Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to appear before you for the very first time at your committee today.

My name is Mark Richardson, and I'm the technical lead volunteer at HousingNowTO, which was created in 2018. We are a pro bono professional services collective that leverages our members' open data, civic tech, urban development and financial analysis skills to help the City of Toronto successfully achieve its targets for new-build, affordable rental apartment developments by 2030.

We need our federal parliamentary leadership to focus on delivering surplus lands, approvals, funding, speed and certainty to non-profits and their pension fund and private sector development partners. To be 100% clear, we do not represent the City of Toronto, CreateTO or Toronto Community Housing here today.

Our HousingNowTO volunteers come from varied planning, architecture, technology, construction, educational and institutional backgrounds. We work to ensure that all new-build affordable rental apartments in Toronto are viable, fundable, buildable and sustainable over a full 99-year period of affordability.

We are an unpaid advocacy group. We're a think tank that focuses our work on answering the three key questions that jeopardize all new affordable rental apartment developments in 2023.

First, does it pencil? Does this project make any financial sense? Who's going to carry the risk?

Second, does it scale? Can this project be expanded or repeated?

Finally, how can we speed up the delivery? What are the delays, and how can they be removed?

Since early 2019, the City of Toronto has formally dedicated 22 parcels of surplus city-owned land and has layered on financial incentives with a combined value of over $1 billion in the HousingNowTO program. That surplus land has been proactively up-zoned to create more viable opportunities to develop approximately 17,000 new mixed-use, mixed-income apartments and condos in transit-accessible neighbourhoods throughout the city. This is slowly being accomplished via City of Toronto partnerships with the private sector and indigenous, co-op and non-profit developers and operators.

The first successful HousingNow site—with 725 new rental apartments, including 218 new affordable rental units—finally broke ground 10 weeks ago near Etobicoke's Kipling subway and GO Train stations.

Every one of these HousingNow developments needs aggressive policy, processing and financial support from our federal government. It is also a model that the federal government should consider for its own surplus lands that are located within the City of Toronto. The land is leased for 99 years; it is not sold. The land is aggressively up-zoned for scale and viability before it goes into the leasing market. A minimum of one-third of the units or residential space is committed to affordable rental apartments for the full 99-year term of the land lease. Additional incentives, rebates and tax waivers are applied to deepen the affordable rents on different segments of those apartments. Partnerships are enabled and supported between the private sector and indigenous, co-op and non-profit partners on HousingNow sites.

Through our volunteers' work with the University of British Columbia's housing assessment resource tools, or HART, we have identified that the City of Toronto alone has a deficit of over 210,000 apartments that we need that would rent below $1,700 per month, according to the 2021 census. Over 70% of full-time, minimum-wage households in Toronto could not find affordable rental housing in 2021. Those numbers are only worse today in 2023.

All of our federal political parties agree that we have a housing crisis. Canada's largest cities have a housing emergency, and it requires our federal government to have a wartime response to deliver net new supply at speed and at scale.

Time is the enemy of new affordable rental apartment developments everywhere, especially in Toronto. A standard 600-square-foot, affordable rental apartment in 2010 would have cost about $210,000 to build. By 2017, that same apartment's development cost had risen to $276,000 per unit. As I sit here today, that same apartment development's costs now hover around $470,000 per unit.

While we sit in this meeting, construction costs are increasing, and they are continuing to rise. Affordable rental housing developers are all holding their breaths to see what the Bank of Canada's next interest rate announcement will be on October 25.

Thank you for your time.