Windsor waiting for final decision on Housing Accelerator Fund application

It’s now a waiting game for the City of Windsor following council’s vote on Monday to reject citywide fourplex-as-of-right zoning for residential land and in the process potentially jeopardizing upwards of $40 million in federal housing support.

On Friday, Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens, alongside city planners, unveiled a new zoning map highlighting a plan to build more density along select corridors of the city while leaving much of the city free of a blanket rollback of restrictive zoning.

It’s part of a revised pitch to the Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) administration had previously warned could risk millions in housing money and instead leave ratepayers to foot the bill for infrastructure improvements to support new construction.

The province has already mandated three-units-as-of-right for residential properties for Ontario municipalities.

The federal government has aimed to bump that up to four units by offering slices of its $4 billion HAF pie, aimed at rolling back “exclusionary zoning” practices in cities across the country and more quickly boosting much-needed housing stock to combat the crisis of supply and affordability.

Dilkens characterizes the city’s plan as one that allows fourplexes “where they make sense” while respecting existing homeowners. Council backed that compromise approach in an 8-3 vote on Monday.

The director of the Windsor Law Centre for Cities and member of Housing Systems Innovation Lab, Anneke Smit, views the plan as one that doesn’t go far enough to meet the city’s needs, but conceded it is encouraging to see the conversation has begun among residents as the city transitions into a “little big city” phase and the need to densify becomes more urgent.

(Source: City of Windsor)

Smit’s interview with CTV News follows, edited for clarity and context

Q: What did you make of what you saw presented on Friday and adopted on Monday?

A: I think it’s a shame that we left the money on the table first of all. Moving to an end to exclusionary zoning, as they call it, moving away from that excessive focus on single-family dwellings is the right thing to do. It’s something that will have benefits to everyone in this community. Housing unaffordability is at an all-time high. We need to be thinking about all the ways that we make that better. There are real policy changes that can be made around that and fourplexes-as-of-right would have been the next step.

Q: What do you make of the argument that fourplexes in some neighbourhoods are just not a good fit and adopting a blanket policy could lead to problems? As the mayor put it, ‘You don’t want to be chasing money to lead to a bad decision.’

A: Absolutely, never want to chase money to lead to a bad decision. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Fourplexes in a number of different neighbourhoods in the city make sense. We have fourplexes already in a number of established neighbourhoods. The ones that don’t have them would do better by them. If you think about where the college students are, where university students are living, there are some really terrible conditions already and those folks deserve better housing than they have; that’s already putting a strain on those neighbourhoods.

Q: As long as we’re meeting those [provincial] housing targets, is it not a good plan to say, ‘Let’s densify in these particular areas, let’s focus our resources on improving the infrastructure in these areas first before we test a blanket policy across the city.’ Is there no merit to that approach?

A: This is one of the reasons why we have municipal government, to understand what the needs of a community are. There’s lots of reasons why leaving some decision-making to a municipality in consultation with the public is a good idea. Complying with the fourplex requirement would still have allowed the City of Windsor to do that. There are important conversations to be had about what we incentivize and where and why that is. We were not prevented from doing that by taking this money. It simply established a different baseline. We know that it’s very unlikely that we would see a ton of building of fourplexes all the way through the city. The market will determine some of that and the city will determine some of that based on what they incentivize.

Q: In terms of the plan as it was laid out, what future do you see for Windsor if that is the focus of council?

A: It’s a starting point. It’s good to see the fourplexes on the map. Where they fall on the map at the moment, that’s not actually intense enough. Some of those arterial roads could actually handle more than fourplexes. Fourplexes can actually go quite seamlessly into neighbourhoods which are primarily residential. It’s good to see the fourplexes there [on the map], to be having that conversation. We need more data behind that and we need to have a more nuanced conversation about what exactly goes on those arterial roads.

Q: Housing researchers have characterized fourplexes as “gentle density.” What does it tell you that when it came to the conversation on gentle density, council couldn’t get over that hump?

A: It’s tough. This is good that these conversations are happening. We collectively need to shift our understanding of what it means to live in a community, what it means to build a city. This is the conversation that we have to have for the wellbeing of the community, for our own children and for all the people that are coming for the jobs that are available and going to be available in Windsor.

Q: Do you see this decision as making housing affordability better or worse?

A: I mean, it’s hard first of all to understand how leaving that money on the table is going to make housing more affordable and more accessible in this community; also fourplexes-as-of-right are an obvious next step in building at the scale that we need to provide in this community. To me, that should have been the starting point. I think it’s the right thing for Windsor.

Q: There are some homeowners who are in a single-family home who bought into a neighbourhood under the understanding that it is single-family neighbourhood. Isn’t there something there that should be considered?

A: All residents of this city have a role to play when it comes to making decisions about what kind of building happens where. It’s not just a question of giving people an opportunity to protest against something that might be coming into their own backyards. It’s about frontloading some of that consultation, at the Official Plan level for example. When it comes to deciding what gets built in a particular neighbourhood that’s not only about the residents who live there now, it’s also thinking ahead to the people who would like to live there, the people who would like to downsize and about young people – all of those voices needed to be heard at an equal level.