THUNDER BAY – Without an increase in larger-scale housing projects, the city won’t meet its 2025 housing target of 675 units, according to the city’s director of development services, Joel Depeuter.
“We are currently not on track to meet that target, though we expect to meet, to exceed last year’s performance,” Depeuter told the city’s standing committee on growth at its Tuesday meeting. He noted the city’s housing accelerator fund has supported 635 units, now in various stages of development, so far.
“We will not achieve our housing targets either for funding assistance from the provincial or federal government, or simply the houses that we need to address the needs of the community. We will not achieve that by focusing on single-family homes, duplexes, and fourplexes. We must think bigger, we must act bigger,” said city manager John Collin.
The housing targets ramp up year after year, he said. “More large projects and larger projects are required to meet the housing accelerator targets. It is necessary for us to double the construction pace to meet these targets.”
While the available funding is designed to increase as targets increase. Depeuter also told the committee the third instalment of the housing accelerator fund is already “overextended.” In 2024, following administration’s recommendation, council voted to top up the funds available in year one with nearly $4.1 million from the Renew Thunder Bay reserve fund, on the premise that the city would return the money to reserves once the year-three advance is received in 2026.
The city will get $5.88 million next March or April, he said, but only $1.7 million of that will be available in the housing accelerator fund for 2026.
To make room for the large-scale housing projects the city needs, Depeuter told the committee administration will be back in November seeking support to declare four north side locations as surplus land.
Lots located at 300 Tokio Street, 144 Fanshaw Street, 791 Arundel Street, and at 211-223 Tupper Street and 224 Camelot Street have been identified as having the potential to develop approximately 1,385 new units in total, he said.
Coun. Rajni Agarwal questioned the decision to encourage the development of apartment buildings in the city.
“When we’re looking at these plans right now, most of these are multi-residential. They’re rentals. Thunder Bay has been known (for) homeownership. In the 70s and 80s and 90s, we had the second highest in homeownership in Canada, and now we’ve dropped a little bit,” Agarwal said.
She asked city staff, “is it the will of our council to promote more rentals, or is it the will of our council to promote more affordable home ownership? With the plans that we’re seeing here for these three or four large projects, are they for creating ownership units or rental units?”
Collin said administration’s “understanding of the will of the council is to build more housing.”
“All types, and focus on the principle of densification or intensification. Whether that’s apartments or condos or owned units of some other form other than condominiums, we’ve never received direction from council to focus on one over the other. It’s get units built,” he said.
If council decided to incentivize homeownership over rental properties, said Collin, city staff would “take a look at that in the longer term,” but he also said that could limit “options that developers may or may not wish to consider.”
Agarwal asked whether the city has asked developers if they want to build permanently-owned units rather than rental properties.
“The incentives are there. The reason is that our history, typically for Thunder Bay, has been a very high percentage of home ownership. 72 per cent, we were the second highest in Canada, and we’ve dropped. It’s the will of our council, the direction we give our administration, on how we develop and what we do and what we incentivize. The rental market is concerning to me in that the province made the 2018 declaration that there is no cap on increasing rents,” Agarwal said.
Collin said they have been informed by representatives on the Mayor’s Task Force on Building More Homes that multi-unit residential condominiums are “drying up.”
“There’s no demand” for condominium development in Canada at this time, he said.
“The market for that, all indications are, is drying up at this point, or certainly is in a lull at this point, and we are cognizant of that,” Collin said.
Depeuter added that the purpose of the housing accelerator fund is to increase density with multiple forms of multi-unit development.
“So many of these forms of development, such as town homes, duplexes, we are receiving these permits come through and the properties be subdivided for ownership. In the terms of larger multi-residential developments, they are tending to be for rental purposes, so that is at the decision of the developer, either related to market demand or the complexities and costs involved in creating condominium ownership,” he said.
