Canadian government-owned underused land could house a million people, study shows

If all the well-located, vacant or underused government-owned land in the Toronto region was turned into affordable housing, there would be space enough to potentially provide low-cost homes for more than 587,000 Canadians.

 

In Ottawa, this same valuable, public land, close to schools, parks and transit, could house about 200,000 people. And in Calgary, there’d be enough for nearly 89,000 residents – not even counting all the property the province also owns in the city.

 

According to a new study by University of British Columbia researchers, the Toronto area and five other cities would altogether have enough underused land owned by federal, provincial and municipal governments to build homes for as many as one million people.

 

Ideally, as the researchers noted, maximizing these urban properties to help solve Canada’s housing crisis would allow governments to reduce the overall cost of construction by providing cheap or free land and produce long-term affordable housing.

 

“We really do need a transformation of how we look at publicly owned land across the country,” said Craig Jones, associate director of the Housing Assessment Research Tools (HART) team at UBC and a co-author of the study. “Particularly since we’ve identified that there’s a fair amount that’s not being used efficiently.”

The HART study used different data but a similar method to The Globe and Mail’s Wasted Space project published earlier this year, which also studied what urban planners call lazy land. These are properties with large vacant spaces, such as parking lots, or with existing buildings that are one or two storeys tall, and significantly lower than current regulations allow.

 

The Globe project found that if all the “lazy” federally owned properties in communities with a population of at least 10,000 people could be developed into housing, the land could support housing for 750,000 Canadians.

 

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. has estimated that the country will need about 3.5 million more homes – beyond what the current pace of construction can build – to alleviate a housing crisis that’s left many Canadians struggling to pay rent or mortgages, or to purchase their first home.

 

Ottawa has been working since last spring to make more federally owned land available to potential developers and non-profit housing organizations. As of this month, the Canada Public Land Bank includes 71 properties totalling 951 acres available for development, or open for discussion, although no deals have yet been finalized. Many of the locations match those identified in the Globe analysis.

 

Every piece of land identified in both studies will not, ultimately, be suitable for housing – because of the cost of demolition and construction, for example, or because the government requires it. As with the Globe study, the HART analysis is meant to show what might be possible if cities approached their entire public land portfolios strategically, by prioritizing the properties most easily developed.

 

“Not every single site is going to be a great slam dunk for development,” Dr. Jones said, but “we’ve intentionally tried to be as conservative as possible to be reasonable in our assumptions.”

 

Still, both the HART and the Globe studies were only a sampling of the full potential of urban public land. The UBC study includes six cities that were willing to work with researchers to assess their properties. In the Toronto region, including Peel, Halton, York and Durham, as well as in Hamilton, Ottawa and Gatineau, land owned by all three levels of government was included. But the Calgary and Edmonton results only cover land owned by the federal and municipal governments, because the UBC researchers were unable to get land data from the Alberta government.

 

As the HART study notes, urban public land is often located near services that people and families need. By leasing the land, Dr. Jones said, governments can control terms that suit the needs of the community, and not the bottom line of private developers.

 

“There’s a lot of land that could be brought to the table very quickly compared to everything else that is available,” said urban planning researcher Rudrasen Amol Sheorey, the UBC study’s lead author and an associate with Bri-mor Developments in Calgary. Mr. Sheorey also analyzed the data for the Globe project, and was hired by HART after the newspaper’s project was completed. His housing yield findings were calculated based on factors such as parcel size, building heights and unit floor space, as well as comparisons with existing developments.

 

David Amborski, director of the Centre for Urban Research and Land Development at Toronto Metropolitan University, has long advocated for governments to lease public land, rather than sell it. But the details of those agreements, he said, determine the success of programs such as Ottawa’s land bank.

For instance, he asked, how does the government structure a deal that is both affordable for future tenants and feasible for developers? How does Ottawa ensure that the right operators are managing the property once built? “The proof is in the implementation,” Mr. Amborski said.

 

Stephen Bennett, chief executive of B.C.’s Affordable Housing Societies, which develops and operates rental housing for those with low to moderate income, said that while he has not received free land for any projects, “it would certainly help reduce rental costs.”

 

That’s because the cash to purchase land would instead go to developing the property, reducing the size of the mortgage and making lower rents possible. Even then, Mr. Bennett said, developers attempting to build lower-cost housing anywhere in B.C. would need more help in the form of grants and perhaps even operating subsidies.

 

Municipalities have also identified aging or insufficient infrastructure as another hurdle to redeveloping urban parcels. Dr. Jones said HART’s study tries to take this into account by prioritizing properties close to amenities such as schools and hospitals that are also more likely to have easier access to sewers and power.

 

Daniel Ger, chief executive for the non-profit condo developer Options for Homes based in Toronto, said that government will also need to make the process easier and cheaper for non-profit organizations that have typically been outbid by well-funded developers when land goes up for sale.

 

 

 

 

This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail