Will COVID show us how to build better housing?

Thestar.com
Feb. 1, 2021
Tess Kalinowski

Vinita Persaud and Guy Labelle are part of a pandemic cohort that has traded condo living for a detached house in the suburbs with room for both to work comfortably from home.

The couple had planned to move last year. Confronted by a COVID-19 real estate market, they initially paused, but went ahead as Persaud’s shoulder began to ache for lack of a proper home office desk and their local green space became crowded with isolation-weary Torontonians pouring into High Park.

“In the pandemic (in a condo) it’s like you’re going out in the hall, you’re touching elevator buttons. It’s just constant negotiation, risk assessment every time you went out,” said Persaud.

As society inches back this year to some semblance of pre-COVID life, individuals, policy and decision makers are asking hard questions about our housing choices -- is vertical living viable or desirable going forward, how do we build healthier communities and how do we bridge the gaps in our housing system?

Toronto’s population grew last year, although not to the extent it did before the pandemic hindered immigration.

In fact, between July 1, 2019 and July 1, 2020, 50,375 more people left Toronto than came here from other parts of the province, part of a longer-term trend of people moving out of large cities, according to Statistics Canada. During the same period, places like Milton and Brampton attracted four per cent and 3.4 per cent more residents respectively.

Real estate experts say the proliferation of home-based work has increased that outflow from Toronto.

Whether some of those exiting the city will come to regret it when the world opens up again depends on the future affordability of Toronto, the ability of the suburbs to provide attractive vibrant neighbourhoods and, of course, whether employers continue to support work-from-home arrangements, say urbanists and housing experts.

“The million-dollar question is, where are the employers going? That becomes the piece I’m trying to make sense of,” said Joe Vaccaro, CEO of the Ontario Home Builders’ Association.

“For that person between the age of 27 and 35 who has been living downtown for five or six years, I think they’ve had their fill,” he said.

Although low interest rates have helped move-up buyers like Persaud and Labelle, COVID-19 hasn’t made home ownership more affordable in the GTA. Prices for detached homes like theirs in the 905 are escalating faster than any other housing category.

“If the pandemic can’t bring a real estate crash like they always said it would, it’s never going to happen,” said Persaud.

She said it made sense for them to leave Toronto because they couldn’t afford a similar home in a transit-friendly neighbourhood, near the downtown restaurants and attractions they loved. Their new place near Lakeshore Road and Dixie in Mississauga is also close to GO Transit.

“It was really important for us to stay in a neighbourhood that is going to allow us to commute downtown,” she said.

She and Labelle work for the same software company. Their employer has already indicated it will continue to offer employees flexible work arrangements but it isn’t going entirely virtual.

That’s just fine by Persaud, 37. If there is one thing the pandemic has taught her, she said, it’s that she isn’t made for a full-time work-from-home lifestyle.

“It is possible to do remote work without full isolation. But I just know that this is not my working style and I can’t wait to be back in an environment with other people,” she said.

“We may have jumped the gun on how much remote work is actually going to be available,” she added. “I don’t know how many companies are going to fully connect to being fully remote.”

While the world of work and the longer-term implications for downtown living have yet to be revealed, at least one thing has become increasingly clear through the pandemic: COVID-19 has laid bare the massive inequities in the housing system, said Matti Siemiatycki, interim director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.

“The pandemic has revealed all the challenges we had with housing -- issues of affordability, issues of how inequality of housing is concentrated in certain neighbourhoods, issues over overcrowding with many more people living in units than really is possible with the size of the units.”

Even essential workers cannot afford to live in the city they serve.

“Instead of going back maybe we can spring forward to something that’s better and start to building communities differently,” he said.

Toronto has already seen the broader potential of its streets, which have been adjusted to accommodate more cafes, bikes and pedestrians. After 20 years of debate, new bike lanes on Danforth Avenue, were an “overnight success 20 years in the making,” said Siemiatycki.

COVID also has accelerated the regional direction to strong, mixed-use communities incorporating superior public amenities and social spaces, he said, pointing to new transit-oriented neighbourhood redevelopment in places like Brampton and Vaughan.

Cherise Burda, executive director of City Building Ryerson said this is exactly the time to double down on those connected communities that put homes within 20 minutes walking or biking distance of shops, community services and transit with parks and active transportation avenues.

Those connections are more important than the size of the homes we’re building, she added.

“We have been building tall and sprawl rather than more healthy density -- multi-unit housing that is human scale and is part of a healthy neighbourhood,” said Burda.

She points to a 2019 city report that showed Toronto’s downtown and central waterfront accounted for three per cent of its total land but 36 per cent of residential units in the planning pipeline.

“We’re reaching peak one-bedroom condo. The small apartments that might have been absorbed by young people in the last 10 years are not what people are looking for over the next decade,” she said.

Downtown will always appeal to some people, but its continuing gentrification means the suburbs have a bigger potential for transformation, said architect and urban designer Michael Piper at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

“We spend so much time talking about the city centre and it’s at the expense of what I think is a much larger constituency,” he said.

He thinks planners impose an idealized downtown vision of condo towers and cafes onto suburban corridors such as Hurontario Street in Mississauga, where an LRT is scheduled to open in 2024.

“Some people argue that’s the way the city should be. I think there are other forms of urban life in the suburbs that can inspire us to think differently,” said Piper.

He cites suburban malls that are retail and cultural hubs for ethnic populations: temples, restaurants and food shops in industrial plazas.

“In design schools, we train students to think that downtown is what we should hold out as an ideal for the city. They don’t think the place they come from is worth looking at,” said Piper, who takes his classes for tours of the places like Brampton and Mississauga where many grew up.

The silver lining in the COVID-19 tragedy may be an increased public awareness of the need for government intervention and support for vulnerable populations, including housing, said Vik Singh, assistant professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University.

If the last year hasn’t already established most people’s economic vulnerability, of which housing is a huge component, he thinks there are more wake-up calls to come.

In cities like Toronto people are highly leveraged, banking on home equity to finance comfortable lifestyles and home renovations.

“That works when you have a good paying job and interest rates are low. But what happens when you watch your partner or you lose your job and interest rates go up. It could be quite challenging if both of those things happen at the same time,” he said.

Another pandemic development, the acceleration of technology and automation, means more of us will experience some of those challenges in the not distant future, said Singh.

The pandemic has shown many companies the power of automation to profit.

“There will be this gradual shift and that’s going to accelerate -- not now but maybe in the second and third quarter of this year and going into the next year. If you lose some of these very comfortable, white collar jobs, what happens to people? Where will they go?” he said.

“This is the challenge for policy-makers. How are they going to support this population that’s never going back to those full-time jobs? What do we do with them -- a living wage or guaranteed income system,” said Singh.