Housing, eventually: Why Toronto’s rapid homebuilding program has yet to build a single home

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Housing Now was supposed to deliver thousands of units quickly, but four years later it has stalled on a shaky economy, infrastructure issues and bureaucracy.

Standing in a car park beside Toronto’s Wilson TTC station, Mark Richardson is dissecting all the ways things have gone wrong.

But the ground at Wilson Heights remains unbroken, despite initial targets of starting to build on the land by 2020. Construction hasn’t started anywhere across the city’s now 21-site Housing Now initiative, touted as its “signature” affordable housing program — with those promised lower-cost homes still out of grasp, in a city where rent prices have continued their uphill climb. It’s a reality that, each day, threatens to push more Torontonians out of the city for good.

By January, city council had approved the first phase of the project, totalling up to 3,700 affordable homes at 11 different locations with Wilson Heights set to be among the first builds.

CreateTO, in a report, would later concede that more due diligence could have been done on Housing Now sites, and there could have been earlier obligations established where a development would require “intensive” co-ordination with other agencies, particularly the TTC. By fall 2020, the city had tapped developers Greenwin Holdings and Tridel Builders for Wilson Heights, and rezoned the land to allow the 1,484-home development, up from an initial vision of 1,150. It took a while to iron out the details, with agreements between the city and the developers finalized by September 2021. Those deals were, at that point, conditional on financing.

 

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