In a city of NIMBYs, this community group has made it a mission to say ‘yes in my backyard’

‘Our major objective is to ensure that it’s not just cranks and complainers showing up,’ says the founder of More Neighbours Toronto.

Thestar.com
Feb. 15, 2022
Joshua Chong

Bilal Akhtar has witnessed the effects of Toronto’s housing crisis first-hand. One by one, his friends were priced out of the market -- forced to move across the country or even across the border to find a home.

That’s one of the reasons Akhtar became a member of More Neighbours Toronto (MNTO), a pro-housing, volunteer-led organization advocating for more housing development across the city.

“If you don’t nip this bud right now, the inequality of the housing crisis will only get worse,” said Akhtar, a software engineer who moved to Toronto in 2020. When his family immigrated to Canada in 2011 they found housing prices in the GTA too expensive, and ended up settling in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.

“If we don’t address this (the housing crisis) early -- and it’s not even early anymore -- then we also see more populist movements pop up,” such as anti-immigration policies, he said.

Akhtar -- one of more than 200 active volunteers in the self-described YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) collective -- drafts recommendations, submits deputations to the city and attends public consultation meetings, all in an effort to push for more substantive housing development in the city.

Less than a year since it was formed, MNTO has published policy recommendations on housing and pushed for change that’s caught the attention of both the city and a provincial task force looking to address the housing crisis.

“Our major objective is to ensure that it’s not just cranks and complainers showing up,” said Eric Lombardi, who started the group last summer.

“What we want to do is show up at these conversations and both make the case for more housing and better urban design -- to refocus the conversation on things that really matter and not just forms of taking away housing opportunities from other people.”

Originally from the GTA, Lombardi became interested in housing issues while working in San Francisco -- a city infamous for its decades-long housing crisis caused in large part by a culture of opposition towards development that increases urban density.

Lombardi, an engineer by trade, started MNTO after his company switched to remote work at the start of the pandemic, allowing him to return to Toronto, where he now lives in an east-end home he purchased with the help of his parents. With his engineering firm planning to start an office in Toronto, he hopes to continue working with MNTO for the years to come.

Lombardi sees many similarities between Toronto and San Francisco. Both have strong local interest groups that are against growth, he said.

“Those groups have a lot of political power, and oftentimes, are influential to local councillors, who control planning.”

MNTO’s affordable housing report, released after the province announced it was striking an affordable housing task force in December, has been read by the policy teams of Ontario’s three major parties, Lombardi says.

His team has also met with the provincial task force, which released its own affordable housing report this week, to discuss MNTO’s draft of recommendations, which calls on the province to create more rental, affordable and co-op housing, and legislate an enforcement mechanism to ensure municipalities comply with provincial housing goals.

“The consequences of permanently expensive housing are too devastating to ignore any longer,” the report reads. “We can repair the social contract between generations and classes that decades of exclusionary planning have broken.”

Lombardi and his team also successfully rallied for zoning and planning considerations to be added to the Toronto’s TransformTO strategy, a framework outlining how the city can reach net zero emissions by 2040. For the group, having the city acknowledge that urban sprawl greatly contributes to the city’s greenhouse gas emissions was seen as a big win.

“We know that buildings and transportation contribute to more than 90 per cent of emissions,” said Lombardi. “We need to build our cities better so that we are less damaging to the environment.”

MNTO is diverse -- with new immigrants, fresh graduates and retirees alike coming together to donate their time and resources to the cause. They come from different parts of the political spectrum and each join for different reasons. For some, the affordable housing crisis is an issue of social justice, while others see Toronto’s housing crunch as a barrier to economic growth.

But that doesn’t matter to Lombardi.

“Whether you’re coming from the social urbanism or the market urbanism ideological perspective, I just care that you care about housing,” Lombardi said.

Volunteer Colleen Bailey, 39, joined the movement from the market perspective. When she returned to Toronto in 2017 after living in the U.K. for four years, she noticed how there was a clear housing shortage and prices in Toronto had “skyrocketed.”

“I was a grad student and I was fortunate enough to be able to live ... pretty frugally (before moving to the U.K.),” she said. “That’s really not possible anymore for many students.”

When Bailey arrived back in Toronto, she lived in an Airbnb for several weeks while house hunting -- an already stressful ordeal compounded by the lack of affordable rental housing in the city, which has since become worse.

Despite a brief pandemic reprieve, vacancies in purpose-built rentals fell to 2.4 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2021, down from 5.7 per cent a year earlier, according to a report from development-tracking market research firm Urbanation.

“To give you an idea of how competitive it is, I went to a place one morning that was open for next month. When I got the paperwork done and brought it back that afternoon, they had to actually phone someone else who had been looking at the place and tell them it was taken,” she said. “Everywhere is low vacancy.”

Now living in a rental in Toronto’s midtown, Bailey counts herself lucky to be able to continue living in the city.

“I don’t have any dependants or kids. But that’s sort of the divide that we’re seeing -- that people who do want to start families have to move out,” she said. “It’s frustrating.”