The Real Estate Diviners

Proof of Toronto’s housing crisis abounds. The condo market is in free fall. Young people can’t buy homes. The number of residents experiencing homelessness has more than doubled in four years. Developers are pushing the government for building incentives; the government needs development charges to pay the bills. And the city, the province and the feds keep passing the buck, going back and forth on who, exactly, should shoulder the lion’s share of responsibility for getting us out of this mess. The good news? Rents are down! And the market will regulate—eventually. In the meantime, we’ve gathered six of the brightest minds in real estate and housing to hash out what should, and can, be done now.

Andrew Boozary

Physician and founding executive director of UHN’s Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine

Brad Carr

CEO, Mattamy Homes Canada

Karen Chapple

Director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto

Vic Gupta

CEO, CreateTO

Andrew Joyner

Managing director and head of multi-family rentals, Tricon Residential

Jason Thorne

Chief planner, City of Toronto

Let’s get right to it. Everyone knows that Toronto, for all its charms, is in the midst of a housing crisis. You each represent a different part of how the industry works: development, affordable and social housing, academia, city planning. So how do we cure what ails our city?

Brad Carr: We need to build more housing of all types to balance demand with supply and get us out of the boom-bust cycle we’ve been in for the past couple of decades.

Andrew Joyner: Exactly. I don’t think it’s an “or” question—it’s an “and” question. We need to build housing for the most vulnerable and affordable housing and market housing. Canada often tinkers—let’s add this and subtract this. This is not a time to be incremental; it’s a time to be bold. We also need to take more of a Team Canada approach. We need government policies working together in concert, not against each other. Benjamin Tal, the CIBC deputy chief economist, once referred to federal policies as the humidifier and municipal policies as the dehumidifier—in the same room at the same time.

Vic Gupta: This probably sounds trite from the City of Toronto, but we need alignment of all three governments. The federal government has committed to making substantive investments into housing, but we’ve had to wait months for the budget to drop. That doesn’t scream urgency. [Three weeks after Toronto Life’s roundtable took place, Prime Minister Mark Carney launched Build Canada Homes, a new federal agency devoted to increasing the affordable housing supply.] This is about the entire value chain in construction and development, from the labour market all the way through. Unemployment numbers are going up, and the economy is precarious, particularly in the GTA, which has been so dependent on development. We need an alignment of policy and a real commitment to sitting around a table and not leaving until there’s a deal. It is going to take government incentives, cash incentives of different types. The city, in its limited capacity, has put up a lot of money, many hundreds of millions. It’s time for the feds and the province to step up in a coordinated fashion.

We did invite the federal housing minister to participate, but he declined. Going back to Andrew Joyner’s point: Why is it so hard for decision makers to be bold?

Brad Carr: We put our politicians in a difficult situation when it comes to solving generational issues. People are elected to be bold, but they’re not re-elected by being bold. To solve a housing crisis, you need to think in terms of decades, but most politicians are focused on staying in office, which means short-term thinking. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between what people know is good for the long-term health of the region or country and what they’re willing to embrace based on how it affects their present-day life. With development, people often think about the negatives, the immediate impacts of construction: congestion, increased density, shadows. But the longer-term impact of not doing enough is not being able to house our population, our children not being able to afford a house.

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“If housing were a patient, it would be in the ICU”

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Karen Chapple: I disagree that you can’t get re-elected by being bold. Think about the great mayors who got re-elected—Sadiq Khan in London or Michael Bloomberg in New York. I would love to see that kind of leadership in Ontario’s cities. But I want to bring us back to the big picture. Our young people are cut out of home ownership. We are able to attract talent from south of the border, but they can’t buy a house here. We remain one of the world’s most livable cities, but that status is increasingly threatened. We have great bones. Civility and kindness are still the rule in Canada, and that is a huge competitive advantage, especially compared with what’s happening in the US. We need to make sure we keep the demand coming from newcomers and keep our young people here by helping them into the housing market.

What specific steps get us to that point of being a place where newcomers can thrive?

Karen Chapple: There’s been talk in various parts of the world about a Green New Deal and thinking about substantive investments in social housing that also meet energy-efficiency retrofit goals. We need to create a huge number of jobs and apprenticeship programs and a construction pipeline. The bold move is to take the hundreds of thousands of already-approved units in the GTA and get them built. Finance them.

