Posted On: September 4, 2025, Posted By: YorkRegion.com, Mike Adler, Original Article.
York Region’s housing gap — and the scale of what needs to be done about it — keeps getting bigger.
A new report from United Way Greater Toronto (UWGT), the group overseeing charities in Peel, Toronto and York, is a call to action after decades of “collective failure.”
Greater Toronto’s housing market — which private home builders call “completely unattainable” for the middle class — remains broken. So far, there’s no sign governments are ready to make the massive investments, perhaps costing $62.6 billion by 2030, needed to turn things around here in a decade.
What UWGT recommends for York in its report, Built for Good, includes: 11,925 new deeply affordable units by 2035, 25,725 portable housing benefits for tenants, and 6,800 new moderately affordable units.
Built for Good also says 3,090 of York’s existing affordable units should be bought by governments or non-profits within 10 years or be lost.
Some 1,125 of York’s social housing and affordable units already need repairs, and affordable housing is being torn down faster than it is being built.
“We are at a breaking point,” said the report, released last month with targets for each municipality (see chart below).
“It is time to recognize that housing is a public good and shared responsibility, not something to be left solely to the private market.”
UWGT argues non-profit and co-op housing providers could build thousands of units a year in York if only government support allowed them to “scale up.”
But though the report gives the region credit for “significant work in addressing the challenges of affordability,” it notes York has a severe shortage of purpose-built rentals, opened 265 community housing units between 2019 and 2023, and housed 547 households through portable housing benefits in 2023.
Hamstrung by inflated land prices and construction costs, new affordable housing appears as a trickle, not a flood.
The region’s Community Housing Supply Grant Pilot invites non-profits to build community housing units. Only Blue Door and Richmond Hill Ecumenical Homes Corporation (proposing 28 subsidized apartments in Richmond Hill) received such grants in 2024.
Blue Door’s 14 units in Newmarket (10 deeply affordable, four emergency and transitional) are just starting construction, said Alex Cheng, the charity’s vice-president of programs and services, who called the UWGT report “a reality check for all of us.”
People who come to Blue Door for emergency housing have few options to move out safely to, Cheng said, since the current market dominated by private builders and landlords has nothing for them.
It’s no longer a small percentage of people who are “priced out” of housing in York, and the percentage rises every year, said Cheng.
“To arrive at a solution by 2035, these big numbers (in the report) need to come into play.”
Local politicians didn’t talk about the report at the Associations of Municipalities of Ontario conference, but were talking about what the report is about, how to build enough of the right kind of housing, said Richmond Hill Mayor David West.
West said municipalities have plenty of potential non-profit partners, but can’t build that much housing without financial commitments from the provincial and federal governments.
“This is a problem that can define how we do (as cities and towns) in the coming decades,” he said. “There are real solutions. They just need to happen.”
Expensive investments — the report estimates York needs $655 million by 2027 and $2.6 billion by 2030 to support capital and ongoing costs for its housing targets — is the only way out of what has become a national crisis, West added in an interview.
Though he criticized Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives for being the only provincial government in Canada not building social housing, the mayor said he is hopeful for positive changes after meeting Housing Minister Rob Flack, who West believes “gets” the municipalities’ point of view on affordability.
In a statement, Newmarket Mayor John Taylor congratulated UWGT on an important report he said is clear and concise.
“As chair of Housing York, I know that we can rapidly increase new construction of units if we are provided with funding from the provincial and federal governments,” Taylor wrote.
“The time for action is now.”