Prime Minister Mark Carney has set a large portion of his federal election campaign messaging for his housing plan, which promises billions in financing for “affordable housing,” including Indigenous housing and a “Housing First” investment approach.
Jeremy Bowes is a Professor of Design at OCAD University. He works at OCAD’s research lab with visual analytics and works with several developers around the city. He has 35 years of experience as an interior, architectural and environmental designer with a Master’s in the field of housing engineering.
Bowes sees the promise in the plan if it can be executed correctly.
“I'm hopeful for the moment. I’m always hopeful,” he said.
Bowes takes a special interest in the plan and its use of prefabricated housing, a housing tactic already used in Toronto’s HousingTO 2020-2030 action plan, which works with NRB Modular Solutions to provide an extra 1,000 housing units to the city.
“When I saw that in Mark Carney's plan, I was excited about it because not only is it more efficient and less waste and more sustainable, but it's also a great opportunity to build industries in Ontario,” he said. “And maybe throughout other provinces, too.”
Bowes cited the history of prefabricated housing and the Sears catalogue, where houses were sold to be built through the early 20th Century, and their advantages.
“The advantages in post-Second World War stuff were that you and your neighbours could assemble it. It got delivered to your site, and you basically put it together,” he said.
The prefabricated house is currently mainly used in cottages. Bowes said that adapting this building style to urban infrastructure, such as sewage and water lines, is an extra step among other issues that urban housing poses, including land costs.
The Conservative Party of Canada proposed the Building Homes Not Bureaucracy Act in 2023, proposed quickening the building of housing year over year by 15 per cent and would penalize cities for not building housing around transit, but failed to pass during second reading on May 29, 2024.
The bill was proposed by opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, who was a housing minister in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.
The New Democratic Party has pledged to build three million houses by 2030 as a campaign promise for the 2025 election, including non-market funding similar to the Carney plan.
Bowes does have a solution for the cost of land, which is extremely high in cities like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.
“Every city has these parking lots that are in a holding pattern waiting for development,” Bowes said. “They make some money to pay the taxes off of parking, but you could easily drop in prefabricated units that could be used temporarily for affordable housing.”
There is also importance in building around transit corridors to avoid worsening traffic and curb unnecessary condo development, issues Toronto faces like no other North American city.
“Presently, the city has a policy around the relationship between transit and housing. They’re allowing higher density to be built along transit corridors,” he said. “The current city's plan is that to protect to some of the neighbourhoods that exist where there's only three-story houses.”
Bowes makes clear that when urban planning, there has to be a balance between these corridors and neighbourhoods seen purely as housing areas.
“You have to start at some point deciding how you're going to add more density into neighbourhoods because otherwise, we're going to have giant corridors all along the streets that are high density,” he said. “And then as soon as you walk half a block away from that street, it all turns into houses, which make these houses almost walled in. So, it's not the best strategy, but it is a strategy the city's been using.”
Solutions such as putting rental units in basements or garages could be a way of addressing this issue while making housing more affordable for all parties.
Carney’s proposed plan seems up to snuff in the face of these issues.
“Looking at his proposal, [it] hits all of the buttons,” Bowes said. “He talks about efficiency, he talks about taking away development charges and introducing tax incentives and [it’s] great. All of that's small potatoes, though in the scheme of money, but it would help developers.”
