First Stratford TEDx event presents several solutions to housing

With the TEDx event in Stratford featuring three different experts speaking on what organizers dubbed “the wicked issue” of housing, there were, unsurprisingly, three very different approaches to the crisis offered.

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These ideas presented at the Thursday evening session ranged from asking current residents about what kind of housing they would like to see to having cities become housing developers to what one expert described as creating communities of joy.

The TEDx event’s first speaker was Mike Moffatt, an assistant professor in the business, economics and public policy group at the Ivey Business School at Western University, and the senior director of policy and innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute.

Moffatt noted how, for decades, young people would eventually move away from their downtown Toronto apartments to more permanent housing. But over time, he added, people would have to move further and further away from the core to find housing in their price range as the Greater Toronto Area expanded.

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“That model really starts to break down for the kids born in the early ’90s. . . . Things start to break down because, by about 2016, the City of Toronto and the (Greater Toronto Area) had gotten very expensive because of population growth and the difficulties of creating housing,” Moffat said.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing number of people working from home only exacerbated the issue, he added.

Suddenly, people earning Toronto wages were able to move to communities outside of the GTA, which in turn increased gentrification, Moffat said. In recent years, roughly 100,000 people have been leaving the Greater Toronto Area annually, he said.

With more people moving to smaller Ontario communities, Moffat suggested the approach of asking people who already living in these communities, such as older adults who may want to downsize, what kind of housing they would like.

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“(They’re) looking for something smaller, two bedrooms. I still want a backyard. Maybe I don’t want stairs. There’s an opportunity. So if people start to see that, OK, growth is helpful for the — growth is going to give them that opportunity to downsize, give them more appropriate housing and growth is going to help them — (it will) make sure that their kids aren’t ‘t priced out,” he said.

While that could include retirement housing, Moffat told the Beacon Herald he would leave it a little more open-ended than that. Asking this question of residents could also be an answer to NIMBYism, he added.

“Because you’re asking people what they want in their backyard, or what would be helpful for them to have. They can see themselves helping create the solutions but also that the solutions are not just for somebody else. The solutions are things that can help them as well,” he said.

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Cities as developers

The second speaker, Anneke Smit, an associate professor at the University of Windsor and the founder and director of the Center for Cities (C4C) at Windsor Law, said the housing approval process needs to be fixed in order to fix the housing crisis.

“Our housing system is broken, and our cities are kind of broken too. That’s the bad news. The good news is that fixing one of them will go a long way to fixing the other one,” she said.

Urban sprawl has contributed to these broken cities, Smit said. Over the past two decades, the largest cities across Canadian have collectively grown in size that’s roughly the equivalent to Montreal.

“The costs of maintaining a footprint of that size are incredible. . . . If you think about things like transit, those things also cost money, and they cost more the bigger the city you have,” she said.

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Sprawl is also leading to an increase in the equity gap as municipal funds are moving out to the suburbs. Participatory governance and engagement in cities is now at a generational low, which is also a crisis, Smit added.

“People don’t show up to vote. They don’t show up to council, unless maybe there’s a development happening in their own backyards,” she said.

Not only is the current system not working for cities, it’s not working for developers either, Smit said. Municipalities need a vision that brings everyone along, she added. Taking it down to the micro-level Smit suggested there are ways cities can be in the driver’s seat, such as providing pre-approvals for specific housing on specific streets.

“Can we actually fast forward some of those approvals, so we don’t have to go through six layers of approval? Maybe we can go through two instead because we already know we’ve committed as a community to being OK with this,” she said.

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How does your city play?

Paul Kalbfleisch, the former vice-president of creativity and brand strategy for Research in Motion, who currently consults with cities on urban planning, started his talk by rhetorically asking attendees, “How does your city play?”

Kalbfleisch said he wanted to talk about the human sides of cities and city building.

“Great cities are more than just places where we find shelter and get our basic needs met,” Kalbfleisch said.

“If we want to make change that’s meaningful and lasting in our cities, we have to work not in silos, but understanding that that building we can be building over there somehow connects to our ability to be happy and collaborative over here, or that the fact that we’re not happy and we hate collaborating might stop that building from ever getting built,” he said.

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Kalbfleisch asked several other questions: How does the city act like a community? How does the city connect citizens in a meaningful way so that strangers become friends? How does your city celebrate its uniqueness in a way that give citizens an optimistic language and an optimistic vision to share among themselves?

Kalbfleisch called these measures “societal resilience, our ability to come together, unity and work through changes and adapt.”

“Our societal resilience in our cities and our nations is very, very weak. I’m sure you can all feel that, and all you have to do is turn on the news and you’ll get the picture,” he said.

Having a weak societal resilience is getting in the way of society’s ability to deal with complex issues, including housing, Kalbfleisch added.

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Creating social infrastructure will help create the type of community that will thrive in the future, he continued.

“Since the 1970s, we’ve been slowly stripping away the social infrastructure that brought us together and built community. We no longer have corner stores. We don’t join clubs like we used to or hang out pool halls; we don’t go to church to the point that we did before, and our downtown cores are becoming less and less vibrant,” he said.

However, we are not going to heal the divisions in our society from national mandates, Kalbfleisch explained.

“Something from Davos, Switzerland, is not going to come and explain to us how to heal. It’s going to start in cities,” he said.

Asked how building connections will help build more housing, Kalbfleisch told the Beacon that every time a potential development turns into an argument, it allows NIMBYism to step in.

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“Every time a developer comes to try and build something, we have to go through several hurdles of people saying ‘no,’ and that happens because we’re not really connected,” he said “It’s about investing in creating a more collaborative community so we can move beyond that in the future,” he said.

Get Involved

The event comes at time when housing in Huron Perth has gotten more expensive in recent years while wages have not kept pace. According to recently released numbers from the local United Way for 2018-2022:

• Housing prices have increased 104 percent;
• Rents have increased 88 percent; aim
• Wages have only increased 19 percent.

Alan Kasperski, one of the organizers of the event, told attendees that the aim of TEDx events is to inspire people, but he wanted them to think about doing something beyond that.

“I want to motivate you. I hope the talks will motivate you to get involved in programs related to housing, one of the most wicked challenges of the 21st century,” Kasperski said.

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