Private Market Solutions to Private Market-Induced Problems: The Limits of Inclusionary Zoning in Toronto

The City of Toronto is experiencing a well-known crisis in housing affordability. The municipality has increasingly failed to provide housing that is affordable to its low- and middle-income residents amidst rapid growth in population size and construction activity. Condominium development has vastly outnumbered new purpose-built rental development in recent decades while existing affordable units are lost to urban revitalization projects and financialized landlords. The City has been negotiating Official Plan and Zoning By-law amendments to allow for inclusionary zoning, an affordable housing strategy that has been implemented in over one thousand jurisdictions globally. These changes will mandate that developments in specified areas of the city include a percentage of affordable units. Inclusionary zoning policies are highly variable and involve careful consideration of the unique local contexts in which they are implemented. This paper examines the potential of inclusionary zoning in Toronto and the role of power in the design process through an investigation of the city’s local housing market and history of affordable housing, interviews with various stakeholders to understand their competing perspectives and demands, and a comparative policy analysis of Toronto’s proposed framework with those of other jurisdictions. With implementation scheduled to begin in January 2022, inclusionary zoning could hold immense implications for Toronto’s housing market and residents. While this research ultimately supports the City of Toronto’s use of this policy tool, its effectiveness is found to be severely limited by a firm reliance on the private development sector, neoliberal capitalist market logics, and colonial ideologies underlying the problem of inequitable access to housing that it seeks to rectify. Deeper changes in systems of Canadian housing provision at all levels of government including transformative interventions in Toronto’s urban planning status quo are found to be necessary if housing unaffordability is to be adequately addressed in the city.