Ford Gets an F on Housing
Sabrina Maddeaux and Mike Moffatt rate the Ontario Premier’s track record on housing
In this episode of the Missing Middle podcast, Conservative pundit Sabrina Maddeaux and economist Mike Moffatt discuss the challenges and failures of Ontario's housing market, contrasting it with Alberta's more successful approach. They explore the vision of affordable housing presented by Premier Doug Ford, at his September 2023 Ford Fest gathering. Sabrina and Mike compare that vision to the reality of the present. The discussion highlights the implications for millennials and Gen Z, who are increasingly considering moving to provinces like Alberta due to affordability issues. Ultimately, Sabrina and Mike each assign a letter grade to the Ontario government's performance in addressing the housing crisis. Spoiler alert: Ford gets an F, but from which host? You’ll have to watch to find out!
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast which has been lightly edited.
Mike Moffatt: So one thing I think those of us on the left and center-left often get wrong - and I should say when I say “us”, I'm not including you, Sabrina, in the left and center-left - I mean, me and my fellow travellers. One of the things that I think we get wrong these days is that we don't really paint a compelling picture of what we want the future to look like. And that particularly goes for wonks like me. We talk in terms of policies and programs rather than outcomes. So nobody really knows what we're talking about or worse, we sound like we're talking down to people. And one politician, who I have to admit, often gets this right is, well, on the right. It's Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
A couple of years ago at Ford Fest in Kitchener, he painted this vision of what housing affordability should look like. And I'm going to quote here, “We're going to offer a 1600 square foot home with a basement that's finished that you can rent out or have a family there. You're going to have a backyard with a fence and you're going to have a paved driveway for under $500,000.”
Now I know that's not everyone's vision of success. Many urbanists and environmentalists would balk at the very idea of every middle-class family having a large suburban home like that. But the thing with the vision is it's something that you can picture. It's tangible. You can understand clearly what Ford is talking about.
So before we get into whether it's even possible to make this vision a reality, I'd like to get your view. Is this the kind of home, and the kind of lifestyle, that would appeal to most millennials or Gen Z in the same way that it did to baby boomers? And I'd have to argue my generation, Gen X, as well.
Sabrina Maddeaux: The short answer is “yes,” but I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Like you said, you hit it on the nail when you said this is a tangible vision. So for a long time, for the most part, the Canadian dream has been getting that suburban 1600 square-foot home with the backyard so that you can raise a family. So when young people picture their next life step or that stage where they are going to put down roots and have a child, that is what they picture.
At the same time, I do think that continued desire for that lifestyle reflects a lack of imagination by our urban planners, by developers, by politicians, because renting and condos or apartments don't have to be inherently bad lifestyles. If you look at other cities around the world, they very much made this work. The problem is we've made renting and the condo-apartment lifestyle in Canada pretty horrible - or at least it has very severe limitations. And as a renter who lives in a condo, I can list some of those out. I mean, the big one is the lack of stability. You simply can't guarantee where you're going to be living a year from now because it's not up to you. And especially when you're at the point in life where, for example, you want to have a child or they're at the point where they're enrolling in schools, that really matters.
The ability to make changes to your own home size. We've talked a lot about how downtown Toronto, and other urban centers, especially, are full of these dog-crate condos - or even if you do snag a two-bedroom these days, they're like 700-750 square feet - which is barely enough room for two people especially if someone's working at home let alone again having a child or raising a family. So the lifestyle just isn't great and we also put these buildings…along the most noisy, most polluted corridors.
So if we were willing to reimagine how we build these and what that lifestyle for renters and condo and apartment dwellers actually looks like, I do think they could be much more appealing and we could have families really aspire to live in them. But we've had a failure of imagination. So a lot of people just don't know what that looks like in Canada and it's unfortunate.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah… I totally agree. And it's hard for people to [en]vision something different when that thing doesn't exist, or at least around the corner.
And as somebody who lives in a single-detached home that we own the reason why we do so is just what you said. That… we don't want to be reno-victed from a place and have to find a new school for the kids. We like having some extra space. We like having green space where we can have the kids… play on the front lawn, that kind of thing. …We don't want to be on a major arterial, right? When it comes to, you know, safety for the kids and noise and that kind of thing.
