When it comes to discussions about fixing the housing crisis in Canada, building new multi-family homes in existing neighbourhoods is frequently brought up as a potential solution.
One Toronto-based advocacy group is committed to combating NIMBYism and the anti-housing agenda that often thwarts attempts to create desperately-needed diverse housing options in the city.
Eric Lombardi, founder of More Neighbours Toronto, first became exposed to urban housing problems when living in San Francisco where he interned while pursuing his engineering degree at the University of Waterloo. After spending time in both cities post-graduation, he noticed similarities between Toronto and San Francisco that were driving them into housing crises, such as strong anti-housing attitudes among established homeowners, regulatory capture by big developers and government restrictions preventing new housing growth.
Upon returning to Toronto, Lombardi observed an abundance of frustration around the rising costs of housing for ownership and rent, but no coordinated organizational effort to channel that energy into policy change. This inspired the birth of More Neighbours Toronto.
The pro-housing, volunteer-led organization advocates for reform to construct more multi-family housing, aiming to translate the anger and energy in the pro-housing movement into real, tangible change. More Neighbours Toronto, which comprises adults from their late twenties to forties across the political spectrum, aims to share knowledge and resources on Toronto’s planning policies, development meetings and other economic, racial, environmental and generational injustices caused by burdensome housing costs.
After officially launching in June, More Neighbours Toronto has gained a mailing list of over 450 people and about 50 volunteers who regularly show up at public development meetings.
Livabl chatted with Lombardi to learn more about the advocacy group and some of the challenges Toronto is facing around creating new housing.
Parts of this interview have been edited or removed for clarity and brevity.
More Neighbours Toronto advocates for reforms so that the city can create new multi-family homes in more neighbourhoods. When we say multi-family housing, what does that look like to you?
I’d say that we are advocates for everything other than single-family detached housing. Toronto is not getting more land any time soon. How we build needs to reflect the fact that we need to have more density in more of the city. I think the biggest item on the agenda for our advocacy is ending single-family detached zoning which comprises over 60 per cent of Toronto’s residential land area. We look to see reforms that allow for more multi-family housing, especially in low-density neighbourhoods with good infrastructure.
We’re talking fourplexes, sixplexes, stacked townhomes, even mid-rise [projects]. High density transit-oriented development is also a very smart thing to be doing because we’ve already made the investments to move people sustainably to jobs, opportunities and culture. Broadly speaking, we believe that when it comes to building a comfortable city, especially one where families have options, multi-family ground-based housing is something that we just need a lot more of.
The More Neighbours Toronto website says that the City of Toronto and the Province of Ontario are “especially culpable for creating and sustaining the explosive costs of home prices.” Can you elaborate on that point a little bit? When we’re talking about anti-housing, how do you think the city and province has contributed to the high costs of housing?
The first thing to note is the city and the province both have powers to regulate planning and zoning. In almost every case, Toronto is under-zoned for what is economical to build. And so, if you are a developer, especially a smaller developer and you want to develop a property, it’s almost never zoned in a way that makes it feasible. You have to go through a long rezoning process that can take years to get approval for what should already be allowed. In cases where housing is allowed, the sheer processes risk involved makes it effectively illegal in a lot of places.
The city and province own the regulatory regime that all new developments need to go through, and this regime has become more process-heavy over time. Proposals to build simple housing, like fourplexes, are subject to multiple stages of public consultation and decision-making tribunals. Propose a McMansion and you can skip the headache. Do we need multiple rounds of “community feedback” to bring a fourplex into a neighbourhood? Probably not.
We’re not really pro-developer, because all of these rules and processes protect big developers from competition. If you have an army of consultants and lawyers who really understand the systems and processes that are in place, and you have the capital that allows you to manage the timeline risk, that’s great for you. You’re going to be able to make your project go forward. But if you are a couple of friends who want to turn a house into a fourplex, good luck with that.
These barriers to entry prevent competition from entering the market and act as a form of regulatory capture that is protecting big developers, raising housing prices in the long term. There are so many ways in which the province and the city are either dithering on reforms or instituting new processes intended to make it hard to build multi-family housing.
The biggest news coming out of the local development world recently is that the City of Toronto recently passed Inclusionary Zoning policies that will require new residential developments to set aside a portion of their project for affordable housing. There appears to be a mixed reaction to this policy. What is your general take on this decision?
I think Toronto is setting up inclusionary zoning to fail, and many members of our organization feel the same way. On our website, if you go to “The Crisis” tab you can find a recent article “Toronto is setting up inclusionary zoning to fail,” it will give you further context about what we think about this issue.
I will say that we support inclusionary zoning. The main reason why we support it is because prices have become so insane in Toronto that we do not have any other mechanism to ensure some middle-class and working class people can live here until we get prices under control. Toronto is becoming an enclave of old, cultureless rich people. Everyone else will have to commute in to serve our communities or choose to be inadequately housed. We at More Neighbours Toronto want a city of opportunities that anyone can be a part of. All classes should be able to find housing options that meet their needs in the city.
Inclusionary zoning, done correctly, is a stop-gap policy so that communities can remain mixed-income. But there’s a whole host of other problems with how the city has approached this.
For one, the city did not include any new incentives. What they’ve done is they’ve said, “In these specific transit station areas, we’re going to mandate that all developers include a certain amount of affordable housing units for rental or ownership depending on the building.” But without new incentives, all of those costs are just being passed on to new buyers. This is because the economics for developers don’t change. They need to maintain a certain margin — around 15 per cent — to get loans from banks to move ahead with projects. Who else is there to pay for the new costs embodied in new projects when the city is choosing to provide no support for affordable housing requirements?
