Allison Evans is a second year PhD student in the Department of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. She previously studied at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Her research focuses on the intersection of urban housing and politics, including how people navigate an increasingly unaffordable housing landscape. Allison received the Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship in Summer 2023 to study the efficacy of the City of Toronto’s Housing Now policy.
I studied the City of Toronto’s Housing Now policy during the summer of 2023 with the generous support of the Canadian Studies Program. Perhaps the greatest surprise of my research was the lack of policy movement during the pandemic. Many media articles scrutinized the city for its inability to produce affordable housing as quickly as the policy’s name implied. In addition, a mayoral crisis led to a sudden shift in leadership, ushering in new housing plans alongside the existing policies. Despite these setbacks, I met with several housing advocates, and I learned a great deal about the timeline of the policy and the role of activism in holding politicians to campaign promises where affordable housing.
The Hildebrand Fellowship allowed me to travel to Toronto to conduct my field research. This included networking with local housing advocates who created and continue to operate HousingNowTO, a largely social-media-based urban movement comprised of planners, architects, data scientists, and other urbanists. Members of the group review city planning and policies and often recommend changes to the city’s development proposals, zoning by-laws, and built-form guidelines to enhance access to affordable housing. In addition, I consulted literature about land value capture, a topic primarily explored from global South perspectives. The Housing Now program’s land leases, surplus land use, cross-subsidies, and public-private partnership structure are key policy elements. Thus, the program offers a rare example of land value capture in the global North, despite the lack of land value capture language in the policy documents.
I conducted six semi-structured interviews with members of HousingNowTO. I learned that they are committed to holding the City of Toronto to its policies, and they continue to push for increased densities beyond the current zoning by-laws and built-form guidelines to provide more affordable housing. Since the city’s key mechanism to provide affordability is private market rentals and ownership units, the more units available at market rate theoretically provide more housing units below average market rates. The group also works with various student groups at Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Toronto. The student groups select additional surplus land in the city and develop detailed pro formas to demonstrate the viability and encourage the city to add the sites to its affordable-housing-ready roster. I also accompanied the HousingNowTO group on an affordable housing bike tour with a mayoral candidate, which was an exciting opportunity.
Based on my preliminary research activities, I hope to eventually write two papers. The first will examine the land value capture aspects of the Housing Now policy and its current trajectory since the city finally broke ground on its first site in July 2023. The second paper will examine "urban technician" movements and the role of groups like HousingNowTO in impacting city policy through their advocacy, including the various channels used to spread their message and their connections to broader housing movements. I also plan to return to Canada this summer to supplement my research with a study of encampment formation in a small Ontario town.