So if we go back to that Ford vision, … it really wasn't that long ago where a home like Ford describes, at a price under $500,000, was possible in much of the province. Now, not all of Ontario of course! Like even 20 years ago, you weren't getting that in downtown Toronto. To bring it back to my own… Gen X experience: 20 years ago we bought our first home in London, Ontario. It was a brand new, single-detached, two story, three-bedroom home. We had the backyard and we had a driveway. That wasn't exactly as Ford described … we only had 1,250 square feet not 1,600, but that was fine for us. It didn't come with a finished basement or a fence - we had to do those ourselves. But even after we finished the basement, even after we built the fence, that cost was still under $200,000. Nowhere near half a million.
And since I know, because they've reached out to me before, that folks from Reid’s Heritage are fans of the podcast and listen to the podcast, I'll add, you know, it was one of their homes. So big shout out to the great folks at Reid’s Heritage. It was a perfect place for our growing family. We moved away about a decade ago, but we still have a lot of fun memories of the place.
I'm telling you all this, Sabrina, like not to rub it in and go: “Ha-ha, here's all the stuff we have that you can't get!” But, I've got to ask: Does it feel like it'll ever be possible to get the type of home that Ford describes in Southern Ontario at under $500,000?
Sabrina Maddeaux: Honestly, in our current political climate, no.
We've gone from politicians at all levels not acknowledging the issue to acknowledging it, but not moving nearly quickly enough on the issue. And I would put Ford certainly in that category. He has not made the reforms to housing that his own task force recommended just a few years back.
So we haven't seen a lot of movement. When you look at the supply goals, we’re not close to meeting them. We're not on track to meet them. We haven't addressed demand issues. Housing is just still such a mess that unfortunately, unless there's some sort of major economic downturn that does impact the housing crisis - looking back to the Great Recession, something like that - I don't see any way that young people are going to experience truly affordable housing anytime soon. And that's sad to say.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I'm with you. I think we are a long way from Ford's vision.
Sabrina Maddeaux: So I get the sense that we don't actually see, like I just said, many of those suburban homes that Ford describes. Where are they, at any price, built in Ontario anymore? Mike, you're our data guy. So what do the numbers actually say here?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, you're, a hundred percent correct. So let's go through the data. So if we look at just single detached homes, which I think is what Ford was talking about, but he never actually said that, or specified it. But if that's what he's talking about, then the numbers look terrible. So last year, 2024, Ontario only had 15,000 single detached housing starts. So this is builders starting to build a single detached home. That's the lowest number ever in Ontario! Ever! At least in terms of recorded data.
The data only starts in 1955. So, you know, maybe there were some years in the thirties that was worse than that, but this is the worst ever.
Sabrina Maddeaux: (Ha) Since the Great Depression, that’s really encouraging!
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, exactly. … When have we had a market like this? Well, maybe World War II, maybe the Great Depression, maybe the First World War, who knows, but it was a long time ago in economic conditions that were probably not very good.
So if we contrast this to 2004, when my first home was built, Ontario had 49,000 of those starts, right? Contrast that to 15,000. So over three times as many. And in 1987, my parents bought a home around that time, the province had 65,000.
So we're literally building less than a quarter of these homes than we did a couple of generations ago. In a province that has twice as many people as it did back in the eighties.
And we're also seeing big drops in semi-detached with only about 1500 of those units started - much lower than usual. In general, Ontario doesn't build a lot of semi-detached. And townhomes we're kind of around where we usually are, it's about 10,000 units a year. So that's been relatively flat. But overall, single detached has basically just fallen off a cliff. Semi-detached has never been a lot of units, but even those are declining a lot. And at least for the kind of townhomes - your row homes - we're doing kind of okay.
Sabrina Maddeaux: To me, those represent such a massive failure considering the affordability crisis we're in and the amount of young people we're seeing forced out of the province because they can't afford homes here. So I have to ask, is anything going well in Ontario in your opinion?
Mike Moffatt: Well, there is one thing and that's apartments. We've had one of the 10 best years on record in 2024. We had 46,000 starts and that covers both purpose-built rentals and condos in apartment buildings. Recently, the growth is mostly coming on the rental side, given how much of a mess Ontario's condo market is right now. So that is a good news story.
