Infill Housing Battles: What 15 Years of Data Reveal

Practical solutions for reducing conflict while getting homes build in cities where they are desperately needed

Why do some infill housing projects spark outrage while others fly under the radar? In this episode of The Missing Middle, host Sabrina Maddeaux sits down with former London City Councillor and researcher Jesse Helmer to unpack 15 years of planning committee decisions.

They explore why certain housing proposals face fierce opposition, what factors reduce pushback, and how cities can actually build more homes with community support. From surprising success stories to lessons learned in local politics, this conversation sheds light on the politics of infill housing—and why it matters for solving Canada’s housing crisis.

If you’re interested in urban planning, housing affordability, or how communities can embrace smarter growth, this episode is for you.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Podbean

Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Hey, Jesse. It's so great to finally meet you. Thanks for coming on the show today.

Jesse Helmer: Oh, thanks for having me on. Pleasure to be here.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Well, let's get right into it. I want to know what your key takeaways are about what you learned from studying all those planning committee decisions. What generated the most opposition, what generated the least, and what was the most interesting thing for you?

Jesse Helmer: Yeah, I think if there's one thing you take away from the study, is’s that although there's lots of opposition to infill housing - we know about NIMBY opposition to housing proposals - there are also a lot of proposals where there isn't a lot of opposition.

So when we look at the planning decisions over a long period of time, we see a lot of consistent patterns. Like, there's lots of opposition over time, especially people who live in the neighbourhoods where infill is proposed, often mobilize to be against it. But the planning committees often pass the proposals, even though there's opposition. Only about 4% of proposals are refused. And there are lots of proposals where there really isn't a lot of opposition. People don't turn up at meetings saying, ‘No, no, no, we don't want this,’ including for some big affordable housing developments. Things that you might expect might generate opposition - we didn't find evidence of that.

So I think, yes, there's opposition to infill, but not all kinds of infill. And maybe we could prioritize those opportunities where there isn't opposition if we want to both have infill housing and also support in the public for infill housing.

Mike Moffatt: Hey, Jesse, it's great to have you here. And obviously, I love any research about my hometown, London, Ontario. So when you looked at this, were there types of buildings that generated more opposition or less opposition, or was it more the location and that kind of thing?

Jesse Helmer: I think it's a bit of a combination.

So if you look at the whole universe of decisions, you see a lot of consistent opposition over time. And if you run into specific examples, you can start to see what the features of proposals are that generate more opposition and ones that generate less opposition.

So let's start with one that generates a lot of opposition. There's a four-story apartment building, right? This is the kind of missing middle housing we're looking to see built in cities throughout Canada. Four stories, 142 homes proposed, basically in a low-density residential neighbourhood. It's on a major street, but it's in a low-density residential neighbourhood. So, [this is] a typical proposal, a very prototypical one that would generate opposition. And it did. Lots of people turned out for the meeting. We actually moved the meeting for that particular proposal from City Hall to a bigger venue so that it could accommodate more people. We scheduled it later in the evening so people could come. I think something like 20 or 25 people spoke at the meeting. So it's hours of people talking about why it's a bad idea.

The proposal was approved, right? The building is built now. But it generated a lot of opposition and a lot of conflict, right? So there's one example. It was one home, one home on a big lot, and now it's 142 homes. But in the process of having it be considered by the planning committee, there was a lot of opposition. Lots of people in the neighbourhood mobilized against it. It was still passed. It is built now, but it was a pretty painful process. And did it increase support for infill housing? Probably not in that neighbourhood, at least.

On the other end, redevelopment of the hospital property in the sort of south of downtown. Huge parcel, right? Used to be a hospital. The hospitals decided to close it. They gave the land and the buildings to the city, and the city tried to redevelop it. It's now going to be something like 700 units of housing altogether, right? Six different buildings. Some of them are heritage buildings being repurposed. Virtually no opposition. Half those units are going to be affordable housing. So over 300 units of affordable housing. Basically, all the proponents who are involved are building affordable housing of one kind or another, and there's no opposition at all. Nobody's turning out to these meetings. They're not expressing a lot of concerns. Nothing like the scale of what we see for a four-story apartment building in a different part of the city.

