Even the most accommodating planning regime won’t necessarily prompt developers to put shovels in the ground if the market timing is not right, said a City of Mississauga planner asked to identify barriers to construction of medium-density housing.
Mississauga’s director of city planning strategies Jason Bevan said planners who take a supply-based approach to identifying lands where coveted medium-density homes could be built and then streamline the planning process can still be hamstrung by market-based hurdles.
Bevan was commenting on a recent Ryerson City Building Institute report that argued Mississauga could encourage developers to build more mid-market homes and eschew highrises by targeting areas along transit corridors, near transit stations, in existing neighbourhoods and in underutilized urban lots and then expediting the planning process.
“At the city we can zone and do official plan amendments for all those properties but we are working with the private market and the development industry may not provide as many units as we would like,” said Bevan.
“So it isn’t so much the planning side…we are always struggling how to address those mid-market units and especially the larger-sized apartment units given that the market isn’t producing them as quickly as we’d like.
“We live in a market economy and that’s their prerogative if they want to sit on a site.”
Among barriers to expansion of medium-density housing stock identified by Bevan, a developer might sit on a site for years waiting for the market to be right or for other enterprise-related reasons. The owner of a commercial plaza might be satisfied with the profits being generated. There are often utilities such as gas stations that meet community needs. And sometimes one reluctant seller delays acquisition of contiguous lots needed for a bigger project. The list goes on, he said.
“When you look at the supply-side approach, like in the report, it obviously identifies lots and lots of sites along corridors for development but we know in the market it can be difficult for them to acquire sites and once they acquire sites they suggest that it can be hard to make the numbers work on midrise where in some areas of the city they can build highrise developments,” said Bevan.
On the approvals side, Mississauga is piloting preplanning of a smaller number of lots, as opposed to widespread pre-zoning of a swath of properties, he explained.
“There are a few pilot areas we are going to be considering over the next few years,” he said. “In some areas it is complicated. On Dundas there are some flood areas that could complicate things, so there are environmental or technical concerns. That would also prevent development in a timely manner.”
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