Inclusionary Zoning as designed is going to exacerbate the supply crisis, and not necessarily meet the objectives for creating more affordable housing. People cannot live inside of a percentage. If fewer units come to market, there will be less affordable housing as a result.
What we really want the city to do is [say], ‘“Okay, let’s do inclusionary zoning and have affordability targets, but to offset these costs, let’s change the rules and provide incentives so that the impact on whether these projects can move forward is zeroed out or facilitates further growth.”
These solutions include everything from the relaxing of building design guidelines to bonus density, built form standardization, and direct subsidy. For example, if you live in Toronto, you’ll notice many new mid-rise buildings look like pyramids and that’s because there are silly shadow restrictions and sunlight rules forcing projects to pointlessly adopt angular planes. It makes the floorplans and buildings less environmentally-efficient and increases their costs. Relaxing those guidelines is one example of a change that would offset additional costs of affordable housing while improving efficiency.
As another example, we can allow density bonusing. Let’s say that a project was going to be 20 storeys and the city wants the developers to include more affordable housing, then allowing that project to go to 25 or 30 storeys with a higher affordability target is a way to enable economics of scale to create affordable housing.
More Neighbours Toronto is dedicated to “counterbalancing the anti-housing agenda that dominates Toronto’s politics and has has created an affordability crisis.” Beside government and zoning policies, what does anti-housing look like in Toronto? How does NIMBYism play a role?
One of the main challenges, even for a group like ours, is that those who oppose development don’t do so broadly. They do so on a project-by-project basis. There are a lot of really well organized neighbourhood associations composed of predominantly white, older, wealthier homeowners. They keep a very close eye on things that are happening in their neighbourhood and have the organizational wherewithal to coordinate opposition to prevent development from going forward.
They use this power to bully and influence city councillors because in a city like Toronto, where only 30 per cent of people show up to vote, a couple of hundred votes influenced by hyper-locally engaged busybodies can mean the difference between their election and defeat. We see that these groups dominate our city’s growth policies despite the fact that the majority of Torontonians don’t really agree with them. I think most sane people couldn’t care less if someone wants to build a fourplex on their street. They may even like the option to do it themselves one day.
You recently explained to the Toronto Star that NIMBYs are highly represented in neighbourhood meetings and can give a false impression of the feelings towards a new project. Why do other people, non-NIMBYs, not go to these meetings in the first place?
Most people have lives, jobs, families and places to be. They don’t really have the time to show up for every community consultation for development. Most people are indifferent to individual projects. That isn’t to say that they’re against growth, but are they going to invest hours of their time into a meeting where a bunch of busybody complainers are just yelling at the developer and city councillors? Is that how you want to spend your 6:30pm to 8pm on a weeknight? For most normal people, the answer is simply “no.”
I think the fact that our organization exists and that so many young people feel the need to organize and show up to these meetings is a sign of how bad things have become. A lot of our members work full-time jobs. They’re trying to get their dating life started after COVID, build their networks or they’re raising families. They shouldn’t need to dedicate time to plead with NIMBYs to let them live in Toronto. The fact that most people aren’t showing up to community consultations isn’t a sign that they are against growth, it’s just a sign that on a project-by-project basis, people don’t have the time.
If 25,000 people live in the neighbourhood and 200 people are showing up to oppose it at a meeting, is that really representative of what the neighbourhood feels? It’s just not. Yet, bizarrely, we treat it that way and we must change it.
If residents aren’t aware of housing policies or development meetings in their neighbourhood, how is More Neighbours Toronto helping to inform locals?
The first thing that we’ve done is make it more accessible to figure out where the meetings are happening and the context about them. The way that the city publishes these things it’s not very transparent. You have to dig. The user experience on the city’s websites can be confusing, so we just make it easy by putting it onto a shared google calendar you can sync with your own. The other thing is that attending these meetings by yourself is very monotonous. Doing advocacy alone sucks.
What More Neighbours Toronto has done is create a community of people who care about making sure that growth is happening and building a community where the people involved like each other, so that we show up together, not alone. You’re not making yourself a target for NIMBYs alone. As we grow, we want to take on more activities that facilitate reporting to the city of what people feel about projects.
Something that we’d like to accomplish in the new year is for every project that is coming up, we can make it really easy for members and people in the neighbourhood to just one-click send a letter to the councillors saying, “Yes, I am in support of this growth in my neighbourhood.” It’s not really something that is available right now, but it could go a long way in showing our leaders that just because people can’t spend an hour and a half on a weeknight to listen to a development meeting where they may or may not get called on to comment, there’s another way for them to express their support without needing to spend a ton of time doing so. We want to build those tools.
As the city brings forth new campaigns, policies and ideas, we want to really contextualize it for our members and also make it easy for them to say “Yes, I support it,” or “I don’t agree with everything More Neighbours Toronto says, but they’ve given me some content I do agree with, and I can edit this email so that it’s reflective of what I truly think about this issue.”
We want to lower the barrier for people to be engaged on the issue of housing, so that we can demonstrate to our leaders that there is a constituency that cares about change. I think we’ve already lowered the barriers and that’s changing the conversation, because we’ve made it more accessible for people to get involved.
