Ahmed Hussen, the federal minister of housing, diversity and inclusion, was in the Barrie area today selling the housing accelerator fund to local leaders.
“In Canada, we have the fastest population growth in the G7 countries, but we don’t have enough housing supply,” he said in phone interview with BarrieToday on Monday, “so we need to build more housing supply and we need to do it now.”
The federal fund was launched just two weeks before last week’s federal budget, Hussen said, although it was originally part of the 2022 federal budget.
“(It’s) meant to incentivize the building of additional housing supply,” Hussen said. “Initially, 100,000 additional housing units and then through system changes and removal of barriers that slow down the approval and delivery of housing, we want to set up Canada to be in a position to double the number of new homes built in the next 10 years.”
The York-South Weston MP said funding will go straight to municipalities, which will have to apply for it, and there are conditions — removing barriers, committing to more density, affordable housing, rental housing, mixed housing, etc.
“This is a partnership,” Hussen said. “We will work with municipalities to get them to a place where they will be able to maximize their use of these funds.
“Municipal governments don’t directly build houses, but they are responsible for a crucial part of the process — the planning, zoning and permitting of houses,” he said. “Those are very, very important activities and today in many municipalities it’s simply very hard to build housing, particularly affordable housing.
"It takes too long to build any type of housing and what we are trying to do with the housing accelerator fund, as the name suggests, is to accelerate the permitting process and the delivery of housing so that we can have more housing in Canada, housing of all types," Hussen added.
The fund wasn’t launched until two weeks before this budget, as Hussen’s ministry worked out details with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), as well as individual mayors, Indigenous people and non-profit organizations.
Municipalities have between now and June get their applications in order, Hussen said, which is when the applications portal opens.
The minister noted federal budget 2023 has new housing measures as well, such as an urban-rural northern Indigenous housing strategy, to meet the housing needs of Indigenous people living off-reserve in urban, rural and northern cities.
There are also measures to help first-time home buyers and guidelines for banks to provide mortgage relief, such as adjusting payment schedules and lump-sum payments, without facing a certain level of banking fees.
Hussen said he was scheduled to meet with several local leaders, including Barrie Mayor Alex Nuttall, on Monday, along with visiting a transitional housing organization and an affordable housing project.
For more information on the housing accelerator fund, click here.
