I understand why the Ontario…

I understand why the Ontario government is developing policies such as these with the attempt to build more housing with the plan that they will become more affordable. Unfortunately, that is not what is going to happen. They only ones that will benefit from policies like this are the developers and those people looking for housing that can actually afford the higher housing prices. There are many assumptions that have been made that will have an overall negative affect:
- reducing development fees will make housing easier and cheaper to build; this is incorrect. Less development fees that are collected means the cities have to raise property taxes for everyone, which means less or inferior services, including infrastructure that this new development will rely on.
- Developers will never build housing and sell for cheaper. They are in the business to make profit. The little savings on fees will do nothing to lower the cost of the houses to an "affordable" level (which needs to be properly defined). I have been in the construction business for over 25 years and have never seen a builder lose money to make something affordable.
- Putting the government policies aside, there are other factors that will keep housing prices high that the governments (all levels) cannot control, such as labour costs and availability, and material costs and availability. According to the material manufacturers that I currently work with, costs are expected to jump again due to higher costs and supply shortages worldwide. These costs will not come down. And, because of these factors, the government is going to have to recognize the very high possibility that their aggressive targets may not be reached, but the builders will have already got what they wanted, less barriers and more profit.
- These types of policies will also lead to inferior construction practices. There will be less qualified builders, rushing to build as much as possible and with the lack of proper enforcement and oversight, we will be seeing new builds failing much earlier (already seeing that in the market). I hope the government is prepared to boost up the home warranty program as it will be busy from now on.

There is no question that more housing is needed. But, it needs to be done smartly and responsibly. Caution is also needed when making assumptions about population growth. The developers love the higher estimates because it gives them the green light to make more profit, but please have a look at past estimates. None of them have ever been reached. The greater issue here is that we will have a huge influx of poorer quality housing that is still not affordable, overloaded infrastructure from poorly planned intensification (which I do agree we some to, but smartly), and cities and homeowners left with the bills to fix it.