00:00:00:01

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[Visual: Chris Woodcock, Mireille Thériault and Aled ab Iorwerth sit around a table in a studio, each facing a microphone and a glass of water on the tabletop. Chris has short grey hair and wears glasses, a white shirt and a blue blazer. Mireille has long, straight, dark brown hair and wears a white blouse. Aled has white hair and a moustache and wears glasses, a white shirt and a blue tie. The perspective shifts between close-ups of each individual as well as a view of all three.]

[Speaker: Chris Woodcock, Director, Government Relations, Head of the Housing Accelerator Fund]

In Canada, you have a lot of local housing regulations that create red tape and just generally get in the way of the speedy development of new housing units that we so desperately need during a housing crisis.

00:00:11:00

[Speaker: Aled ab Iorwerth, Deputy Chief Economist, CMHC]

So, what the HAF does, is it encourages municipalities to change their processes.

00:00:16:00

[Speaker: Chris Woodcock, Director, Government Relations, Head of the Housing Accelerator Fund]

Many of these larger cities moved very quickly to implement zoning reforms, and we’re starting to see the results in those communities.

00:00:23:00

[Speaker: Aled ab Iorwerth, Deputy Chief Economist, CMHC]

This is all hands on deck so we can increase housing supply and get affordability for Canadians across the board.

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[Speaker: Joelle Hamilton, Communications & Marketing, CMHC]

You’re listening to In-House, Canada’s housing podcast, where we share the latest on Canada’s housing market.

00:00:39:00

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00:00:47:00

[Visual: Chris, Mireille and Aled sit around the table in the studio.]

[Speaker: Mireille Thériault, Specialist, Communications, CMHC]

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to In-House. I’m your host, Mireille Thériault.

00:00:49:00

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Today, we’re talking about the Housing Accelerator Fund, or HAF. To help us understand the ins and outs of HAF, I’m joined by Aled ab Iorwerth, one of CMHC’s Deputy Chief Economists, and Chris Woodcock, Director, Government Relations, and Head of the Housing Accelerator Fund. Welcome, Aled and Chris. Great to have you with us.

00:01:11:00

[Speaker: Aled ab Iorwerth, Deputy Chief Economist, CMHC]

Thank you.

00:01:12:00

[Speaker: Chris Woodcock, Director, Government Relations, Head of the Housing Accelerator Fund]

Thanks, Mireille.

00:01:14:00

[Speaker: Mireille Thériault, Specialist, Communications, CMHC]

Let’s kick things off with you, Chris. Can you tell us exactly what is the Housing Accelerator Fund and how does it work?

00:01:21:00

[Speaker: Chris Woodcock, Director, Government Relations, Head of the Housing Accelerator Fund]

Absolutely, Mireille. Across Canada, housing is governed by a complex web of regulations, bylaws, and roles of different governments, including local governments. It’s not a surprise to many listeners that, in Canada, you have a lot of local housing regulations that create red tape, slow approval processes, and just generally get in the way of speedy development of new housing units that we so desperately need during a housing crisis. The idea behind the Housing Accelerator Fund is that the federal government is investing $4.4 billion to incentivize local governments to get rid of that red tape, to speed up their local approval processes, and introduce innovative new measures that can speed up housing across the country.

00:02:04:00

[Speaker: Mireille Thériault, Specialist, Communications, CMHC]

And how does it work?

00:02:06:00

[Speaker: Chris Woodcock, Director, Government Relations, Head of the Housing Accelerator Fund]

Starting in 2023, CMHC began accepting applications from ambitious local governments that wanted to reform their housing approvals and wanted to participate in this program. Following some negotiations and assessments, we have landed 241 agreements with local governments, and that includes municipalities of all sizes, northern governments, Indigenous governments, and, in fact, 2 agreements with the province of Québec across 2 rounds of funding. A really important part of those agreements is that we also include additional permitted unit targets. And so the idea behind the program is that we have an expectation based on Aled’s work and based on local community and historical permitting trends. We know how fast communities are expected to grow. And HAF is premised on the idea that we’re going to get additional permits beyond what would have happened anyways. So every community has a 4-year housing growth target, tracking how much they’re speeding up that growth over the long term. Annual payments are based on completing the reforms and achieving, ultimately, the 4-year growth target.

00:03:08:00

[Speaker: Mireille Thériault, Specialist, Communications, CMHC]

Can you tell us a bit more about what you mean by “reform”?