Andrew Boozary: No one likes to revisit the pandemic, but there was really strong alignment between the three levels of government. Those politicians went beyond partisan lines, and they need to do that again. We’ve been experiencing a homelessness crisis for decades, and there is an inextricable link between homelessness and health. People who are chronically unhoused live half as long as the general public—there’s no other social factor that steals 30 to 40 years from your life. We have more than 80,000 people experiencing homelessness in Ontario, and the City of Toronto’s own data shows that in the past four years, homelessness has more than doubled, with more than 15,000 individuals unhoused each night. Without housing as a human right, it’s hard to argue that we even have universal health care, given the litany of health issues that emerge from precarious housing and homelessness. The bold measure is not to fall into complacency. The bold measure is not to criminalize and punish people in encampments. All levels of government have to make serious inroads to ending homelessness—they can’t turn away.

Brad Carr: I’d add that money invested in housing isn’t net new dollars. It’s trade-off dollars. We need to understand how housing participates in the entire ecosystem. Strong access to housing results in less police spending, in less health care spending, in reductions in all kinds of other places. There will be downstream benefits that will pay for the initial investment.

Andrew Joyner: The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation says we need $1 trillion of private capital to flow into the system by 2030 to build 3.5 million houses in Canada. How do we do that? In my world of building new rental housing, the return for institutional investors is so tight relative to just leaving their money in the bank in a GIC. As a result, it’s really hard to mobilize, say, pension-fund capital. Canada has many of the largest and most sophisticated real estate pension fund investors in the world, but you often see our Maple Eight Canadian pension funds building housing outside of Canada. Part of the problem is that we overtax the thing we want more of: development charges in Toronto are roughly $60,000 per door. We need development-charge reform. If nothing is getting built, no one is collecting that money anyhow. After 9/11, Lower Manhattan flourished because a huge amount of housing, offices, parks and entertainment venues were built there. Michael Bloomberg removed a lot of municipal levies for a short period of time, which allowed that area to thrive. What we need here are two-year solutions that create a finite window and really mobilize people to act.

The city tacks on development charges to help balance its books, which hinders development, which feels self-defeating. What’s the solution?

Vic Gupta: The issue for the city is that we have a very limited tax base. We have just one source of revenue: property. We don’t share in the sales tax, the income tax or the payroll taxes. The city cannot forego development charges that allow for infrastructure to be built. The point that we’re not collecting money if nothing is getting built is a perverse argument. The minute something is built, the city incurs costs around that infrastructure need, and if we’re not collecting the money, we’re behind the eight ball. The truth is, we need everyone building: the city, the non-profits, the private sector. So far, the city has done a lot: Mayor Olivia Chow has provided incentives for 7,500 units of housing at a cost of close to $400 million as a way of showing leadership to the other levels of government. We’re doing what we can afford. And we’ve also put up a lot of city land through the organization I lead, CreateTO. The private sector needs to develop on its own land, and again, we think the federal and provincial governments need to step up and provide deeper incentives. Success can’t be achieved on the city’s tax base alone. People’s property taxes would go up 50, 60, 70, 100 per cent if we asked the taxpayer to foot the full bill for those incentives.

When Mayor Chow came into office, she raised Toronto’s property taxes, which was both unpopular and overdue. Given the woeful state of the city’s budget, did she go far enough?

Vic Gupta: The city has a structural deficit. But people come to our city to live their dreams, to take a shot at making it, and if they fall through the cracks, we have to pick them up and look after them. We have no choice. We also have to build the parks, the community centres, the daycares and the services we need for a vibrant and healthy city. If we’re going to have that kind of city, we’re going to continue to see tax increases unless we have support from other levels of government. As to whether the more recent increases went far enough, well, that’s for politicians to decide.

Brad Carr: Vic, I would challenge you. We have a productivity problem writ large in this country, and I think it manifests in government as much as it does in the private sector. But, in the private sector, we are forced to look at our cost structure when revenues are falling because our financial partners, our lenders and our shareholders all demand a reasonable return. Capital is agnostic. It will chase the best return on a risk-adjusted basis. On a related topic: I fear sometimes that the assumption is there’s only one direction for the cost to go. Speaking of costs, one of the biggest things we need to recognize is that it takes too long to get things approved. The Canadian research institute C. D. Howe recently published a report showing that Canada has the second-longest approval timelines in the OECD. We need to figure out how to do things faster so that we can ultimately lower the cost of delivery.

