Ontario Construction News staff writer
The Ontario government will award $67.2 million to the City of Toronto through the second round of its Building Faster Fund, which provides funding to municipalities that achieve at least 80 per cent of their provincially designated housing targets.
Toronto broke ground on 20,999 new homes in 2024, or 88 per cent of its annual target.
“You have certain mayors in certain towns and cities that absolutely refuse to build. They aren’t building a doghouse,” Premier Doug Ford said at a news conference at Toronto City Hall Friday with Mayor Olivia Chow. “They aren’t building a garage, and we all know it.
Announced in August 2023, the Building Faster Fund is a three-year, $1.2 billion program that rewards municipalities that make significant progress against their housing targets. But the province distributed only $280 million from the fund in its first year as building starts slumped due to factors including high borrowing, material, and labour costs.
The government has extended the deadline to 2028 for municipalities to use funds awarded through the fund. Any unused funds will be redirected to a separate fund for housing-enabling infrastructure, which all municipalities can apply for.
As of October 2024, only 11 of 50 municipalities that had been assigned housing targets had reached their annual benchmark, according to the most recent update to the provincial government’s housing tracker.
This is the second round of funding from the province’s Building Faster Fund, which provides funding to municipalities that hit at least 80 per cent of their provincially designated housing targets. Announced in 2023, it promised to provide $1.2 billion over a three-year period to municipalities that achieve annual targets for new home construction starts.
Toronto broke ground on 20,999 new homes last year, the province said in a news release, which works out to be 88 per cent of its 2024 housing target.
Municipalities missing housing targets
Though Toronto appears to be on the right track, it’s now increasingly unlikely that Ford’s government will achieve its stated target of 1.5 million new homes by 2031.
The latest Ontario budget forecasts 71,800 housing starts in 2025, followed by 74,800 next year and 82,500 in 2027.
There have been 260,000 actual housing starts in the three years since the target was set. So if you add in the projections for 2025 and 2026, the province would only be about one-quarter of the way toward its goal at the end of next year, which is the halfway point of the target timeline.
The province distributed only $280 million from the fund in its first year after more than half of Ontario’s municipalities failed to hit the housing start targets in 2023.