00:03:12:00

[Speaker: Chris Woodcock, Director, Government Relations, Head of the Housing Accelerator Fund]

Absolutely. HAF targets a few specific kinds of reforms. If you’re interested in the full list, we have best practices posted on the website. But to be more specific, in many cases, we’re talking about streamlined zoning. So up until recently, across Canada, more than 70% of residential housing lots were reserved exclusively for single-family homes. We’re seeing communities commit to rezoning proposals that allow for, in many, many cases, up to 4 units as of right, so without requiring someone looking to develop a 4-unit housing to go through a lengthy, expensive, and time-consuming process for obtaining a zoning waiver or rezoning proposal. We see a lot of communities eliminating parking minimums, especially in downtown areas and in areas surrounding major transit stations. We’re seeing proposals supporting greater density around transit stations to take advantage of walkable communities and make sure that people can live close to where those rapid transit systems exist, and then a wide range of innovative proposals from communities, anything from offering incentives to help make sure that affordable housing gets built, often combined with municipally owned land, land databases, and in some cases, it’s support for additional resources for the community itself to speed up application processes.

00:04:27:00

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So there’s a wide range, and if listeners or viewers are interested, they can look at the best practices online.

00:04:32:00

[Speaker: Mireille Thériault, Specialist, Communications, CMHC]

HAF is a very ambitious program that seeks to address housing needs in numerous and diverse municipalities across Canada. That being said, there could be some misconceptions. When can people expect to see the results of the money invested in HAF?

00:04:48:00

[Speaker: Chris Woodcock, Director, Government Relations, Head of the Housing Accelerator Fund]

That’s a great question. Typically, in CMHC housing programs, we receive applications to build a housing project. You’re talking shovels in the ground, pouring a foundation, so it’s very clear when a project starts. And it’s very clear when a housing unit is created and when a household is able to live in that home in the end. HAF is a little bit different, because it’s based on achieving long-term reforms, and so what we’re paying for is those reforms. That can often mean difficult political conversations at the local level and putting enough federal cash into the system to encourage and incentivize local councils and local governments to make decisions they wouldn’t otherwise have made. That can take time. Once those reforms are passed, once bylaws are adjusted and complex local regulations change, the system has to respond. The market has to respond. Developers change their proposals. A developer who was thinking about building a certain type… or doing something in particular with a piece of land might decide this is a great time to take advantage of new rules around missing middle… new rules that make it easier to build missing middle housing, for example, and redevelop their property. What we’re seeing is the reforms themselves are shortening the timelines to get those proposals into the system, but it still takes a little while for this to play out. So, 4 years – and our program is 4 years, 4 years is a very, very short window to see through a full development cycle. We are starting to see, however, results in terms of permit cycles in cities that were first movers. Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, London (Ontario): many of these larger cities moved very quickly to implement zoning reforms. We’re starting to see the results in those communities, but it’ll be some time before we can really substantiate the long-term effects.

00:06:32:00

[Speaker: Mireille Thériault, Specialist, Communications, CMHC]

Aled, HAF came about to address the housing supply gap. Can you speak to its opportunities?

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[Speaker: Aled ab Iorwerth, Deputy Chief Economist, CMHC]

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Sure. Well, as regular viewers of this podcast will know, we’ve been going on about housing supply and affordability challenges for Canadians for quite a while. Back in 2018, we released a report where the HAF was initially mentioned, highlighting how supply problems are prevalent in some of Canada’s most unaffordable cities. So, what the HAF does is it encourages municipalities to change their processes. We know there is local opposition to new development and to new housing supply, but the intent of the HAF is really to show that there are benefits from development as well, from getting these approval processes streamlined and getting more housing built. The opportunity there is to get more supply of everything: we need more rental supply, we need more homeownership supply; obviously, we need more social and affordable housing, as well. We need everything and we need it across the board. This is all hands on deck. It’s trying to get all of these parts moving in the same direction so we can increase housing supply and get affordability for Canadians across the board.

00:07:45:00

[Speaker: Mireille Thériault, Specialist, Communications, CMHC]

Every municipality has a different rulebook when it comes to development. How much of a challenge has that proven to be?

00:07:52:00

[Speaker: Aled ab Iorwerth, Deputy Chief Economist, CMHC]

Well, our research has consistently shown that regulations, red tape, approval delays, and development fees are all barriers to development. We’ve been arguing that for a while. Last year, we conducted a survey with Statistics Canada that gathered data on all of these regulations, and, at the time, we actually showed there was a strong correlation between red tape and a loss of housing affordability. What we’re now doing, and with more research, is that we’re even strengthening that result and saying that these regulations and approval delays are causing a loss of housing affordability. So it’s a very robust result. There are a lot of problems with these delays. They’ve been longstanding in Vancouver and Toronto, and we’re hoping to reform that. But it’s also highlighting challenges for the future. I think there are a lot of opportunities with manufactured homes, prefabrication, and developing economies of scale in these new technologies. Now, unfortunately, it seems that all of the municipalities are following their own regulations with respect to prefab housing, which sort of negates the opportunity of really getting economies of scale. We need more standardization of regulations, more and faster approvals. All of this drives towards more housing affordability for everyone in Canada.

00:09:17:00

[Speaker: Mireille Thériault, Specialist, Communications, CMHC]

So Chris, how do people stay up to date on progress?

00:09:21:00

[Speaker: Chris Woodcock, Director, Government Relations, Head of the Housing Accelerator Fund]

There are a couple of ways. First of all, we regularly update our progress page on CMHC’s website under the Housing Accelerator Fund subpage. We’ve published, as of now, about 70 progress reports covering all of the major cities. For us, in the Housing Accelerator Fund, a large city or a large applicant is over 10,000 people. We have the vast majority of large cities across the country participating in the program. And we’ve published at this point hundreds of pages of detailed information about housing targets that are part of those agreements, about the specific initiatives and the reforms that cities have committed to undertaking, as well as progress and how they’re doing so far. Overall, most of the cities that are part of the program are moving ambitiously and aggressively in implementing these reforms. We have a small number where either local political objections or local political discussions continue. For us, it’s really important that we get ahead of those discussions and we work with communities to help make sure that they stay on track. Because, ultimately, we want to see these funds end up where they’re supposed to end up, and these funds end up investing directly in housing in these communities in specific projects. So it’s really important that we can get those dollars out the door. And we can’t do that if cities aren’t on track. So progress in that regard, that’s on our website. Another way is that cities themselves are required to publish their own reporting on how they’re doing and to talk to their citizens about their progress. Calgary, I think, has done a really good job of this, Edmonton as well. A lot of B.C. communities are very, very far ahead, including the city of Vancouver. There’s a lot of exciting information out there about the kinds of reforms that we’re seeing.

00:10:59:00

[Speaker: Mireille Thériault, Specialist, Communications, CMHC]

That’s great. If our listeners would like to see a breakdown of where HAF has supported housing, by community, check the video’s description for a link to our progress page. What can we expect to see in the coming year?

00:11:12:00

[Speaker: Chris Woodcock, Director, Government Relations, Head of the Housing Accelerator Fund]

For the program, it’s really more 2 years, I would say. So for the HAF program, we’re mid-cycle. Communities have had, for the most part, 2 years now to lock in their plans, to complete their action plans, and to work out some of the inevitable complications that come about when you develop an action plan. In some cases, they’ve had a few weeks to apply for the program because it rolled out very quickly. Communities have now really had a chance to get their heads around it. In the first year, we saw that, for a lot of small communities, it was difficult to set aside the capacity to figure out how to implement some of these reforms. We’re now into the real full-scale implementation phase. We’re starting to see the earliest hints of results around the impact on permitting. It’s too soon to go either way, but we’ve noted, for example, that, in the first year, as a group, HAF communities grew faster than communities that weren’t participating in the program. That could be due, and Aled knows this, to a lot of different factors, economic and otherwise, outside the program, but en gros, we are seeing that HAF communities are growing a little bit faster and approving more permits. We’re excited to see what that looks like down the road. We’re also working on some other related initiatives, and one of those is the Housing Design Catalogue.

00:12:22:15

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CMHC, working with Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, has published about 50 standardized designs. The plans for those designs are upcoming very shortly. What those designs really provide is an opportunity for communities, many of them HAF communities, to help support the hands-on development of missing middle housing. If you have a piece of land and you’re interested in putting in a laneway home or in redeveloping that property into a multiplex, a fourplex or a triplex, there are some regionally specific designs that are pretty far along in the development curve, are very close to permit-ready, and can be taken advantage of. And communities and HAF-participating communities are looking at ways to standardize their processes to shorten the time that it takes for someone looking to build one of those units and get that actually to market. So we’re excited about that, and there’s a lot more to come on that front.

00:13:15:00

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[Speaker: Mireille Thériault, Specialist, Communications, CMHC]

That sounds very exciting. Thanks so much, Aled and Chris, for breaking down the Housing Accelerator Fund for us and its impact across Canada. To our listeners, check the episode description if you want to learn more about HAF and explore our progress. Thank you for joining us In-House. See you next time.

00:13:34:00

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[Speaker: Joelle Hamilton, Communications & Marketing, CMHC]

Did you know we’re not just on YouTube?

00:13:37:00

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You can now find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music.

00:13:41:00

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Don’t miss our next episodes for more real, data-driven discussions. If you’re learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please share this episode, follow us, or subscribe.

00:13:53:00

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Reach out, let us know what you think. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

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