Okay, so far we’ve got development charges, bureaucratic red tape, a shortage of workers, intergovernmental misalignment, slowness and politicians focused on re-election at the expense of long-term planning. That’s a heady list.

Karen Chapple: I want to take Andrew Joyner’s idea of a two-year “let’s build” period and see several things happen. Let’s waive HST for new housing. I want to get rid of development charges but have the federal government backstop them. I want to streamline approval processes. I want to use public land. Let’s do it all, because each one of these things is necessary, but each one alone is not sufficient.

Jason Thorne: You’ve hit the nail on the head, Karen. I get frustrated when we’re focused on one thing or on having endless conversations about whether development charges are good or bad. The first rule in a crisis is don’t pick one thing—do everything, everywhere, all at once. My answer is yes to approval timelines, development charges, property taxes, development, financing models—yes to all of them. When you’re focusing on one solution, it often serves to justify preconceived notions. If you already think government is full of red tape, you’re going to think the solution lies there. If you think the problem is a bunch of greedy developers who just want to make money, you’re going to lean toward solutions that reinforce that world view. That can be problematic. To me, there are no sacred cows. Nothing is off the table. Let’s attack on as many fronts as possible—some will be big things and some will be small things that add up.

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“My guess is we’ve still got two or three years of volatility ahead of us”

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Andrew Joyner: I agree, philosophically, to trying everything. But, at this point, I would like to see progress on even just one or two things.

Jason Thorne: It’s not like we haven’t accomplished anything over the past two or three years. There is way more opportunity, from a regulatory standpoint, to build in this city than ever before. The majority of residential areas in the city have been rezoned or upzoned, for example.

Andrew Joyner: You’re right—your team has knocked the cover off the ball on zoning approvals.

Jason Thorne: There’s movement on many of the fronts where there needs to be movement. None of them are at the finish line, of course. Frankly, there probably isn’t a finish line, just continuous, constant improvement. That’s how you do these things. We’ll never do enough in any area, but let’s not have inertia set in. I’m not going to agonize over getting it perfect. If we can move the yardsticks in six months, that’s better than getting it perfect in three years.

Related: “Toronto can be one of the world’s great cities”—New chief planner Jason Thorne on his grand designs

Brad Carr: I’m concerned that the housing crisis three years from now is going to be way worse than it is today because of the time it’s taking for us to rally together and get going. So let ’er rip. Like Karen said, pull everything off the table for a period of time and just let housing starts go, reduce development charges, remove HST, increase planning approvals. Let’s not spend weeks debating whether buildings are creating shadows. Is that what the public wants us to do right now?

Earlier, Andrew Boozary mentioned how Toronto made it through the pandemic thanks to a coordinated response. What is stopping the city from working hand-in-glove with the province and the feds? Is it party politics? Ego? Other?

Karen Chapple: We’ve been talking about alignment vertically across levels of government, but we haven’t talked about horizontal alignment. In the pandemic, you had tremendous coordination across the city departments, and then you had city managers across the GTA coordinating. They talked about health, but they would also work on homelessness together, which is a regional problem. Having working groups across different silos is critical here.

Jason Thorne: Far too often, we have a provincial government that’s adopting policies and regulations supporting a certain vision and certain types of housing products, but then the feds are incentivizing a different product, and municipalities are enabling a different product through our zoning. The result is unevenness. It’s not that any of those things are wrong, but if they’re not aligned, you’re not going to get what you need.

Vic Gupta: The pandemic was an existential issue for us as a society. It was life and death in the moment, and every decision that was made was aligned around that. I think everyone taking part in this conversation today sees the housing crisis that way, but I don’t think everybody in Toronto does. If you have a steady job and you make good money and you own a home, you don’t see it the same way. If you see a homeless person and you don’t know anyone who has experienced homelessness or who has a mental illness, you don’t see them the same way.

