The Mayoral RecordRECORD . 2026-05-05

Should Toronto add housing supply primarily through private-sector incentives (cutting development charges, accelerating approvals) or through a city-as-developer model on city-owned land?

Scenario . Last reviewed 2026-05-04 . Next review 2026-06-01

Who would each mechanism reach?

Each candidate's preferred mechanism redistributes who pays and who benefits over different time horizons. The empirical literature on impact-fee incidence and on limited-profit housing systems lets the two paths be compared on the same framework.

Brad Bradford

Cutting development charges and accelerating approvals tends to benefit, in the near term, owners of developable land and current homebuyers in active submarkets. Empirical work on impact-fee incidence (Skaburskis and Qadeer, 1992; Skaburskis, 2003) finds the burden shifts forward to buyers in competitive markets and back to landowners in supply-constrained or hot markets, so the savings from a DC cut do not flow uniformly to renters. A 2021 IMFG paper (Found, 2021) cautions that DCs can also be neutral or positive for affordability if they fund the infrastructure that makes new supply possible, meaning a cut may simply shift cost from new buyers to existing taxpayers.

Olivia Chow

City-as-developer plus the Purpose-Built Rental Incentives stream is designed to deliver units at rents below private-market levels, with affordability requirements (at least 20 percent affordable for 40 to 99 years) attached to a defined share of stock. Comparative work on Vienna finds limited-profit and municipal rents averaging roughly 27 to 30 percent below private rents (Kadi, 2024; Housing Europe, 2023). U.S. evidence on rent-restricted construction (Diamond, McQuade, and Qian, 2019) cautions that any policy that lowers rents below market without offsetting new construction can reduce overall rental supply, so the gain depends on whether the public-led units are net additions rather than substitutions.

Literature. T3Skaburskis and Qadeer, An Empirical Estimation of the Price Effects of Development Impact Fees, Urban Studies, 1992 . T2Found, Development Charges and Housing Affordability: A False Dichotomy?, IMFG Papers No. 56, 2021 . T3Greenaway-McGrevy and Phillips, The impact of upzoning on housing construction in Auckland, Journal of Urban Economics, 2023 . T3Diamond, McQuade, and Qian, The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality, American Economic Review, 2019 . T3Kadi, Layers of Commodification in the City of Decommodification, Housing, Theory and Society, 2024 . T1OECD Housing Sector Country Snapshot: Austria, Housing Policy Toolkit, 2023 . T2Housing Europe, New research from Austria demonstrates that not-for-profit housing can tame the housing market, 2023

Candidate positions

Brad Bradford

Bradford has stated he would draw on Toronto's DC reduction funds and has called for development charges to be dropped, framing the city's current rental plan as too dependent on other governments. He has also released an office-to-residential conversion proposal: as-of-right approvals for conversions that do not enlarge the building, paired with a 20 percent affordable requirement.

T2Beach Metro Community News, City's not real plan for more rental housing, November 4, 2024 (link) . T2TorontoToday, Toronto's homebuilding taxes could be cut in half, 2026 (link) . T2Storeys, Brad Bradford Looks to Convert Empty Toronto Office into Homes, 2023 (link) . T2votebradford.ca campaign release, No More Waiting: Realistic Plan to Get More Homes Built (link)

Olivia Chow

Chow's stated target is approximately 25,000 additional rental homes layered on top of the HousingTO 2020-2030 Action Plan target of 65,000 rent-controlled homes, delivered through a mix of the Purpose-Built Rental Incentives stream (Council vote 23 to 1, November 2024) and a Public Developer Delivery model launched on city-owned sites in 2024. In March 2026, Chow signed a tri-government agreement with Carney and Ford that cuts DCs by 50 percent for three years on eligible projects.

T1City of Toronto news release, City unlocks more than 7,000 net new rental homes through purpose-built rental incentives stream, 2024 (link) . T1City of Toronto news release, City breaks ground on first Public Developer Delivery model project at 11 Brock Ave., December 2024 (link) . T1Prime Minister of Canada news release, Carney secures new partnership with Ontario to cut taxes on housing, March 30, 2026 (link)

Status quo. What Toronto already does.

As of the 2024 to 2025 HousingTO progress report, Toronto Council had approved nearly 30,000 new rent-controlled homes, about 46 percent of its 10-year target. City-led and city-supported projects accounted for roughly 65 percent of all rental housing starts in Toronto between January and August 2025. On the private side, Toronto CMA per-capita homebuilding fell to its lowest level since 1996 in 2025, driven by a roughly 60 percent drop in condominium starts; rental apartment starts also fell about 8 percent year over year. Toronto DCs on a non-rental one-bedroom rose from $4,985 in 2009 to $52,676 by 2024.

T1City of Toronto, HousingTO 2024-2025 Housing Progress Report, November 2025 (link) . T1City of Toronto, Development Charge Rates Effective June 6, 2024 and May 1, 2025 (link) . T1CMHC, Housing starts up 5.6% in 2025 from 2024, January 2026 (link) . T1CMHC, Slowdown in Toronto, Vancouver leave national housing starts flat in first half of 2025 (link)

Comparable jurisdictions

Auckland2016 to 2024

The Auckland Unitary Plan upzoned approximately three quarters of residential land in 2016, roughly tripling permitted dwelling capacity. Greenaway-McGrevy and Phillips (2023) find upzoning roughly doubled the permitting rate within five years and produced an approximate 80 percent increase in cumulative permits over six years.

Outcome. Roughly 80 percent cumulative permit increase over six years; rents grew about 29 percent versus 47 percent income growth from 2016 to 2023, with the rent-to-income ratio falling from 22.7 to 19.4 percent.

Caveats. New Zealand has different DC regimes, weaker tenant protection law, and a smaller share of land owned by major institutional developers than Toronto.

T3Greenaway-McGrevy and Phillips, The impact of upzoning on housing construction in Auckland, Journal of Urban Economics, 136, 103555, 2023 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119023000244) . T2Greenaway-McGrevy, Can Zoning Reform Reduce Housing Costs? Auckland EPC Working Paper WP016 (https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/business/about/our-research/research-institutes-and-centres/Economic-Policy-Centre--EPC-/WP016.pdf)

Projections

Literature does not support a confident singular projection on this question. Toronto-specific evidence is thin: the city's own 2024 to 2025 progress data show 65 percent of recent rental starts came from city-led or city-supported channels under the current policy mix, but isolating the marginal effect of DC cuts versus public delivery requires a counterfactual the published research does not yet provide. The comparable-jurisdiction outcomes (Auckland's roughly 80 percent cumulative permit increase over six years; Vienna's new social rents averaging roughly 27 to 30 percent below private rents at sustained 0.25 percent of GDP public spend) are the closest defensible numerical anchors.

Time horizon

Auckland's permitting response showed up within one to three years; Vienna's stock share took roughly three decades of sustained public investment; Berlin's rent-cap experiment unwound in 14 months. For Toronto, the published evidence supports near-term effects (years 1 to 3) on permits from approval-speed and DC changes, and decade-scale effects on stock composition from city-as-developer programs.