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Ted Parkinson's avatar

Thank you for this well researched article! It spells out many of the concerns I have about "inclusionary zoning". The question "how many affordable units does this development contain?" seems to be one of the first things people ask from any proposal. But I've always felt this is the wrong way to look at it. For one thing, who defines "affordable"? Usually the developer so they can get a couple of gold stars added to their proposal. But is a $400K condo really "affordable" just because the others are $650K? And how long must it remain "affordable" before being flipped?

If a developer has 60 units and 5 are tagged as "affordable" that could cost $1 million dollars if each was given a $200K reduction. I believe it would be *far* more useful to give that $1 million to a local low cost housing development run by the Working Centre and/or other partners. I'm sure *many* more units would get built and they would remain "lower cost". This kind of donation is a far more efficient and long lasting use of that money.

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Mitchell Avis's avatar

Great post, Melissa. It’s sent me down a rabbit hole this morning about IZ and reading Michael Manville’s essay about value capture. When working for municipalities I used to be very confused when we would have a 30% target of affordable housing but never measured or tracked it. I used to be a proponent of IZ but agree now that efforts are better off removing exclusionary zoning instead. The point from Manville that really resonated for me was that vacant land (land left undeveloped) and building no housing is assumed to be socially harmless. This assumption - among some other key ones for IZ - is fundamentally flawed. Affordable housing should be a public service offered by government/non-profits and funded by the entire tax base - not just new home/condo owners or renters. It’s a “yes…and” situation. Moving away from IZ without government commitment to build affordable housing cannot happen.

It does make me think about a separate, but related, topic. We often talk about wanting a range of housing options in a neighbourhood that allow people of all classes to live together. But what about in individual towers and larger buildings? Is there any risk to having one tower entirely marketed to one income class and a neighbouring building being entirely affordable housing? What’s the risk or harm from this type of segregation? And is there a way to plan for (and require) more diversity within individual buildings. I’m trying not to talk myself back into IZ…

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