Andrew Boozary: If housing were a patient, it would be in the ICU. Yet here we are offering oral antibiotics. That’s what is maddening about this whole exercise, especially after coming through the pandemic. Yes, there is fragmentation in the housing sector, but we have tons of fragmentation in health care, from long-term care to mental health to primary care and the acute care sector. During Covid, everyone was working together. We haven’t seen that here, and I don’t know what it’s going to take. Housing is a life-and-death issue. If there were a drug that could add 30 to 40 years to your life, every funder in government would be tripping over themselves to fund it. There are people in their 90s being evicted to shelters, and we’ve never seen this many children and families in the shelter system and families at risk of eviction. I think the way we view housing is the way Americans view health care: if you don’t have enough money, you don’t deserve it.

The human element often gets lost in the larger conversation about housing and the focus on dollars and cents. How do we get the most marginalized folks what they need?

Andrew Boozary: We need to see housing as an investment. And we need to move away from investing in shelters and invest in housing instead. Shelters had a purpose 30 years ago, but now people are living in the shelter system for months at a time, and there’s a decade-long wait list to get into social housing. Homelessness is a terminal condition—most of the patients I see will pass away before their name is called to get into housing. If we’re serious about having a universal health system or caring about the collective health of the city, there’s a moral imperative to act.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has talked about how prefab and modular homes are the future of housing in Canada. Brad, Mattamy has gone hard into this idea as both a financially successful path and one that benefits buyers on a budget.

Brad Carr: Modular is all about innovating, refining and replicating. It’s not about a bespoke solution, one building or site at a time. I was inspired when I toured Dunn House, which is a modular building, with Andrew Boozary. We shouldn’t be re-designing and re-approving new projects like Dunn House throughout the city, province and country. We should be saying, “We have a model. Let’s assume it is approved. Anyone, anywhere, who wants to build a Dunn House, rock and roll.” When you design something to be repeated over and over, you have the opportunity to focus on every cubic inch. We’re trying to design a housing product that is actually livable for a family as opposed to having it get smaller and smaller to meet an economic price point. We can then offset that larger size with manufacturing efficiencies, because we’re going to repeat it over and over. We can shorten the delivery time of construction: building a one-off building from scratch takes two or three years, and we believe we can bring that down to six months. If the majority of the front-end work is taking place in the factory, all we’re doing in the field is stitching the boxes together. We’re trying to find a replicable solution that delivers more housing at a lower cost, but modular housing isn’t a silver bullet. It’s more sustainable and more affordable, but we need all types of housing for all kinds of circumstances in all kinds of jurisdictions. For example, there are transportation considerations: building far away from factories is impractical and adds a lot of costs. So housing is an ecosystem. We can’t take our foot off the gas on all the other things.

Related: Physician Andrew Boozary on opening the country’s first social medicine housing

The oddity of Toronto’s current situation is that we have an affordability crisis and a glut of condos that aren’t selling. Help us understand how both things can be true.

Brad Carr: We have a mismatch in housing stock—what we are bringing to the market doesn’t meet consumer needs. There is a tremendous number of studios, bachelors and tiny one-bedrooms, fuelled largely by investors looking to make a return as opposed to end users looking for a home. We need to build more for families, which means two-, three- and four-­bedroom units. We need to recognize that the cost of housing is preventing young people from thinking it’s a good idea to have children, because they can’t afford a house.

Jason Thorne: There is definitely a mismatch in terms of what’s available and what buyers and renters are looking for. We’re going to need innovation in the public and private sectors to respond to that. Another issue is that the units aren’t necessarily where people want to be. For too long, development was pushed to the edges. A lot of what we’re doing at the city involves welcoming more growth and development back into neighbourhoods that have the proximity to parks and schools and transit. That’s what a lot of the work around multiplexes and major streets and avenues is about: let’s create more opportunity in parts of the city where people want to live. More broadly, I find the term “affordability” challenging because it’s often equated with social and subsidized housing. What we’re talking about here is attainability, but I don’t really love that word either. Ultimately, we’re talking about offering multiple price points across the housing spectrum. Some of that is going to be social and subsidized housing, some will be attainable to the teachers and the firefighters, and some of it is going to be luxury housing and high-end housing. We’ve got to create something for everyone.

