The Ontario government is providing Whitchurch-Stouffville with $2.6 million for exceeding its new housing targets, a feat no other municipality in York Region could achieve.
The province announced the funding today as part of the Building Faster Fund, meant to help municipalities pay for infrastructure with the string attached of meeting housing targets set by the province to achieve its goal of building 1.5 million homes by 2031.
Whitchurch-Stouffville surpassed its 2023 target, the province said, with ground broken on 1,141 new housing units in the last year.
“I applaud the work being done by Whitchurch-Stouffville and all the other municipalities that have met or exceeded their housing targets and I’m proud to see our community helping lead the province when it comes to building homes,” Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing and MPP for Markham-Stouffvile Paul Calandra said in a news release.
The fund is, in part, meant to address municipal concerns about being able to build infrastructure for new housing. It became a point of focus when the province introduced Bill 23, which reduced the charges developers pay to municipalities to fund infrastructure.
The three-year, $1.2-billion total fund will go to municipalities that achieve at least 80 per cent of their provincially assigned housing target, with extra funding for those that exceed the target, the province said.
“In Stouffville, we're not just building houses, we're building homes and a community that reflects our town's unique character,” Whitchurch-Stouffville Mayor Iain Lovatt said in a news release. “We are incredibly grateful for the support from the province’s Building Faster Fund. This support will reinforce our efforts to meet housing targets and create a brighter future for all our residents.”
But the Association of Municipalities of Ontario said the fund fell short of the funding gap created by Bill 23, which it estimates at $1 billion annually, versus the $400 million annually on offer through the fund.
Municipalities, including the Regional Municipality of York and Newmarket, have also expressed concern about being able to meet provincial housing targets, with them being unable to fully control when developers put in building permits. The region has achieved 7,100 new units annually over the last 10 years, but the provincial targets required that number go up to 16,700 new units annually.
Newmarket itself refuted the provincially assigned target of 12,000 new units by 2031, with council deciding to set its own target of 6,400 new homes.
But the province has not acknowledged Newmarket’s target on its housing tracker website, which still lists Newmarket’s target at 12,000. Newmarket originally refuted the target because it did not see it as remotely possible given it is limited by the need to develop more sewage infrastructure, overseen at the regional level, which has had a lengthy development process.
According to the tracker, Newmarket failed to meet the annual target of 880 it needed to, only progressing on 286 units, about 33 per cent of the target.
Similarly, Aurora, East Gwillimbury, Markham, Richmond Hill and Vaughan have all missed 2023 targets, according to the provincial tracker. Georgina is listed as “on track” to meet its targets with 419 units in progress of the 455 needed for 2023. King is not on the list at all, as the province did not assign it a housing target.
In total, about half of the municipalities on the provincial tracker are not meeting and are not on track to meet those housing targets, including the York Region ones.
The province said any unspent funding from the fund will be “made available for housing-enabling infrastructure to all municipalities” through an application process, including those that have already received funding. Another 10 per cent of the fund is being set aside for small, rural and northern municipalities.
The province has recently changed some criteria for housing targets. Besides new housing starts, new and upgraded long-term care beds and residential units created by renovating or converting existing buildings will also be considered when calculating if a municipality has reached its target. This is noteworthy for Whitchurch-Stouffville, which had 416 new long-term spaces break ground last year.
According to the provincial tracker, Whitchurch-Stouffville had a 2023 target of 477 units built. Instead, the municipality managed to start on 1,141 units.
