Council’s Affordable Housing Con

A recent story in CollingwoodToday has the headline, “Town considering increases to development charges.” Everyone knows that increasing the development charges (DCs) adds to the cost of a new home, making housing even more expensive and less affordable. Right now, it’s extremely difficult to find anything even close to “affordable” in Collingwood. Apparently, the town wants to make it even harder and more expensive to buy new homes… unless, of course, you’re already a millionaire with money to burn.*

The proposed increases include (emphasis added):

For urban rates development charges for single/semi detached dwellings will increase by $2,653 to $42,855, other multiples will increase by $2,001 to $32,328, two-plus bedroom apartments will increase by $1,594 to $25,743 and bachelor/one-bedroom apartments will increase by $923 to $14,919.
For rural rates, single/semi detached dwellings will increase by $1,580 to $25,532, other multiples will increase by $1,193 to $19,261, two-plus bedroom apartments will increase by $950 to $15,338 and bachelor/one-bedroom apartments will increase by $551 to $8,889.
For non-residential units, urban rates per square metre will increase by $43.49 to $196.38 and rural rates will increase by $15.98 to $80.65.

That’s a 6.6% hike for residential DCs. Those increases will be added, likely with a hefty profit margin, to the housing price. That means a bigger downpayment is required, more insurance, and a bigger mortgage to carry. (and don’t forget to add in the many hefty permit fees to the initial cost…)**

As you might have guessed, the reporter didn’t ask the mayor or treasurer how this will affect the cost of new homes here or what it will do to affordability. Well, local media, eh? We don’t expect much from them these days.

Right now, the average selling price for a home here is $772,000, but for a three-bedroom home, it’s $904,000. The average for a two-bedroom condo is $638,000 and for a two-bedroom townhouse is $419,000 (assuming you can find one); the average for a three-bedroom townhouse is $995,000. While rising interest rates have forced down prices from the high earlier this year, these past few months, it’s still a huge mortgage for anyone to carry. And anyone making minimum wage — pretty much everyone in our hospitality, retail, food, and service businesses — is simply priced so far out of the market you can’t see homeownership on the horizon.

So if this gets passed, you will have a clear indication that our council doesn’t give a shit about affordable housing. All those virtue-signalling comments from councillors about being proud to be doing something about housing will be proven mere verbal flatulence.

Collingwood deserves better.

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* Keep in mind, this council eagerly approved building a 24-storey waterfront condo development, turning the town’s century-old iconic terminals into a playground for millionaires. But that’s not all: council will spend tens of millions of our tax dollars putting in new infrastructure for the private development, PLUS give that private developer 80% of the public parkland on The Spit. Millions of dollars to a private, for-profit corporation building highrise condos for the rich. And how much has our council spent on actually building affordable housing or helping people out of homelessness? Right: nothing. How very Saundersonish of them.

** Despite Canada being on the metric system since 1975, Collingwood’s permit fees are still being presented online in archaic imperial measurements ($/ft2) with no metric equivalents. To me, that highlights the 1950s mindset in the planning department and speaks volumes about why they remain so vehicle-centric and pedestrian-hostile in their planning when progressive municipalities have long since abandoned that nonsense. And it makes me wonder why no one in the well-staffed, $1.4 million-a-year IT department can add a simple button with code to convert imperial to metric for those of us living in the 21st century. Other websites do it.

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