Vic Gupta: I’ve had people tell me they’re moving out of one-bedroom or studio condos as rentals and into purpose-built rental products because there’s just way more intention. Even if it’s the same square footage, it’s built differently and better, with higher-quality materials and amenities that keep the end user in mind. What we’re hearing is that we need wider selection and sophistication in our housing supply on a unit basis. These are the kinds of things that are happening in New York and London and other big cities.

Karen Chapple: Like Jason, I get very confused with the notion of affordability and attainability. If I’m confused and I’m a professor of this stuff, then everybody is confused. What if instead we talked about 30 per cent? Housing should be 30 per cent of your income, no matter who you are. That’s the affordability threshold; that’s reasonable across income levels. We did a policy brief last year at the School of Cities about co-ownership. Young families want to buy these big, old, beautiful houses in the region, but they can’t afford them on their own. We need to be thinking innovatively about reforms to get people into home ownership again. On the street level, what I’m hearing most often from students and colleagues is, “There are discounts on rent. I’m able to afford housing right now.” It’s exciting that the market downturn actually has an upside. But there are a couple of issues here. One is the sustainability factor: a few years from now, we won’t have any new supply because housing starts are currently down and many projects have been cancelled. The market will get tighter and tighter, and those folks are going to be in trouble. We need to be thinking about how to keep those units affordable for them in the future. The other issue is that the market downturn is very uneven across the GTA. In old neighbourhoods like the Annex, housing prices are stable or even slightly increasing; in Brampton, prices are dropping by 50 per cent. Something is amiss. We need to better understand how to help suburban areas that maybe don’t have complete communities, that maybe don’t have the amenities and that aren’t able to sustain their housing prices over time.

You’ve argued in the past that a lack of infrastructure—transit, daycares, ­libraries—is a threat not just to our economy but to our democracy. Can you expand?

Karen Chapple: Canada is facing an infrastructure deficit. Insufficient transportation capacity, two-hour commutes and the highest congestion in North America by some counts are eroding our quality of life and our ability to be civically engaged. We have school districts, hospitals, library systems that are on the brink of collapse. This is shocking because in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Canada stood out among OECD countries by having fabulous civic infrastructure that created a social safety net and civility and a sense of commitment to the public sphere. That’s what we’re in danger of losing.

Andrew Boozary: I often hear about how much administrative sludge there is to navigate when trying to get out of the shelter system and into housing. We’ve talked about barriers at a macro level, but there are a lot of individual barriers. One of the people living at Dunn House had lost hope after years of not being able to access housing. The day they came to see their apartment, they cried because they couldn’t believe they had their own bed and bathroom. We’re talking about attainability versus affordability, but beyond those terms and considerations there is a more basic preoccupation: people having the simple security of not worrying about their belongings being stolen.

Andrew Joyner: We had a family move into one of the affordable integrated units that’s part of a project we did with CreateTO. Their daughter, who was about seven years old, shared that she’d been in the shelter system with her mother and her grandmother for several years. When she moved into our community, it was the first time she felt comfortable inviting a classmate over. It shows that housing can be a foundation for growth and confidence and getting to know people in your community.

Brad Carr: In Canada, we have a social contract that says you’re entitled to four things: education, food security, health care and housing. I think we do a pretty good job on three of those things—we view them as a societal responsibility. With housing, it often feels like it’s somebody else’s problem to solve. If you don’t have it, that’s your issue.

It’s one thing to know why the condo market is in its current state. But here’s a more urgent question: Where is it headed?

Brad Carr: There was a rapid increase in pre-sales driven by historically low interest rates and significant increases in government-announced levels of immigration, which created an environment where investors saw nothing but upside. That drove the size of units down and the price of units up, and it created the mismatch in supply we’ve talked about. That chapter of the industry is closed, and the conditions that caused it are no longer present. We’re going to have to work our way through that supply, but we need to reset and restart for a more targeted, end user–driven product at prices people can afford. The market will correct itself, but my guess is we’ve still got two or three years of volatility ahead of us.

Andrew Joyner: There have been about 20,000 new units delivered annually in Toronto over the past few years. But, last year, it was 30,000, and it will be 30,000 again this year. This above-trend level of deliveries is adding to supply. Also, interest rates have doubled since March of 2022. The carrying cost for people who bought condos has doubled, so we’re seeing a lot more inventory hit the resale market and significant downward pressure on condo prices. To a certain degree, there’s also more competition in the rental space. But, if you look forward, we’re going to start delivering below trend, and that goes to extremely anemic lows come 2028. We’re in a period of disequilibrium now, but that’s going to invert, which is why it’s so important that we unlock more housing supply, get shovels in the ground, and get supply and deliveries back up to an on-trend level. To say nothing of the tens of billions of dollars of capital that should be moving through Canadian factories, keeping trade floors busy and people employed.

