Toronto has a housing crisis. Activists are trying empathy to ease it.

When the community consultation meeting for a development in a northern Toronto neighborhood that includes 1,500 new apartment units – half of them affordable housing – got underway, it quickly turned contentious. Angry neighbors complained that the project would mean congested traffic, crowded schools, even increased crime.

But Eric Lombardi, a housing advocate, presented a different sort of response to the city planners.

He told the virtual meeting last October that the project, called Tyndale Green, is exactly the kind of option his generation needs in the middle of Toronto’s housing crisis – one that by some measures, is the world’s worst.

Members of the group Mr. Lombardi founded, More Neighbors Toronto, have been trying this tactic at community meetings across the city in an attempt to overcome local resistance and convince homeowners that change in their community does not mean a loss for them, but can be a gain for everyone.

“What used to happen before us is the [city and developers] would show up and get yelled at for an hour and a half. We attend and talk about how it’s a building we could imagine ourselves or our friends living in, people who’ve been really struggling to find housing in the city,” Mr. Lombardi says. “It’s about making housing more personal, and not just some big structure that will change the beauty or character of a neighborhood.”

They are just one group among a broader movement of housing advocates and experts trying to change how people, particularly homeowners, think about intergenerational equity on housing. And they are focused on generating more empathy and understanding across one of the biggest fault lines in North American cities today.

World’s worst bubble risk

If any place needs a solution, it is Canada’s biggest metropolis.

While interest rate hikes by the Bank of Canada have led to a decline in home prices in Toronto – as well as other Canadian cities – in recent months that is expected to continue, average prices remain out of reach. Single-family homes are valued at above $1 million in Greater Toronto, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board.

It’s a volatile situation. Earlier this month, the UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index of 25 major cities listed Toronto as the global city holding the highest housing bubble risk in 2022, with real house price levels in Toronto (and Vancouver) having more than tripled in the last 25 years.

It’s a problem that spans well beyond the country’s major cities. Canada faces one of the largest disconnects between housing costs and incomes in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And it’s a gap that cuts along generations. Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland called the housing affordability crisis “intergenerational injustice” this spring.

Government officials in Canada increasingly feel that housing affordability has reached a tipping point, much as it has in the United States. The mismatch between housing supply and strong population growth and record-low interest rates during the pandemic amplified demand. The government, provinces, and municipalities have sought to address the issue with myriad programs to boost supply, offer tax credits to first-time buyers, and fix zoning laws. In Toronto, housing was at the heart of municipal elections on Oct. 24.

But for many fighting the crisis, shifting mindsets is just as important as policy. And many see this going beyond fighting NIMBY sentiment.

Housing inflation, says Paul Kershaw, a policy professor at the University of British Columbia, has provided a lot of homeowners – himself included – wealth, and much of that wealth has been sheltered, keeping younger generations, even higher-income ones, priced out. He says that notions of who is “rich” and who is “poor” – and who the victims of ageism are – require some soul-searching in what he calls a new “intergenerational tension.”

“Because [the housing inflation that is] actually harming younger people has been benefiting older members of their family who they love and who love them,” he says.

Society blames foreign buyers, money launderers, NIMBYs, mean-spirited developers, and Airbnb for housing woes, he says. “But the intergenerational tension actually invites us to look in the mirror and say, how might we be implicated? And that is a harder message to get anyone to lean into.”

The charitable think tank Generation Squeeze, which was founded by Dr. Kershaw and focuses on intergenerational inequity, has proposed an annual surtax on homes valued above $1 million, the proceeds of which would go toward affordable housing projects.

“Change is scary”

Major cities have always been expensive. But housing prices in Toronto have had a ripple effect in surrounding cities and even rural communities. Migration data from the federal government released in January showed 64,000 people leaving Greater Toronto for smaller locales within Ontario from 2020 to 2021. Some of that is pandemic-related, but it began before the rise of remote work and was led by young families. A Scotiabank report showed the highest out-migration from Ontario in 2021 in four decades. 

This has implications for those moving away, but also those staying, says Mike Collins-Williams, CEO of West End Home Builders’ Association. If residents have to move away, it changes the nature of cities, undermining the idea that so-called stable neighborhoods, primarily where wealthier homeowners reside, are actually stable, he argues. It deprives neighborhoods of service workers and vitality. “Toronto, the city that’s supposed to be the entertainment heart, with the bars, the clubs, the music, the place where [younger] people are supposed to be, they’re leaving.”

Mike Moffatt, an economist and senior director of the Smart Prosperity Institute in Ottawa, Ontario, says one way to change views is to focus on the fact that the status quo isn’t working for many seniors, either. Many want to downsize, but in their neighborhoods.

“One area I think is ripe for looking at is actually how to create more senior-friendly housing,” he says. “I think we need to try and get out of the zero-sum frame and try to show how housing reform is good for existing homeowners. I think that’s the only way we’re going to get out of this.”

Ontario has said it will need 1.5 million new homes in the next decade. That includes a current shortage and anticipated one, with immigration on pace to hit a record 431,000 new residents in 2022. It is the “missing middle,” between single-family homes and high-rise condominiums, that many say is the future.

Colleen Bailey would purchase a home in the “missing middle” if she could. But although she says she has sizable savings for her age, homeownership as she nears 40 is still out of reach. As a member of More Neighbors Toronto, she has attended development meetings to voice her support for new housing. “It’s about trying to get people to have a little bit more empathy that it’s a struggle,” she says. 

“Change is scary. So people think if you are comfortable, if you already own a home, then it seems like the safest thing to do is, you know, let’s just keep things the same,” Ms. Bailey says. “But I think we’re getting to the point where people realize that not changing is not a choice without any consequences, either.”