Let the community be your secret sauce
A number of cities will say they already have consultation processes in place.
To those cities, we’d suggest you throw up a quick survey and see how many of your residents feel like they have been heard on the subject. Or a targeted survey of builders, and ask them if they feel heard on the barriers to getting homes built.
You may find that your city-managed consultation process is not producing the results you want.
And let the community play the role of the heavy that forces the municipal government to act. Change is hard. There will always be people unhappy whenever something different is proposed. City councillors can take it on the chin. Or they can defer to a higher authority — the will of the people — as the real decision-maker.
Cities have to keep experimenting with different approaches to get housing built. City Hall acting alone is unlikely to solve the profound crisis we are experiencing.
We suggest getting the wider community involved more meaningfully, through a multi-stakeholder group that identifies barriers to housing and reports back on progress in eliminating those barriers.
The prospect of being held publicly accountable is a great motivator to get those involved — including governments, builders and community groups — to do what they have to do.