Naama Blonder has put issues such as improved housing costs and increased housing diversity as top priorities at Smart Density, the Toronto-based architecture and urban planning firm she co-founded almost eight years ago.
Blonder, an architect and urban designer/planner, says Smart Density along with two partners has been recently awarded a CMHC grant titled Breaking Zoning Barriers: A New Solutions Lab to Unlock Housing on Faith-Based Lands.
The aim is to look into zoning reforms that would allow faith-based properties to develop housing on underutilized property.
Faith-based organizations own significant land and often have social mandates that include the development of affordable housing, but they face a complex approvals process to remove zoning barriers prescribed only for institutional development, she says.
“This land is such a low-hanging fruit (for affordable housing), but if you think about churches they don’t have a clue about what development is.”
In collaboration with the Kehilla Residential Programme, an affordable housing organization, and BGM Consulting, Smart Density is focusing on practical solutions to help these churches and other faith-based organizations overcome these barriers.
Under the Solutions Lab, Blonder says she will be spending a lot of time with municipalities and policy-makers nationwide discussing zoning reforms that strike a balance between institutional and housing needs.
“If they (municipalities) are serious about it, I have the resources and funding to figure out how to rewrite their zoning,” Blonder points out.
“It is such an easy win for so many municipalities.
“If your municipality is revising its zoning regulations or is interested in enabling housing development on faith-based lands, we want to you to get in touch,” she says.
While zoning reforms could open a gate to affordable housing, it is just a start to addressing the housing crisis in Canada.
She says the shelter shortage is deeper than many stakeholders in the development industry are willing to acknowledge.
Not nearly enough affordable housing is in the planning stage or underway, she adds.
While high interest rates are often blamed as the cause of the crisis, “they are just nails in the coffin.”
high costs of construction and the rising development charges are also attributed to why affordable units haven’t kept up to demand, but even before these increases, affordability took a back seat to other developments, she points out.
Stakeholders, Blonder says, have to stop pointing fingers at each other. “Something has got to give. Is it going to be tax, construction costs? I don’t know.”
Smart Density is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Best Emerging Practice Award in 2022 by the Ontario Association of Architects.
Blonder, who has been the industry for 14 years, says while it hasn’t always been easy being a woman in the male-dominated world of building and design development, she hasn’t faced the struggles that women in the field faced a couple of decades ago.
“There is still a lot of work to be done but I am 100 per cent certain that 25 years ago it was much harder than it is for women today. They really suffered but paved the way for us.”
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