Andrew Joyner, your business at Tricon is purpose-built rentals as a viable alternative to buying condos. Do you think Torontonians are willing to give up on the dream of ownership and adopt a Manhattan kind of lifestyle where more than two-thirds of the city rents?

Andrew Joyner: Owning versus renting is a personal decision. When we started our rental business at Tricon in 2016, it was in the context of a shadow market of condo investors who rented out their units in buildings that weren’t professionally managed. If you had an issue and you wanted to get in touch with your landlord, good luck. They didn’t have inspired, resort-quality amenities. There wasn’t a big focus on service, and there wasn’t a big focus on community events and programming. We endeavour to bring a US-style model to the rental space in Canada. I do think you’re going to see that defining our city going forward. Toronto has been a global outlier in the number of condos we’ve built.

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“We don’t want to lose the special sauce that made Toronto great”

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Vic Gupta: There’s an important pride in ownership, but I do think the shift to purpose-built rentals is fundamental. It’s a product that will stand the test of time, and I think it will change the mindset that you aren’t successful until you own. Renting for life isn’t a bad thing, and you can rent different qualities of product depending on what stage you’re at in life. An advantage is that it will always be rental—it doesn’t leave the market, whereas a condo can be pulled off the rental market if the owner decides to move in themselves or save it for their child.

We touched briefly on multiplexes, which can allow people to live in the city at a relatively affordable—or attainable—price. Despite a big initial push from the city, they are being green-lit in only a small handful of areas—established, wealthier neighbourhoods have effectively pushed back and said no. What will it take to overcome their resistance?

Jason Thorne: The permissions are still fairly new. I know it seems like we talked about it for a really long time, but we’ve had four-plex permissions for only a little more than two years now. It will take a while for a developer market to build up around that, but you can see companies starting to take advantage of a new market niche. I think it’s going to become a really important segment of the housing market and meet a need that others can’t necessarily meet, both in terms of unit type and unit location. As for the resistance, I expect that as these units get built and they become neighbours instead of just faceless multiplexes, that conversation will shift. It will just be a housing form that we get used to. I’m excited about it, and I think it’s an important move for the city. We already have hundreds of four-plexes, five-plexes and six-plexes in this city. It’s just that most of them were built 70 to 80 years ago.

Toronto is still, despite everything, largely viewed as a desirable place to live—safe, clean, prosperous, relatively easy to get around. But the sparkle is fading, notwithstanding how appealing we look next to the US. What is your best advice to counter the growing issues facing the city? How do we keep the good things about Toronto going?

Jason Thorne: We can’t lose sight of the fact that in trying to create housing, we’re also trying to create great neighbourhoods. I worry that in pursuing a quantity of housing, we push aside some important things. Design quality still matters, as do quality of architecture, quality of public space and environmental performance, and services and amenities. It’s a good thing that people want to live here. We have to make sure we’re building housing to actually make that possible, but we also don’t want to lose the secret sauce that made people want to come here in the first place.

Karen Chapple: It’s about understanding the character of the city. It’s a city within a park; it’s a city of neighbourhoods; it’s a city built around a powerful transit system. It’s a city of plexes—all over Rosedale, you have these multiplexes. And it’s a city of tremendous social and civic infrastructure. So how can we leverage that? How can we bake that into the new communities we’re building? We found ways in the past of financing that. We need to connect whatever housing we’re building now to infrastructure development in a more systematic way to keep that Toronto flavour.

Vic Gupta: Our purpose statement at CreateTO is, “Building the city we love.” A city that people can get around easily, a city of tremendous parks and great public amenities, a city with a rich history of celebrating its diversity. The key is having an outcome-­based approach and not an ideological one. Our ability to get around the city is not a left-wing or right-wing issue; it’s a practical one. Parks are backyards for people who live in high-rises and so forth, so we need to animate them and keep them clean. Toronto is critically important to the success of the country, and we need deliberate action and focus by all governments to support the city financially—it takes money to do all those things and to thread them together.

