The first ever TEDx Stratford event took place Thursday night in front of a large group of community members and politicians, with the focus on Meeting the Wicked Challenges of Housing in a Small City.
Mike Moffatt kicked off the TEDx Stratford the night by focusing on child friendly neighbourhoods. He discussed the changing landscape of families and large cities, with a focus on people moving to Toronto after post-secondary education and then how those people develop families and then move away from the city.
“For some reason or another, people would move to areas with more space,” said Moffatt. “People would move to places with three bedrooms and a backyard, but those people would have to move to Scarborough, North York, or Etobicoke."
Moffatt, the Smart Prosperity Institute's senior director of policy and innovation and an assistant professor in the Business, Economics and Public Policy group at the Ivey Business School at Western University, used his experience to provide the audience with real life data on how increased pricing has forced people to move further and further away from the large urban area of Toronto.
“For people born in the 1990s, those Toronto job offers don’t look as attractive when you have to pay $2,000 in rent, rather than the $600 the previous generation paid,” said Moffatt. “First people have trouble saving the money for a down payment, and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) has gotten so expensive that people are having to live further away.”
This phenomenon is called 'Drive until you qualify', meaning people need to drive away from the large urban centre in order to actually qualify for a home. What the pandemic did was drastically increase the price of homes, so families now have to drive even further away than they previously did because of the high housing costs.
“This has caused people to relocate to places like Stratford or Brantford that are still expensive but nowhere as expensive as the GTA,” said Moffatt. “Then the pandemic allowed companies to move the workforce online, so those people who were hesitant to move to a place like Stratford, due to a long commute, were only in the office a couple days a week so that made the move much more attractive.”
Data shows that 100,000 per year are leaving Toronto, with the most common age to move out of Toronto is children under the age of 1. This is changing the face of smaller communities, as they are now growing at a rate of one to two percent, which doesn’t seem like a lot but it can cause small towns to double in size roughly every 35 years.
“On the positive side, you are getting a lot of highly educated and highly motivated people moving to smaller towns,” said Moffatt. “But the challenge is you have Toronto people, making Toronto money coming into non-Toronto towns and cities and bidding up the price of real estate.”
This is causing a large number of people to become displaced, particularly lower income people and families. Investors are buying up homes, renovating them, kicking out existing tenants, and then selling them to middle class families from the GTA.
Moffatt reiterated during his presentation that growth is coming to smaller communities and now is the time to start planning for it. He presented a question to the audience, how can we manage growth in a way that creates the conditions to preserve the town the way people want, and he used a small town near Ottawa as an example.
“The town of Mississippi Mills got the community together and the first thing they asked was what do you like about the community, and what are the things that make Mississippi Mills, Mississippi Mills,” said Moffatt.
He encouraged towns to participate with their communities to take on a vision exercise to plan ahead for the growth, and present as a series of alternatives that embrace growth to the town, instead of turning a blind eye to growth.
Anneke Smit, who is an associate professor at the University of Windsor and the founder and inaugural director of the Centre for Cities at Windsor Law was introduced second. Her expertise has her speak about changing the entire system to solve the housing crisis. Statistics show that urban sprawl is an issue with some of the largest cities in Canada growing to have a footprint the size of the city of Montreal.
“What’s the impact of that, there are many,” said Smit. “The cost of maintaining a city with a footprint of that size is incredible. You have to think about things like transit and bike lanes.”
She said that right now developers are in the drivers seat, and we need to turn the system around. Canada is near the bottom of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranking in the length of time it takes to get approvals.
“We measure our development approvals in years, not months,” said Smit. “Then there is the cost impact, the GTA is the worst, and in some ways that is an opportunity for small communities like Stratford and others in the vicinity of Toronto. But if the system continues the same way and absorbs layers and layers of regulator approvals, and if the system is still set up to sprawl and be responsive to what developers are coming to municipalities with, it can make the problem worse for communities like Stratford that have historic character.”
Smit spoke to the audience about innovation happening in the private sector which looks at different ways to build homes. She added that municipalities need to start acting like developers, and plan a long term vision.
She offered four potential solutions to the problem: target market analysis, robust and ongoing community and private sector and developer participation in the creation of a detailed vision for the city, community planning, and laying out a pre-approved permit system, and the fourth is financial incentives.
“Target market analysis is something business people use in situations to figure out what has sold, what might sell and what customers may want in the future,” said Smit. “A robust engagement with all stakeholders allows a vision to be set out for the community. A comprehensive pre-approval system puts municipalities in the driver seat, so what can we know we need on certain streets, and can we fast forward some approvals and cut down the layers of approval. Financial incentives are already taking place by municipalities but communities can look at further incentives for developers by providing opportunities like cutting taxes for a period of time.”
The last speaker of the evening was Paul Kalbfleisch, who is a consultant on city strategies prioritizing economic, social, and environmental benefits. His presentation focused on changing cities is how we change the world with a focus on joy, a topic he co-authored a book on called The JOY Experiments: Re-imagining Mid-Sized Cities as a Tool to Heal Our Divided Society. His experience brought forth a discussion around the human side of communities, and how they play. Kalbfleisch said this is an area that needs improvement across the world, as we need to get away from the us versus them, and instead focus on community resilience.
“We have slowly been stripping away the social infrastructure that used to bring us together and build community bonds,” said Kalbfleisch. “People don’t join clubs or go to church like they used to, and our downtown cores are becoming less and less vibrant, so we have to consciously start building social infrastructure that goes along with our cities.”
Kalbfleisch said cities need to start helping to heal the divisions in our communities, and a good way to do that is simply with play.
“Play is one of the most complex social things for humans,” said Kalbfleisch. “Play helps us to learn and collaborate while seeing our differences.
The slogan live, work and play is used by many municipalities and Kalbfleisch said he believes the slogan exists because those are the things we have assumed that people are looking for, but that isn’t actually the case. Many people are either working remotely or commuting to work so there isn’t always the opportunity to live or play where you work.
Kalbfleisch believes that play is an opportunity for municipalities to bring the community together.
“People want to live in cities that make play inclusive and belonging tangible,” said Kalbfleisch. “If you build ways for the community to play in your city, it allows an opportunity for the community to connect. We see with cities that build these spaces that allow play that they become gathering places for people so when we win a gold medal people just know to congregate at this location.”
He added that these places become spaces where people feel an emotional connection too regardless of their financial opportunity. Kalbfleisch said in the end people want to be happy so it's up to municipalities to build infrastructure that makes people experience joy.