Ontario has that desperate need for rental apartments. So I'm not going to suggest that's a bad thing, but as you described earlier, those aren't for everyone. And it's certainly not exactly aligned with what Ford's vision of what middle-class housing for families should look like. Yes, apartments are doing quite well, but that's a very different vision than what Ford is painting.
Sabrina Maddeaux: Absolutely. So Mike, is there anywhere in Canada that is building the type of housing Ford is talking about?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, there's an easy answer to this question. It's Alberta.
A single detached starts there were over 16,000 last year. Keep in mind, Ontario only had 15,000 and we are a much larger province, much larger population than Alberta. And they're building more of these homes total, let alone per capita. And overall home starts in Alberta were 47,000 units. That's the best year they've had in the provinces since 2007, since the oil boom. So to put that in perspective, Ontario total has 75,000 units. So we didn't even have twice as many in a province that is, three-and-a-half times larger.
Now, interestingly, a lot of these new homes are being built in Edmonton and Calgary. And, they're being built for people moving in from the GTA. And I have to admit, like, if I were 20-years younger, Alberta's lower home prices would have me seriously consider moving there.
Is this something that you're seeing among your friends and family? Are they considering moving out to Alberta?
Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, it is something that both myself and my social circle have considered to different extents. So over the last, I'd say five years, I've seen a lot of my friends move an hour to three hours outside of Toronto.
And now where they live is so far out of reach on an affordability scale that I couldn't think about moving there. Or, other friends who have remained in Toronto, couldn't think about moving there. So if you do want a home and you do want to start a family in that suburban area that we've been talking about, you're going to have to look further abroad. And Alberta is a really appealing option. They had that ad campaign a couple of years back - Alberta is calling - that really did precision target young professionals in Ontario, centered around the theme of affordability - that housing was cheaper there both to buy and to rent and that wages are also on the upswing.
So it is an appealing option, but one thing I'll say is I'm in my 30s and as you get a bit older, you're a bit more cemented in your social circles, you're more cemented in your career, so making such a big leap does become harder. Where I see it more is my fiance is younger than me - he's still in his late 20s - and his friend group is thinking more about moving, or they have moved. Whether it's to the East Coast or to Alberta, that really appeals to them because there is more mobility there.
And, that's a massive red flag to me. We see it showing up in data but I think over the next few years if something doesn't change significantly, Ontario will experience a lot more brain drain and young people fleeing the province.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah… you're absolutely right about the data. And we see that, that the folks moving from Ontario to Alberta, the biggest cohort tends to be people getting their first career job. You know, that tends to be 25, 26 and not having kids. Whereas the people who stay and are moving out of the GTA, they are maybe in their mid-thirties and having kids - they're doing more of that two to three-hour thing. Your anecdotes that you describe, we see that in the data and I share your concern. I suspect that is only going to grow in the future.
Sabrina Maddeaux: So then I have to ask you: what is Alberta doing right that Ontario isn't and why have they been able to build so many homes?
Mike Moffatt: So, I think this in and of itself could be an entire episode, but there's three things that immediately come to mind. The first is development charges. Every episode I have to talk about these, but it's absolutely true - that the development charges and the municipal taxes on housing construction, depending on the city, are about four to five times larger in the GTA than they are in Edmonton or Calgary. So you're looking at $200,000 a home out here and then out in Alberta, depending on the city, more in the $30,000-$50,000 range. So that's a big one.
Another one is: approval times. Altus [Group] did a study on this funded by the Canadian Home Builders Association. And it was showing that in these cities in Alberta, to go from start to finish, might take anywhere from about four to six months to get everything approved. In the GTA you're looking at two to three years. And, time is money. This adds to the expense.
And then finally: land use policies. It's actually easier to build gentle density in Alberta. There's a lot of great ability to build density around transit lines and things like that. And then there's also the ability to build out, which is controversial. Obviously. Part of that is just geography, but a lot of that is just rules. In Ontario our land use policies have become so politicized, with the green belt scandal and other scandals, that it makes it difficult to have a fact-based policy discussion around, like, where should urban growth boundaries be and that kind of thing - just because it's become so political and not just with the scandal, but over the last 20 years, - it's been a real challenge in a way that Alberta has been able to overcome. And what I find particularly interesting about this Ontario to Alberta comparison is that in both provinces, you have conservative governments in power.