So it's very asymmetrical. You don't get the same kind of dynamics for different kinds of proposals. And depending on where you're proposing to build, if you're building on a parking lot downtown or you're redeveloping something that otherwise would be underutilized blight, people are very keen to see those kinds of infill housing projects proceed.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So to me, a lot of this seems pretty intuitive, like building homes in commercial zones is going to get less pushback from neighbours because, well, there are fewer neighbours. So, could you tell us more about your research and how you can definitively back all this up?

Jesse Helmer: So the way we approached the analysis was, let's look at everything. So, we'll go to the public minutes for all the planning committee meetings, pull all those minutes down, and then take a look at what kind of proposals were being made. Which ones had a number of speakers at them, and then we could use the transcript. There is a summary that the clerks would write up about what people said, to see what exactly they were saying about the proposals, right? This way, we can look at: are they angry about these proposals? Are they happy about them? We can do sentiment analysis and emotion analysis on the words that have been recorded.

I think in total, it was like three-quarters of a million words across all the various proposals over many years. So there's a lot of content to be analyzed, and you can pull it out to see; are people expressing fear or anger or disgust? Or are they [expressing] joy, surprise, some of the more positive emotions? And what you see is that there's a lot of different emotions expressed.

So if you dig into particular proposals, you can see that it does vary depending on what kind of proposal you're looking at. And I think just trying to understand those dynamics a little bit better helps us make recommendations [that result in] more infill housing, but also more support for infill housing.

And one of the recommendations from the report was, we’ve got to speed up the zoning bylaw changes that would allow those kinds of mid-rise buildings. The one that I gave as an example, which generated so much conflict, to go ahead without having to have a zoning application to change it. Because there are a lot of those proposals that have been made. We look at London, but this happens in many places. The official plan, the document that's one level above the zoning, says that's fine. That's perfectly fine for this street, but the zoning bylaw is out of date. It's not lined up with the official plan. And that gap means that everybody has to come in for applications to say, ‘Can I do this four-story building?’ And it generates this kind of conflict over and over and over again. And why are we doing that, right?

So, catching up the zoning to the official plan, in this case speeding that process up, would really avoid a lot of this conflict, right? People might be unhappy about it, but they would know that it's allowed, and they wouldn't be mobilizing to try and stop it in the same way they are now.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah. So the report makes a number of recommendations, and some are things that we've talked about here, like zoning, and we've seen in other reports, but there are a few that are, I would say, novel to this report. A couple immediately come to mind. So one of the recommendations is around how we should be following up, or cities should be following up, with residents after the infill projects are built to share successes, address concerns, that kind of thing.

The second one you talk about is celebrating good projects with an award program for well-designed, community-supported infill. So could you tell our listeners and viewers more about those two ideas?

Jesse Helmer: Yeah, let's start with the first one, following up afterwards. You know, this is one of the, I think, consequences of having this sort of legislated system that we've got in Ontario, right? We're looking at London, so we're dealing with kind of the provincial rules about land use planning for Ontario, but it's similar in other places where there's lots of work on the front end about a proposal, right? So if you're going to change something, you notify the property owners and you tell the people close by, ‘Hey, we're thinking about changing something.’ And then people mobilize whether they like it or not, right? And then there's a decision. And maybe it gets appealed or something, but eventually there's a decision that's made. And then after that, basically nothing happens, right? The developers, if it's approved, will go in and demolish what was there and build something new. But then once the new thing is built and it's occupied…In the past, when we were talking about the land use decision, it was just future residents. But now there are actual residents. And does anyone go talk to them to see, ‘Hey, how did this go?’ Do people talk to the residents who were opposed to the project because it was going to cause traffic problems for them about what traffic is actually like? Because when you're talking about it as a change that could happen, there's a lot of fear and worry about the future, right? This is one of the reasons that people are so agitated, is they're sort of projecting all the worst things that could happen onto the proposal. But once it's actually built, are those fears realized, or is it maybe worse or better than they thought at the time?

Not all infill projects are the same. Some of them are done very well, you know, like the developers, they do a good job of building it. They designed the building well. All the things are actually executed well. When the public is looking at a concept or a rendering or something, it's not what is actually built. So I think actually following up and doing that work afterwards, even if there were feelings of anger or trust felt like it was broken, maybe afterwards it can be healed, right? You can kind of fix it or mitigate it afterwards by following up.

