{"id":19609,"date":"2018-01-19T21:56:58","date_gmt":"2018-01-20T02:56:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=19609"},"modified":"2018-01-19T21:56:58","modified_gmt":"2018-01-20T02:56:58","slug":"new-year-could-bring-new-incentives-for-affordable-housing-throughout-york-region","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/new-year-could-bring-new-incentives-for-affordable-housing-throughout-york-region\/","title":{"rendered":"New Year could bring new incentives for affordable housing throughout York Region"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

The dawn of a New Year could bring the dawn of a new day in affordable housing across York Region.
\nThis winter, the Regional Municipality of York is expected to receive a report on a new framework which would put in place incentives to bring about more affordable housing.
\nAccording to Valerie Shuttleworth, Chief Planner for the Region, staff will be reporting to Regional Council \u201cin probably February or March\u201d on an incentives framework to foster the development of affordable housing. Until this point, she said, York was waiting for guidelines from the Province on exclusionary zoning \u2013 such as housing density \u2013 but something had to give.
\nBy June, a further presentation to Regional Council will delve deeper into how affordable housing is defined.
\n\u201cIn June, you will see a much more in-depth report on affordability by type, a little more detail by location, and we\u2019re going to look a little more specifically at rental and setting some thresholds around affordability,\u201d she said. \u201cWe have some ability to alter the definition as long as we get the Provincial okay for it.\u201d
\nCurrently, the definition of \u201caffordable\u201d housing in York Region is pegged at just under $468,000, but that could be up in the air.
\nMost recently, in the last year-and-a-half, there has been increased interest in rental units throughout York Region, said Rick Farrell, General Manager of Housing for the Region. A significant factor in this surge is a corresponding surge in rental prices, which has climbed up to nearly $2,000 a month in many cases.
\n\u201cThe problem with that this year became that once they introduced rent controls again, some of the [developers] are now thinking twice about it because it does cap the return on their future investment,\u201d\u201d he said.
\nWhile a review of the Region of York\u2019s Housing Strategy is still some months away, some local lawmakers have looked at ways Aurora can get its foot in the door on the plan, or even set out with some incentives of its own to increase the number of affordable units here in Town.
\n\u201cIt is my impression that Aurora is in need [of] more affordable housing and more rental units,\u201d said Councillor John Abel, who introduced a motion himself last fall to get a head start on some of these incentives. \u201cIt\u2019s acute in our area. The other part is if you\u2019re developing a tool kit and a strategy, and if you\u2019re aware of a strategy Aurora already has in place, you could then [have that as a tool].\u201d
\nWhile the Region stopped short of telling Aurora to forge ahead on a housing strategy of its own, the Regional representatives told Council the municipality should do what it thinks is best.
\n\u201cI think Aurora should do what Aurora thinks it should do and we will bring our framework forward,\u201d said Ms. Shuttleworth. \u201cIf Aurora has something in place before we report to Regional Council, we will take that into consideration, review it, work with it, see how we can include it and work with our framework together with Aurora\u2019s. Having Marco [Ramunno, Aurora\u2019s Director of Planning] and his staff at our local municipal housing working group, I think we\u2019re all kind of talking about the same thing.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re not saying wait. We have a 10 year housing plan. We committed in our 10 year housing plan to look at ways to provide incentives for private, affordable market housing and rental housing. There is a lot of good stuff in there; we\u2019re not developing a housing strategy [but] an incentives framework. In 2018 we will be refreshing that 10 year strategy.\u201d
\nFrom Councillor Wendy Gaertner\u2019s perspective, any further incentives are a long time coming.
\n\u201cI keep talking about trying to get developers to give us affordable housing through bonusing,\u201d she said. \u201cI have been talking about it for years and I don\u2019t believe, to this point in time, we have ever accomplished that. It is very frustrating.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The dawn of a New Year could bring the dawn of a new day in affordable housing across York Region.
\nThis winter, the Regional Municipality of York is expected to receive a report on a new framework which would put in place incentives to bring about more affordable housing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-56h","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-18 08:19:26","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}