So, Sabrina, do you have any thoughts or insights about why we're seeing two very different approaches to housing policies from two governments that are, at least on the surface, ideologically similar?
Sabrina Maddeaux: I think you hit on part of it, that in Ontario housing has become much more politicized. And I would say one pattern we've seen throughout Doug Ford's time as Premier is he doesn't necessarily like to take on those bold visions and hard arguments, especially if he feels that he's going to get a lot of complaints or be yelled at, right? That's where we've seen him change positions sometimes from day-to-day. And housing is an incredibly hard thing to tackle, especially when you're dealing with potentially angering a lot of existing homeowners who might not want something down the street from them or in their backyard. So he just hasn't had, apparently, the courage to take that on. I'd add I see them as being, whilst both under technically Conservative banners, different ideologically. I think that Danielle [Smith] is a bit more committed to that traditional, I would say, version of conservatism that is about freedom and allowing opportunity and really having that hands-off approach, which does translate into good things in the housing sector.
Whereas Ford is comfortable being a bit more, I'd say, almost the centrist/liberal side of things. …He wants to be more hands-on. He's not really committed to swift change. He's OK with the status quo.
At the same time, I think the two provinces view growth differently. Again, that campaign: Alberta is calling a few years back, shows that Alberta still has an appetite for growth, for attracting people. They want to build. Whereas Ontario has been Canada's economic center for a long time and has been very comfortable and successful. I think the province kind of felt like they made it and didn't have to do much to attract people or keep people. And now, unfortunately, they might see the consequences of getting too comfortable and the status quo really leading to a state of decline.
It's been announced there's going to be an election in Ontario on February 27th. So, Mike, we're both going to give grades to the Ontario government on their last 6.5 years as it relates to the housing file. We've both written these down on a piece of paper and we'll do our big reveal and then I guess do a little bit of commentary as to why. So should I count to three and we'll show our papers?
Mike Moffatt: Okay, sounds good.
Sabrina Maddeaux: One, two, three.
Mike Moffatt: Ooh, I thought I was being harsh. Wow!
Sabrina Maddeaux: I would say I'm being realistic. Yes, for our listeners who aren't watching, I gave the Ford government a failing, big fat F-grade on the housing file.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah. So I gave a D, and Sabrina gave an F. And I was not expecting that! …For those of you who heard one of our previous episodes where…I tend to be a little bit more forgiving of the federal Liberal government than Sabrina. I thought I was going to be the harsh one.
You know, I'm not going to argue with you. I will say that there are some areas that I do have to give the Ford government credit. I think that the Building Faster Fund is a good idea. I like some of the changes they've made to allow for larger mass timber buildings. But, if you want to say it's an F, I'm not going to argue. If we're judging this based on outcomes, Ford set a vision and when you have the worst year on record for building the types of homes that Ford says he wants, then yeah, if that's not a fail, that's pretty close to it.
Sabrina Maddeaux: Like you said, for me, the outcomes have just been, I think, pretty objectively a complete failure. And when you're dealing with a crisis that I truly believe is existential for this country and the province, just the lack of action, there's no excuse. And this isn't a crisis where no one knows what to do. I mean, he's received recommendations, both from within his government and outside of it, and he's just failed to move on some pretty basic things.
Hopefully we see if he does get re-elected a change, although based on the last few years, I'm not incredibly optimistic, but we'll see.
So thank you everyone for watching and listening and to our wonderful producer, Meredith Martin.
Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about the difference between Ontario and Alberta, please send us an email to: [email protected].
Sabrina Maddeaux: And we'll see you next time.
Some additional reading that informed the episode:
Ford promises homes in Ontario for under $500,000 during speech at Kitchener FordFest
Canada’s development hurdles remain a long-term problem
Housing Shortages Grow Fastest in Smaller Ontario Metros
Development Charges have Helped Price Out the Middle Class
This podcast is funded by the Neptis Foundation and is brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative - a think tank housed in the Department of the Environment at the University of Ottawa
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