Once again, the Ontario government has produced a provincial budget that will do little to tackle the crisis of unaffordable housing in this province.
The budget will see spending for the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing drop from the $2.14 billion estimated for 2025-26 to $1.79 billion for the coming year. That’s a 16 per cent decline at a time of dramatically rising housing needs.
One of the few new measures is the $1.4 billion the province will spend on the harmonized sales tax (HST) break described in the other article this week, which they hope will lead to construction of an extra 8,000 homes. About 65,000 homes were started last year. That’s a one-year tax break.
The government has also committed nearly $53 million over three years to expand supportive housing, helping to pay for the operations of more than 425 supportive housing units. That is a very small increase compared to the very large need. Supportive housing is affordable housing that includes health and other services that people with various challenges, including mental and physical health, need. Supportive housing is also vital for many of the 85,000 Ontarians and 2,000 Hamiltonians who are currently known to be experiencing homelessness. And there is no money to build new non-profit affordable or cop housing for the 30,000 Hamilton households and 700,000 households in the province which pay too much for rent and/or live in over-crowded housing or housing that needs major repairs.
Finally, one beneficiary of the HST tax break is a housing initiative that will see the province lend $300 million to the private investment firm High Art Capital to allow it to buy about 2,200 newly built condominium units and turn them into long-term rental housing. Of those 2,200 units, about 550 are to be kept “affordable” permanently through legal agreements. Affordable here means rents 25 per cent below market rents or at no more than 30 per cent of the median household income in the GTA. High Art Capital will own the units for five years and then is expected to sell them to repay the loan from the government.
Some have called the move a bailout of a condo industry that has overbuilt condos, with several thousand sitting unsold in Hamilton and many more unsold in Toronto. Also, note that median income is the income in the middle, with half of all households earning less than the median. So even the “affordable” units won’t be affordable to half the population.