Hamilton is home.
Photo by Blake Wheeler on Unsplash
And home should be affordable.
Hamilton’s current city council has not caused the housing affordability crisis. The city’s present crop of civic leaders can’t take the blame for decades and decades of poor federal, provincial, and corporate policies that led us to this point. Blaming our mayor and councillors is a cheap and ignorant way to blow off steam, rather than address the real problem.
And let’s make one thing abundantly clear: property tax increases are not the reason home prices are increasing! No matter how much shady, self-serving right-wing populists want you to think that an increase in property taxes is why housing is now $300,000 more expensive than it was in 2018, the truth of the matter is that property tax increases have not impacted housing prices one bit.
Hamilton has a housing crisis for a lot of reasons. Three of the most obvious are that we’ve spent decades building expensive, inefficient sprawl, we have failed to provide real housing choice, and that we’ve allowed sleazy investors to turn housing into a commodity that they can use to make themselves richer.
Angry right-wing populists will complain about taxes and fees and city council, all to distract you from the fact that their millionaire investor buddies are the real reason Hamilton has become unaffordable. Instead of listening to them, we should instead be demanding policies that provide us with dense, human-centred, complete communities with a variety of housing types and a whole array of different ownership options.
So here are some facts:
More sprawl = higher tax bills.
Wealthy developers love building sprawling suburban communities of single-detached housing and stacked townhomes. They can squeeze the most profit from the smallest amount of land, all while handing every other resident in a municipality the bill for the services. It costs more for local governments to provide new services to these communities. New roads, new sewers, new schools, new emergency services, new amenities, extended snow plowing and garbage routes…the lists go on.
Sprawl costs you more while high-density development pays for itself. A 2021 study from Ottawa found that low-density suburban-style development ends up costing taxpayers $465 per person, per year. This is in contrast to higher-density development in the city’s existing urban areas, which ended up leaving the city with an extra $606 per capita in revenue. Why? When we build more dense communities, we can use pre-existing services, rather than build new ones. People in dense urban cores are able to walk to services and are closer to work, meaning less wear-and-tear on roads. They shop at existing businesses, which increases revenue and boosts the local economy. Instead of duplicating services across a municipality, higher-density development is more efficient and saves taxpayers money.
Suburban-style development is more expensive overall. When Doug Ford announced he was taking chunks out of the Greenbelt for housing, he did so in the name of affordability. But, as Professor Brian Doucet from the University of Waterloo notes, that kind of development would have done nothing to help affordability. Suburban-style houses are larger and less-well built than older homes, increasing both the up-front and long-term costs for buyers. They’re further away from services and work, meaning residents spend more money commuting. They’re built on precious farmland, which means our grocery bills increase as we have to import more and more of our food. That’s not even considering the increased tax bill for providing new services to these communities. Urban sprawl is expensive - so why has Hamilton prioritized building this kind of inefficient housing? Could it be that developers have funded the municipal and provincial campaigns of those who would be friendly to their businesses? It is important to ask: if they have been able to buy the policies they want, what other kinds of campaigns might they fund to influence the public conversation?
Filling in the missing middle is how we can address the housing crisis in a sustainable way.
We deserve a variety of housing types. We can’t have a community that’s nothing but single-detached homes and massive condo towers. That’s where the “missing middle” comes in. This is housing like duplexes, multiplexes, cottage courts, walk-up apartments, live/work buildings, laneway houses, “granny flats”, and more! This image from missingmiddlehousing.org provides some good examples:
People want more housing options. A study from the Urban Land Institute found that “consumers at all income levels value location and amenities more than large homes or lower-density housing.” Even the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board observed the benefits to the community, noting that missing middle housing caters “directly to the substantial sector of the market wanting lower-rise, more ground-related housing.” People want housing choice. Communities that provide such choice will attract new residents, new investment, and new opportunities.
Missing middle housing can provide us the units we need in the urban boundary we have. Toronto-based public-space non-profit Evergreen and the Canadian Urban Institute published a report in 2020 that observed the missing middle can help increase housing stock, diversify communities, and breathe new life into neighbourhoods. Hamilton will need housing for an additional 236,000 people over the next 25 to 30 years. By better utilizing the land we have, we can create meaningful and diverse housing options for people while strengthening our already incredible neighbourhoods.
The missing middle maximizes housing potential. The city of Edmond, Oklahoma recently had a redevelopment plan replace one single-detached home with 23 cozy cottages on a single lot that managed to also protect a creek and wooded area. This can provide places for seniors to retire, students to live comfortably, and families to get started, all on one large lot. Imagine the potential!
We need policies that prioritize people over the profit of investor hustle bros.
If you’ve been following the news, you’ve seen the shocking stories of bully landlords and investor hustle bros, sipping champagne on private yachts while bragging about their real estate portfolios, all while their tenants fight abusive evictions, shiver in the cold, and struggle to survive in dilapidated apartments without even so much as running water.
We deserve policies that put people first.
We need more housing co-operatives. Housing co-ops are an incredible way to put people back in control of their housing. Housing co-ops are buildings that are run and managed by their residents in a fair and democratic manner. Each resident is a member of the co-op who helps run their building, be it a house with multiple units or an apartment building. While the federal government stopped funding co-ops in the 1990’s, the movement is making a comeback in places like Toronto where civic leaders have recognized that co-ops can be the key to affordability. Housing co-ops have incredible benefits, like:
Offering residents a democratic alternative to corporate landlords,
Being far more affordable than corporate market rent,
Providing help to members who may be struggling with finances.
We need to stop the financialization of housing. Far too many policies benefit wealthy investor landlords and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). As the Hamilton Social Planning and Research Council found, while Hamilton has lost nearly 5,000 affordable units since 2016, we’ve seen a massive growth in the number of condos built around the city - of which almost 54% are owned by investors, not owners. We need to remove the most egregious policies that incentivize greedy investors to use housing like a commodity and recognize that housing is a right, not just an investment. Groups like the progressive Broadbent Institute have some solutions that can help, including:
Increasing taxes on investors with multiple properties
Increasing vacant unit taxes
Implementing strict rent controls
Building more social housing, which can be run by non-profits or as co-ops