Opinion: Governments must protect the social licence to build more housing

Construction progress on the 39-storey, mixed-use rental housing tower at SkyTrain's future South Granville Station in Vancouver, as of August 1, 2023. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Michael O’Shaughnessy, who is the principal of Fintona Strategy, a boutique communications firm.

To those of us who watch municipal government, opposition to developers is deeply familiar.

Members of the pro-housing, “Yes-in-my-backyard” movement, often make light of this opposition. Developers, after all, build housing, and Canada is in the midst of a crippling housing shortage. Why balk at accepting money from companies who can help us build our way out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves?

But anti-developer sentiment isn’t always driven by an unjustified fear of apartment buildings. It’s also driven by the totally justified belief that a democratic government, by and for the people, should not be influenced by the rich and powerful.

You might also like:

It is worth reiterating: to end the housing crisis and allow renters, workers and young people to build lives in this country, we must build much, much more housing.

And we cannot allow the idea that more housing is somehow corrupt to take root.

Here is a hard reality: rising prices alone aren’t enough to create the space for the change we need because not every household sees the impact of the housing crisis on their monthly budget. In 2021, 66.5% of Canadian households owned their primary residence and were shielded from rising rent.

These households will be, by definition, wealthier than renter households. As any watcher of elections knows, they are much more likely to vote. And if these voters come to believe that our system of housing approval is simply a way for well-connected insiders to become even richer, they will reject it – and new housing along with it.

This is an unacceptable outcome.

A government seeking to build its way out of the housing crisis must take these voters’ concerns into account. It must preserve the fragile pro-supply consensus that has emerged in Canadian policy circles – and work to convince skeptical homeowners.

In short, the government must preserve and defend its social licence to build. Otherwise, the consensus will collapse, and our housing crisis will continue to worsen.

This week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford acted to shred that social licence.

His government is embroiled in an ongoing scandal around turning over protected land in Ontario’s Greenbelt to build single-family homes. According to Ontario’s Auditor-General, developers close to Ford’s Conservative government had direct influence over this decision, received “preferential treatment,” and ended up profiting to the tune of $8.3 billion.

The Ford government has defended this decision as a key part of its plan to build 1.5 million homes. But their government’s record — from refusing to implement the recommendations of their own Housing Affordability Task Force to receiving the Key to the City of Oakville for preventing a golf course from becoming thousands of homes — makes this a hard line to defend.

There is, however, another way forward.

British Columbia’s NDP government, headed by David Eby, has spearheaded pro-supply reforms in the province. Though they have been even more aggressive than Ford’s government on the supply question — by intervening both in favour of projects facing opposition and in favour of overall plans like the Broadway Plan — they have done so while preserving public confidence.

This is because the process by which they look to break municipal gridlock is totally transparent and, importantly, gives municipalities an opportunity to improve housing supply on their own terms prior to provincial intervention.

It is a process that is difficult to attack as something cooked up by insiders at a stag-and-doe.

Canada’s pro-supply consensus is fragile and thin, and attempts to build within cities at scale have met stumbling blocks. From Victoria to Vancouver, so-called “missing middle” programs have been found to be overly restrictive, full of “poison pills”, and, in the words of advocates, “crafted to do as little as possible.”

Actually solving the crisis will require governments to end the long-standing “grand bargain” through which single-detached neighbourhoods are frozen in amber. It will require the legalization of apartment buildings, not just townhouses – and it will require that all these new buildings be economically viable.

Change that significant requires a bulletproof process. It requires transparency, and when governments fail to be transparent — as they have failed in Ontario — it requires accountability.

And it requires that governments and political parties tell the story of the future they are trying to build: one where an end to overly-complicated zoning bylaws, discretionary approval processes and Kafkaesque permitting systems will allow companies to make money through building housing, not through closeness to the premier’s office.

We must demand that our governments build much more housing.

And we must demand that governments defend their social licence to build.

The moment demands nothing less.

You might also like: