The upcoming municipal election on October 26, 2026, is shaping up to be a pivotal moment for housing policy across Ontario. On that day, voters in communities throughout the province will head to the polls to elect mayors and local councillors who wield significant influence over the future of the built environment. These local officials hold the keys to how much housing gets built, where those homes are located, how quickly development projects move through the administrative pipeline, and, ultimately, how much homes cost for buyers and renters alike.
Ontario continues to face a severe housing shortage that shows few signs of abating without concerted, localized action. Between 2022 and 2025, the province recorded approximately 304,000 housing starts. This figure represents barely half of the construction volume required to remain on track with the provincial government’s stated housing targets. The slowdown became even more pronounced recently, with housing starts across the province falling to just over 62,000 in the year 2025 alone.
The real-world consequences of this persistent underbuilding are visible every day across the Greater Toronto Area, Simcoe County, and various other regions throughout Ontario. Home prices and rental rates remain stubbornly out of reach for a vast number of households. For a rapidly growing demographic of younger Canadians, the traditional milestone of homeownership increasingly feels like an out-of-reach ambition rather than an achievable life goal.
To be sure, municipal governments did not create the broader economic housing crisis entirely on their own. Local councils do not dictate macroeconomic conditions, nor do they control interest rates, commercial financing costs, or global pricing for construction materials. However, municipal authorities do hold direct authority over the regulatory environment. They control the rules, local fees, zoning bylaws, and approval processes that ultimately determine whether a proposed housing development can move forward or stalls indefinitely.
Excessive Costs Can Discourage the Development Communities Need
The primary barriers standing in the way of much-needed housing are well documented by urban planners, developers, and municipal watchdogs alike. Over the past decade, development charges levied by local governments have risen sharply. At the same time, administrative approval processes can routinely drag on for years, creating massive financial uncertainty for builders. Planning requirements and municipal policies vary wildly from one municipality to the next, creating a fragmented regulatory landscape.
Furthermore, restrictive zoning laws continue to limit opportunities to introduce new housing forms into established, low-density neighbourhoods. Mandatory parking minimums add substantially to construction costs and consume valuable urban land, even in locations that are already well-served by public transit infrastructure.
No single policy or bylaw is exclusively responsible for Ontario’s complex housing shortage. Taken together, however, these cumulative barriers have made housing significantly more difficult, considerably more expensive, and far less predictable to build.
Municipal councils should begin addressing this crisis by critically examining whether the local taxes, fees, and charges currently imposed on residential development are genuinely helping to alleviate the housing shortage or if they are simply making a bad situation worse. While municipal infrastructure must be adequately funded to support growth, excessive development costs can severely discourage the very construction that communities desperately need. When projects no longer make financial sense on a spreadsheet, developers are forced to delay them, scale them back significantly, or cancel them altogether.
In tandem with financial reassessments, municipalities must focus heavily on accelerating the approvals process. Every single month spent navigating bureaucratic red tape and administrative hurdles adds carrying costs that are inevitably passed on to end consumers—homebuyers and renters. Greater standardization across regions, firm statutory timelines for reviews, the adoption of modern digital technology, and stronger accountability measures would make municipal approvals faster and more predictable while still maintaining responsible planning and environmental standards.
There Is a Wide Range of Options in Between
Zoning reform must also form a central pillar of any serious municipal strategy to tackle the housing crisis.
Too often, public debates surrounding residential development are falsely framed as a stark choice between single-family detached homes and towering high-rise condominiums. In reality, there is a wide spectrum of housing options that exist comfortably in between these two extremes. Duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhomes, laneway suites, and small-scale apartment buildings can provide much more attainable housing options while allowing density to be added gradually and harmoniously to existing neighbourhoods.
Despite these proven benefits, many municipalities continue to maintain restrictive policies that prohibit these forms of housing. Allowing up to four units as of right on standard urban residential lots, alongside eliminating unnecessary parking minimums—particularly in areas close to rapid transit corridors—would not single-handedly solve the entire housing shortage. However, these vital changes would remove persistent regulatory barriers to the types of homes that Ontarians increasingly require.
At the same time, municipalities should actively avoid creating new financial burdens for homebuyers. Toronto’s municipal land transfer tax, for example, remains a heavy financial burden, particularly for first-time homebuyers and young families who are already struggling with severe affordability pressures. The City of Toronto should be actively looking for ways to reduce this tax burden rather than expanding it. Similarly, other municipalities across the province should firmly reject any proposals to implement comparable housing taxes of their own.
These Are No Longer Niche Planning Debates
Public anxiety and frustration regarding the state of housing in Ontario are unmistakable. Recent public opinion research conducted by Ipsos on behalf of the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board revealed that 85 percent of residents across the Greater Toronto Area and Simcoe County are deeply concerned about housing affordability. Furthermore, 82 percent of those surveyed believe that municipal governments are simply not doing enough to address the issue. Driven by these concerns, nine in ten residents indicate that they are considering casting a ballot in the upcoming municipal election, with 60 percent stating they are significantly more likely to support candidates who place housing at the forefront of their platforms.
With the election approaching, political candidates should be completely transparent about where they stand on these critical issues. Voters deserve to know whether prospective mayors and councillors are genuinely willing to reduce municipal costs on housing, accelerate sluggish approval timelines, permit a broader array of missing-middle housing, and reject punitive new taxes on homebuyers.
These issues are no longer confined to the realm of niche planning debates or bureaucratic policy discussions. They are fundamental questions of economic opportunity, community affordability, and generational fairness.
While municipal leaders cannot control external factors like interest rates or global economic trends, they possess direct authority over local policy. They can decide whether residential development approvals take months or years, whether local zoning laws permit the diverse types of homes families actually need, and how heavily housing construction is taxed.
On October 26, voters will have the opportunity to elect municipal leaders who are fully prepared to remove longstanding barriers to housing. If communities across Ontario want homes to become genuinely more affordable, the logical first step is to make them significantly easier to build. It is time to clear the way for more housing.