What does it actually mean to build “enough” housing in Toronto?

There has been a good deal of discussion in the Toronto housing discourse around the idea of whether the city is building “enough” housing. Those against radical zoning reform say we have enough, those in favor we need some amount of new units. Implicitly implied in these arguments is that there exists some ideal amount of housing supply. What is to be debated is thus whether or not we are currently at this ideal amount and thus have “enough” housing.

I want to complicate this assumption. I am going to argue that, for a city like Toronto, the idea of building “enough” housing does not really make conceptual sense.

Toronto is a pretty desirable place to live. We have a great deal of walkability, dining options, entertainment, and proximity to jobs compared to anywhere else in Ontario. And if we limit ourselves to looking at the pre amalgamation City of Toronto this is, even more, the case.

And yet, of the 15 million inhabitants of Ontario, only 800,000 reside within the Old City of Toronto (The remaining 1.9 million of the city’s 2.7 million inhabitants live in the old suburban municipalities that were amalgamated into Toronto in 1998). Why do so few people choose to live in such a desirable place? The answer, obviously, is price. Toronto is extremely expensive.

If a place is highly desirable and has a limited number of housing units, the price will be bid up until the people willing and able to pay the market price to live there matches the supply of available housing units. Toronto’s expensiveness is the mechanism by which we deal with the fact that more people want to live in Toronto than realistically will be able to.

And this brings me to my point about “enough” housing. It will essentially always be the case that more people want to live in Toronto than realistically can. And, to deal with this fact, Toronto will have to be more expensive than the surrounding areas. And there is nothing really wrong with this. Why shouldn’t people living in the most desirable areas pay more for the luxury? Why shouldn’t those inhabiting the less desirable areas get some savings as a result?

But here we get to the key point. How much more expensive than the surrounding areas should Toronto be? And how many people should be able to live in the city? There is no inherently correct answer here. And there is no magic number for how many inhabitants the city should have. The key mechanism, at least in the long run, by which we will determine how many people get to live in Toronto is the supply of housing. More housing means more potential residents. And thus housing supply is the mechanism by which we will decide how exclusive our city should be. So we can choose to be more exclusive or less so, but there is no magic number at which point there is “enough” housing supply.

So to say we need this or that many new units in the coming years is to completely miss the point. How much our city grows in the coming decades is a political choice. Do we want to give more people the chance to live in the old city, or do we want them to continue to flee to the suburbs? Toronto’s population growth in recent decades has continually lagged behind the surrounding suburban municipalities. Many of the most desirable parts of the city have actually lost population. Is this the trajectory we want? I certainly hope not. But it is our choice to make as a city. The future, as always, is ours to make.