Developers need to step up to help Oshawa reach housing targets – planning report

Building enough homes to meet provincially-mandated housing targets – and qualifying for financial bonuses as a result – are in the hands of developers, not the city, claims a report from Oshawa planning staff.

On October 25, 2022, the provincial government and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing released an action plan to build 1.5 million homes in Ontario by 2031 and assigned 29 of the province’s largest cities targets.

The government also introduced the More Homes Built Faster Act and Bill 23 that year and added the Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act last June, all to help make this goal a reality by addressing the ‘missing middle,’ reducing costs, fees, and taxes, streamlining development approvals and encouraging greater density, among other changes to the development process.

There are conflicting reports on how well the plan is working (though the province claims it hit 99 per cent of its target in 2023) but it doesn’t seem to be working in Oshawa. The city’s ten-year target is 23,000, an ambitious goal considering the city has never come close to building houses at that rate, despite smashing building permit records last year by $300 million.

Not hitting those goals also means being left out of a $1.5 billion Building Faster Fund from the provincial government and city staff are putting the onus on the development industry, believing Oshawa can hit its ten-year target – and collect those multi-million dollar cheques from Queen’s Park – with a little more help from builders.

“It can be demonstrated that the province’s target for Oshawa can be met with the assistance of the development community in advancing projects when the role of the city has concluded or when advancing the application process is in the control of the developer,” stated a report delivered to Oshawa Council Monday morning. “The delivery of 23,000 new dwelling units between 2022 and 2031 … relies on the efforts of both the city and the development industry to advance planning approvals and issue building permits,” a report released at council Monday declared.

“The city’s ability to increase the supply of housing in Oshawa is limited to undertaking all necessary steps of the development approvals process over which it has direct control.”

The city has started just 853 homes as of September of this year, less than halfway (44.5 per cent) towards its 2024 target, but fully half of the units to be delivered by 2031 are already subject to planning applications that relies primarily on action by the development community, the report declared.

The report, authored by Planning Services Director Tom Goodeve and Planning Commissioner Anthony Ambra, also claimed it would “not be unreasonable” to expect Oshawa to claim a bonus from the Building Faster Fund, which rewards communities achieving 80 per cent of their target, noting the city issued permits for 1,204 new housing units in 2023. “Had builders advanced building permits for site plan approved projects alone,” the report added, Oshawa could have counted 420 more units, thus surpassing the 80 per cent benchmark.

With seven years and change to go, Oshawa has less than under 4,000 homes built or started.

Just 19,000 homes to go.