[URBAN NOTE] "Let’s actually talk about investing in housing"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc writes about Toronto's need for investment in housing, private and public.

On and off since the early 1990s, when Paul Martin and Joe Fontana concocted an impossibly progressive policy agenda that became Jean Chrétien’s Red Book, the federal Liberals have nursed a fantasy about returning to the glory days of the activist national housing policy of the 1970s, when mortgage subsidies stoked the construction of hundreds of thousands of co-op apartments across Canada.

In government, however, the party found many excuses to kick that policy can down the road. The dream has re-surfaced with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, as evidenced most recently at last Friday’s housing confab in Regent Park, when several big city mayors, including John Tory, made a pitch to earmark $12.5 billion of the next $20 billion tranche of federal infrastructure funding to social housing.

The event, make no mistake, was one of those carefully staged-managed affairs meant to whip up political demand — and thus public pressure — for a policy that Ottawa kinda-sorta-maybe wants to implement. The asks were pre-negotiated and fit seamlessly into the “Let’s Talk Housing” fall consultation (it runs until October 21) initiated by minister Jean-Yves Duclos, who was in attendance.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad to see this degree of engagement, and what seems — so far — like an authentic attempt to translate a targeted election pledge into actual policy.

My concern, however, is that whatever policy and money emerges from this process won’t fully address the stubborn, but enormously important, riddle of why private investors won’t finance moderately priced rental apartment buildings in urban markets where there’s huge and growing demand for the same.