And I think that there's an opportunity there where if you're just worried about building housing and like, who cares what people think about it, then it's not needed, right? Maybe you just keep plowing ahead and improve things, and people get angry, maybe they take it out on people in elections, and that's it. But if you actually want to build more housing and build support for more housing, because that broader support is going to help you build even more housing, right? This is the sort of virtuous cycle that we want to get on then I think it is needed to do that, to do a bit of a follow-up. And that's not required. Because it's not required, you don't see a lot of cities doing that, right?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, that's interesting. Because even when you only have the opposition in front of a project that generates headlines, which then people see, there's more fear around these projects. And you never see headlines about the successes, or the feelings of the community or the benefits to residents after the fact. So I think that would be great.

Now this is all really wonky. So I'm curious how you got interested in it. And how hopeful are you really about the future of the housing crisis in Canada?

Jesse Helmer: Yeah, I mean, I was involved as a city councillor in London, right? And I was really frustrated. This is back, I was in my early 30s. So this is like 2013 or so around there. I was kind of splitting my time between Toronto and London, right? So I was working in Toronto, I was taking the train back and forth all the time. And I was living here in London. And I invited Naheed Nenshi, who was the mayor of Calgary, to come to be a speaker at a conference. And he was talking about why he was the mayor. And somebody asked him a question. It was basically like, ‘When are you going to be Prime Minister?’ This is what they wanted to know. So he was like winning the Mayor-of-the-World kind of awards at that time, and people were very impressed by him. And he said, ‘The whole premise of your question is that being Prime Minister is way better than being mayor of Calgary. It's like a hierarchy of levels of government, and the ones at the top are the federal government and the province.’ And he was like, ‘I don't agree with that.’ And so I started paying a lot more attention.

I listened to why he was involved in local government. I started paying a lot more attention to what was going on locally. And when I started paying attention, I didn't really like it.

They were not really approving a lot of housing at the time. Their approach was not to really prioritize infill development, which is a lot more cost-effective and, in the long run, is better for the environment. They were doing things like trying to keep property taxes at zero and pretending like nothing bad was going to happen as a result of that.

So I started looking around for someone to run for council in my area. And I couldn't really find anyone. So eventually I decided, I guess I'm going to have to do it myself. The guy at the time was a two-term incumbent. I think he got 50% of the vote in the previous election. So nobody really wanted to run against him. He was pretty good at running campaigns. And then once I got involved, I learned very quickly. It's like this very intense applied education across all areas of municipal policy.

Once you're a councillor, right? You're in all these meetings for countless hours, being briefed by staff about all these various topics. So you learn quite a lot about what's going on. And my interest in those topics has really come from that experience of being a councillor, right? So I was interested in them before, but then I spent eight years-six of them on the planning committee dealing with these things-in a very practical sort of hands-on way, right? Listening to the kind of concerns people were raising, listening to the advice from professional planners, and making lots of decisions about what we should or shouldn't do. And my interest in that endures.

Unfortunately, many of the problems we were dealing with in my first term on council are actually more difficult in the second term. Things were getting worse. This is in the time period 2014 to 2022, where the housing market in Canada was under serious strain, and we started to see really ballooning affordability problems across the board.

So my interest in that is what's motivating me to stay involved with things like the missing middle. But it certainly comes from that I've already been involved in these things in one particular place. I really want to understand how it works more generally.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So, Jesse, you spoke about how you saw things get worse for a period. But looking forward, how hopeful are you that we can actually make some meaningful change in the years to come?

Jesse Helmer: Well, I'm an eternal optimist. I mean, I think there's always room for improvement, for people to get better. I think we need to be willing to change how we're doing things, even if we're pretty convinced that those are the right things to be doing. Right? And that can be very hard.

I think those of us who have strong opinions, you know, political opinions, policy opinions, I think it's maybe hardest for people who have those strong initial priors to realize that, like, maybe we need to have a different role for the local state. Maybe we need to make a lot fewer decisions. One thing that you see from the analysis is like, we're making hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of decisions at the planning committees. 96% of the decisions are, ‘yes, it's approved.’ So why are we requiring all these applications that cost money and take huge amounts of time to analyze and make recommendations on, and then mobilize people in the community just to approve them anyway?

