OAA Conference 2024: Gimme Shelter: Coming Together to Answer the Housing Affordability Question

In cities, suburbs, and rural areas across the province, housing affordability is a multi-faceted issue requiring coordinated approaches from across the architectural design, real estate development, and planning realms. Millions of current and future Ontarians are affected by a lack of affordability across all income levels of homes—rented or owned, single-family or high-rise, subsidized or not.

As part of its mandate to regulate the practice of architecture to protect the public interest, the OAA has spent more than a decade exploring architectural and land use methods to increase housing supply, while encouraging thoughtful planning approval process changes to deliver homes of all typologies more quickly and cost-effectively. At the same time, the urgent need for climate action means there can be no compromise in safeguarding green spaces or ensuring the environmental sustainability of both new and existing housing.

A few years ago, the OAA commissioned an independent report to examine design and regulatory opportunities to address housing affordability. At a high level, the findings were simple: increase supply, make homes financially attainable, and address the current urgency now. The question is: how? And what roadblocks are currently in the way?

The architecture profession has an important role to play, and must work with the other groups responsible for the development, design, construction, and zoning of our built environments. To kick off the Association’s 2024 Conference—Housing: Pushing the Envelope—this special plenary panel brings together perspectives from the architecture, planning, and development spheres. It explores the current state of housing as experts come together for practical, real-world solutions from new building materials and assemblies to site plan approval and red tape to transit-oriented developments and missing-middle infill zoning.

Participants:

Shawn Micallef (moderator) is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness, Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto, and The Trouble with Brunch: Work, Class, and the Pursuit of Leisure. He’s a weekly columnist at the Toronto Star, and a senior editor and co-owner of the independent, Jane Jacobs Prize–winning magazine Spacing. Shawn teaches at the University of Toronto and was a 2011–2012 Canadian Journalism Fellow at Massey College. In 2002, while a resident at theCanadian Film Centre’s Media Lab, he co-founded [murmur], the location-based mobile phone documentary project that spread to over 25 cities globally.

Panellists:
John van Nostrand, OAA, FRAIC, FCIP
Naama Blonder, B.Arch, OAA, RPP, MCIP
Robert Boyd, B.A. (Hon.), M.Arch, OAA
Christian Huggett, MCIP, RPP