Brad Carr: I’ve always believed that an important attribute in a leader is curiosity, and I recently read a report that said what people are looking for from their leaders is hope. There’s a temptation to lean in to the problems, but right now, there are opportunities to inspire hope. We have a sophisticated and well-established housing industry in Toronto and in the GTA. It takes time to implement solutions and government alignment. While that’s happening, we should be celebrating the journey, not just looking backward at the problem. Things are happening. It’s incremental, but it’s leading us to a better place. We should spend as much time talking about where we’re headed as we are talking about where we’ve come from.

Andrew Joyner: I think this question pulls at all of our heartstrings. Do we as Canadians feel the same civic and national pride that we did decades ago? It makes me sad that I can’t say yes to that. The country is facing a lot of complex issues. We need some wins. We need more companies growing, more job growth, more innovation. We don’t do a great job of celebrating successes. We have to start loving ourselves and being bolder and prouder—we need our mojo back.

Andrew Boozary: There’s a famous quote from Monique Bégin, the minister of health under Pierre Trudeau, about how Canada is a nation of pilot projects. We have a graveyard of pilot projects in the city and across the country, of things that have been world leading and haven’t survived or been scaled in a way that we need to build hope. If we believe in and love this city, which I think we do, why should a child born in Scarborough be expected to live a decade less than one born in Rosedale? The real generational challenge for us is to bridge these gaps. Housing is such a central piece, as is access to primary care. By supporting these major pillars, the city can really shine and reassert itself as a global leader.

Are there cities Toronto should be looking to, Canadian or otherwise, for inspiration?

Andrew Boozary: Working across every level of government and various political stripes, Helsinki has been able to drive homelessness down to near zero. They have saved 15,000 euros per person by moving them into housing-first options. If you walk around Helsinki, you won’t see encampments or virtually anyone who’s living outside. You also can’t tell the difference between social housing and market housing, which means dignity for all. We’re going to need unique solutions that are tailored to Toronto and our diversity and specific strengths. But, for those who say this can’t be done, Helsinki—and Finland writ large—is a powerful example.

Jason Thorne: I’ve been to a lot of cities and sat down with their planners, architects and developers. It’s led me to conclude that there’s no perfect city. No city has it all figured out. There’s some solace that comes from the fact that all cities are wrestling with many of the same issues that we are, in different proportions and at different scales. There are points of inspiration to take from other places, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that a lot of cities take inspiration from Toronto. I hear that a lot. I’ll visit Copenhagen and someone will talk to me about a trip they made to Toronto a couple of years ago and how amazing they thought the waterfront or the Bentway was. Let’s not forget that.

Andrew Joyner: There are many. I would say New York for its High Line and walkability, Copenhagen for its bike lanes, Chicago for its waterfront, London for its cafés and markets and spontaneity, and San Francisco for its innovation and boundless opportunities.

Jason Thorne: Throw Tokyo transit in there and you’ve got something!

Vic Gupta: The northern European cities have figured out how to leverage their resources and their small size to create opportunity. They have made significant investments in the public realm, with an understanding that these are shared resources and shared land assets to enjoy together. If we look in the rear-view mirror, there are examples from Vienna in terms of investments made decades ago to social housing and government-­owned housing. Obviously, it would be very costly to do that here, but there are lessons for us. What can we do today? What can we do that people will be talking about 50 years from now?

Karen Chapple: So many of the examples cited are cities within social democracies. Copenhagen, Rotterdam and Helsinki are so great because they have strong federal social safety nets and great relationships between the cities and the federal government. We need to live up to our reputation as a social democracy and double down on it to make our cities great too. We need some of New York’s and London’s boldness and chutzpah. Closer to home, Vancouver and Montreal have something to teach us about livability.

Brad Carr: Sometimes we look outside our borders for solutions when it’s better to look at our own chapters in history. We can look back on periods in Toronto and think, Wow, we really had it figured out. When we first put the subway system in place, it was one of the best in the world. What changed? What prevented us from holding on to that leadership? As we invest in the Ontario Line, how do we make sure that integrating housing and community and transit is so well done that for decades after its opening, people around the world are going to look to Toronto as a model?