This example I gave was the official plan, which was passed in 2016. It wasn't in effect until years later because it was under appeal. So we're fighting. Fighting about, ‘Oh, is it right? Let's fight about it some more.’ The zoning bylaw that actually implements that official plan is still not updated. And it's like 2025, right?

So I think there's lots of room for improvement. If there wasn't obvious room for improvement in areas where I think we could do better, maybe I'd be very pessimistic about it, right? We've made all the changes we need to make, and we're still getting these terrible outcomes. But I think there is, there are lots of things we could do differently.

Things like the building code, like we didn't talk about in this report, but, you know, it's hard to build those apartment buildings that actually work for families, where you can have units with two or three bedrooms in them. It's hard to do that in Ontario, but it doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be like that, right? Other places in the world have figured this out. They can build apartment buildings with three-bedroom units all over the place. We just have to change how we're doing it. So I'm quite optimistic, honestly, that we can do better as long as we remain committed to … we got to change this. This is a serious problem. We can’t just think, ‘Well, prices have come down a little bit. Everything's solved. We can move on.’ If we have that kind of reaction, then we're a lot more pessimistic about it.

Mike Moffatt: So Jesse, a final question here, and I want to kind of tie this to your career arc. So you know, Jesse's a senior researcher here at MMI. He authored this report that was published by the Public Health Agency of Canada, looking at all of these decisions. But, you know, as Jesse just pointed out in an earlier question, he served two terms on the council. He was on the London City Council for eight years, two of which he was deputy mayor.

So in a very real sense, you were researching decisions that you were involved in. So, going from that politician hat to that researcher hat, did you learn anything in this research project around the decisions that were made back then?

Jesse Helmer: Oh, yeah. I mean, like, at a personal level, you look back at some of these examples and there are a couple that I didn't support that, in retrospect, I'm not so sure that was the right decision.

I think you also see patterns, right? When you look back at it and you look at it more objectively, when you're not in the moment, you see heritage buildings, for example, generate a lot of opposition. Anything that's going to change a heritage building or demolish a heritage building, and there's just a lot of conflict over that kind of issue. And I think, our approach in London has been somewhat proactive where there's some programs that try and conserve heritage resources, but it's mostly like, we're going to make rules about what the private sector can and can't do - is kind of the general approach I would say. And I think if we want to be serious about conserving heritage buildings, especially the built form, we need to be a lot more proactive about it. Because waiting and being like, ‘Well, let us know what you want to demolish, and then we'll make decisions.’ That’s not a good approach. Like, let's identify the things that are really important and invest in those things. Do something different around heritage resources so that we're not using a let's wait and see whack-a-mole kind of approach to building development and heritage. I think it needs to be much more integrated and collaborative. That's where I think we’ve got opportunities to do things differently. It's not like there won't be conflict over these things. There will be, but I think it could be done differently.

And then also, as a whole, when you look back and you say ‘Wow, we were really whacking around a lot of these decisions over and over again when what we really should have done was really prioritize the implementation of that zoning bylaw’. One of the reasons it's not in place now is that we didn't prioritize it back then. We didn't get it done earlier. We could have just had it underway while the official plan was being appealed, but we just waited and waited and waited for the official plan to finally come into force before we updated the zoning bylaw. When you look backwards, you can definitely see opportunities for improvement there. And I think a lot of councillors would see some of the same patterns, even just reading the report about London.

I think for people in Toronto or Ottawa, they'll see some of the same patterns that are happening, right? London's very typical. I think that is what made it a good case, and maybe learn some things that they could apply, those that are currently serving now, about how they're approaching these things right now.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, there's certainly no shortage of things to improve when it comes to getting housing built. But I love your outlook. This is a reason for optimism rather than pessimism.

So thank you so much, Jesse, for being with us today. And thank you to our audience for watching and listening. And of course, to our fantastic producer, Meredith Martin.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, thanks, Jesse.

And to our audience, if you have any thoughts or questions about unusual career arcs or becoming a senior researcher here at the Missing Middle Initiative, please send us an email to [email protected].

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we'll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

This podcast is funded by the Neptis Foundation

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative