Reject Builder Breaks In Housing Initiative: LEIPER

This is mayoral candidate and Kitchissippi Councillor Jeff Leiper’s response to Mayor Mark Sutcliffe’s housing initiative:

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Mayor Sutcliffe’s Housing Acceleration Task Force is suggesting a five-year break for developers from paying community benefits charges (CBCs).  These charges are often used to support affordable housing and public amenities in our neighbourhoods. The proposal would remove millions of dollars we could spend in ways residents need.

Council should reject this recommendation.

The proposal is one of many made by the task force that seek to address hurdles to increased levels of homebuilding in Ottawa. Most of the recommendations will work to increase the incentive to build.

The task force’s recommendations are available in a report. This will be voted on by the Financial and Corporate Services and Planning and Housing Committees on October 1. To be clear, we need to spur more housing construction and the recommendations should be generally supported by Council. One proposal in particular – to give developers a five-year break from CBCs – should be rejected.

CBCs are a tool that puts a certain percentage of a project into capital projects in the public interest. In our ward, we have used these types of benefits to enable affordable housing projects, fund road safety improvements, and more. As an example, I usually ask that a significant portion of benefits go into our ward’s affordable housing fund. I am planning to use CBCs to help build a new refrigerated rink at the Granite site, and to fund sidewalk construction that otherwise won’t get done.

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Another First From Mayor Mark Sutcliffe

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The proposal to give developers a holiday from paying those CBCs is well-intentioned. We need more housing and while no one fee or charge will make or break a project, the cumulative effect of those is a drag on construction starts. But a five-year holiday will starve the system of funds needed to help make intensification more livable. After years of spendthrift budgets, they are one of the few funding sources we have to build the public infrastructure we need.

There is no guarantee that removing CBCs for five years will actually spur starts, nor in-depth analysis to demonstrate the need. Further, forecasting economic conditions five years from now is a fool’s errand. At the very least, Council should insist on a shorter pilot – 18 months – to see whether this actually helps.

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