When Ontario's housing minister gave a speech to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board on Thursday, half of it was about transit.

That shouldn't come as a surprise, Minister Steve Clark told QP Briefing after the speech.

"We've, as a government, made a decision to intensify around major transit station areas," he said. "The very first consultation I began when I became minister was around changes to the growth plan — Places to Grow — and there was unanimous support for intensifying around (major transit station areas)."

The Progressive Conservative government has been focussed on increasing housing supply and at the beginning of the government's mandate Clark devoted much of his energy on measures to streamline and speed up the development approvals process. But he said in his speech to the real estate board that the government realizes it "can't just increase the supply of housing without addressing the city’s transit deficit."

Since then, the Ford government has announced a $28.5 billion Greater Toronto Area transit plan and Clark said the province needs to "leverage housing" as part of it.

At multiple points in his speech, he lauded the recent work of Associate Minister of Transportation Kinga Surma, who has been tasked with creating a "Transit-Oriented Communities" strategy concerning dense development around the stations of four new rapid transit lines: The Ontario Line, the three-stop Scarborough Subway Extension, the Yonge Street Extension and the Eglinton Crosstown LRT.

He described it as a vision of "complete communities" around transit hubs that will include "affordable housing, maybe even student housing, long-term care, libraries, parks and recreation centres."

"We will do that by maximizing this historic transit investment and continue to build a city that is dynamic, prospering and a welcoming place to work and play," he said.

Clark framed the plan as a solution to the "last-mile problem," which is a term often used to describe the challenge of getting people who live in residential areas to public transit hubs without using their cars.

"The way to solve the ‘last mile’ problem is building in that mile," he said. "So, the 'last mile' problem becomes the 'last metre' solution."

Surma told QP Briefing she's been working on the transit-oriented communities strategy for several months and has been having discussions with the City of Toronto and York Region about establishing a framework for how to proceed.

"We want to look at how we can solve the housing shortage that exists in the City Toronto," she said. "So we're partnering with the city. We're looking at what we can do to provide more housing, more family services.

"People want to live near stations because it's easier for them to get around," she continued. "They're not forced to buy a car, they're not forced to pay high auto insurance rates in the City of Toronto and we want to provide that to the public."

The four key lines Surma is focussing on are at different stages of planning, with the Eglinton Crosstown expected to open by Sept. 2021, although the Star reported internal documents warn that it could take until May 2022. The other projects still in the early planning stages.

The Toronto Star also recently reported that Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency, has been meeting with developers and land title holders about the alignment of the Ontario Line, the centrepiece of the Ford transit plan that is currently budgeted at $11.8 billion.

Real estate report

Clark's speech was delivered to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board at the of their 2020 Market Year in Review and Outlook report. The report found homebuying demand rebounded in 2019 after a lull in 2018 and predicts high demand in 2020, and high prices as a result.

"[In] many GTA neighbourhoods, home buyers will be faced with a constrained supply of listings," the report found. "This means competition between buyers will remain strong and above-inflation price increases will be the norm in most market segments."

TRREB is predicting both total sales and average sale price to increase in 2020 by roughly 10 per cent over 2019, with the price increase driven by "less expensive mid-density low-rise home types" and condos.

Province working on ‘transit-oriented communities’ housing strategy with Toronto, ministers say

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