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It’s cold outside
Living indoors has rarely been harder, for so many. House prices in Prince Edward County increased 79 per cent last year. The cost of housing rose faster last year in the County than in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. A one-bedroom apartment now fetches $1,448 per month. To afford this apartment, you must earn at least $66,000 per year. These statistics were compiled by Charles Dowdall and form part of a presentation he will make to a committee of Council this week. Dowdall is the executive director of the Prince Edward County Affordable Housing Corporation.
Sprouting from this harrowing data, Shire Hall has proposed a basket of options for Council to consider. They range from rewriting secondary plans, updating building code requirements, creating new affordable housing zones, permitting bunk housing, direct subsidization of home purchases under $400,000 and paying STAs to rent to long-term tenants.
The first four have been proposed before. The latter two—subsidizing home purchasers or STA owners—are non-starters. The municipal well isn’t deep enough to have a meaningful impact. (Were they added to the list for dramatic effect?)
Sadly, the County’s track record on this issue offers little hope that Council will do anything meaningful to address affordable housing. Sure, some will wring their hands, share an anecdote or two about the house next door that just traded for a gajillion dollars. But in the end, they will surely send it back for more review. More study. And by now, it is surely too late to do more than staunch the bleeding. It is not clear that a consensus exists to do even this.
How do we know Council isn’t serious about affordable housing? They have been holding up the building of 182 townhomes in Picton for six months. The project, Talbot on the Trail, is an extension of the new homebuilding occurring on the northern edge of the town. But neighbours complained. They didn’t want such housing near them. It was too dense. Council intervened. This wasn’t their idea of Prince Edward County.
Yet, density is the only market means to make housing affordable. With materials, labour, services, and regulatory costs rising, the only path to affordability is building more units on a smaller footprint.
Coincidentally—or perhaps not—the very next item on the agenda on Thursday is Talbot on the Trail. After Council listens to the cold, hard, immutable data about the rapidly declining affordability, it will turn to a discussion about how much more it can extort from this house builder.
In exchange for a green light to build much-needed homes, Council will insist the developer pay them $91,451.43. It is an oddly precise number for shakedown demand— or as it is called in the report, a Community Benefit Charge. But let’s be clear about what this proposition is—pay us $90 Gs or your townhome project is dead.
There is plenty of other evidence suggesting Council will merely shrug and move on. Five years ago, the County’s Community and Economic Development Commission presented the Developer’s Framework Forum findings. It contained 34 detailed, actionable recommendations to streamline the development process and accelerate the pace of homebuilding in the County. It was the product of 16 months of collaboration between builders, Shire Hall staff and council members. It painted a vivid picture of the structural, cultural and process impediments to building new homes in the County.
Folks praised the findings—and vowed to act upon them. A handful of recommendations were adopted—most were ignored. And then forgotten. Since then, a succession of council members have proposed modifying County building code rules to accommodate small homes. Only to have these notions disappear down the memory hole.
Will this time be different? I suppose anything is possible. Sadly, it is essentially too late to do anything but blunt the trajectory of already destructive home and rental costs.
The time to act was ten years ago. Or even in 2017. Even if Council decided it was time to do something, nibbling on the edges with land use and zoning changes won’t cut it.
Only two things will have a meaningful impact on the trajectory of housing costs: fast-track new housing supply; or pour millions of taxpayer dollars into direct subsidies and tracts of government housing. Council seems unwilling or unable to do either.
It’s not their vision for the County.
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