Housing program leading into major construction season

By Brent Bellamy, Associate + Creative Director 
Originally published in the Winnipeg Free Press

We are living in an unprecedented moment of economic uncertainty and political anxiety. U.S. President Donald Trump’s consistent threats of trade tariffs and random musings about Canada’s sovereignty have unified governments and businesses to search for ways to support and fortify local economies against the looming threat.

A federal initiative intended to address Canada’s housing crisis has become an important model for how the different levels of government and private industry can be brought together to innovate and spark localized economic growth while also addressing social need. The Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) is a program that has created a direct relationship between the federal government and 177 municipalities across the country. It provides financial incentives to developers to accelerate housing construction in the immediate term and requires cities to implement structural and lasting policy, permitting, and regulatory reforms that will expedite and increase housing construction in the future.

The City of Winnipeg signed on to the program just over a year ago, and as we enter this year’s construction season, we will soon begin to realize its reward at a time when the economic stimulus is so critically needed.

Last week, the city announced the second round of the program’s development grants intended to leverage investment from the private sector to construct housing quickly, with a focus on affordability and social benefit. To date, Winnipeg’s Housing Accelerator Fund has provided grants worth $50 million to support 23 housing projects, largely scattered across downtown and the inner city. These projects will create 2,550 new homes, with 1,230 of them being classified as affordable. The province is contributing to the initiative by offering rent-geared-to-income units in several of the projects and providing services to those that are supportive housing.

Once projects receive this grant, it opens the ability to stack private investment with other funding sources like tax increment financing through the City’s Affordable Housing Now Program, and loan financing from public agencies like the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).

The 23 projects receiving HAF funding are projected to leverage construction investment worth more than $1.6 billion. This staggering number will not only provide homes for thousands of people, it will also generate a construction boom through Winnipeg’s inner city. Industry metrics suggest that this level of investment could create an injection of as many as 10,000 jobs into the workforce, creating broad, positive impacts on the local economy.

When the City of Winnipeg joined the HAF program, Mayor Scott Gillingham issued an internal challenge “to have every city department see themselves as a housing department.” To their credit, this is beginning to happen, and the dialogue around housing at city hall has started to change. The city is no longer just an administrator of land use policies, but is becoming an active partner in making housing happen.

To achieve this, internal bureaucratic moves — such as centralizing the housing portfolio at the CEO’s office — are creating the ability for faster decision-making and cross-departmental co-ordination. The number of people dedicated to housing at the city has risen from one to eight positions, including a new affordable housing concierge that has been established to help non-profit housing providers shepherd their projects through civic processes and be a single point of contact that gets ahead of arising issues, provides advice and co-ordinates submissions and approvals.

The city’s new Land Enhancement Office has been created to identify, acquire, consolidate and rezone city-owned properties and to then work with non-profit, supportive and Indigenous housing providers to develop affordable housing on those sites.

Perhaps most importantly, and definitely most controversially, the city has begun to undertake a review of zoning regulations and community plans to remove barriers to the construction of higher-density housing across the city. The intent is to create more as-of-right regulations that preset development requirements like density, scale and use, to expedite construction and reduce uncertainty and delays in the approval processes. The malls and corridors plan was recently approved to allow higher-density development on identified major streets and shopping centre properties, and in June, a proposed blanket rezoning of the city’s residential neighbourhoods will be brought forward to allow fourplexes on single-family lots and higher densities around transit lines. With a complete zoning review to follow and a streamlining of internal permitting processes, these changes will be a lasting legacy that expedites housing development in Winnipeg for years to come.

The HAF program is at the midway point of its three-year mandate and has already proven successful at creating change and leveraging public incentives into significant levels of private and not-for-profit investment. A coming federal election puts the remainder of the funding and the future of the program itself in jeopardy, but whenever it does end, its success will hopefully mean new partners like the provincial government will see its value and find funding to continue an important program that has been created to facilitate housing construction, renew inner city communities, create jobs and grow the local economy, helping to hedge Trump-driven or any other economic challenges that are to come in the future.