Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new housing agency has unveiled its first project.
Build Canada Homes (BCH), which the federal Liberal government launched last month, will oversee the construction of 540 new homes in the Arbo neighbourhood of Toronto’s Downsview Park.
Minister of Housing and Infrastructure Gregor Robertson made the announcement at a press conference at Downsview on Tuesday morning. He said the plan is for the new units to be factory-built — meaning they will primarily be prefabricated and then assembled on-site — in order to speed up construction.
At least 40 per cent of the units at Arbo will be designated affordable, with a mix of studio apartments and homes with between one and three bedrooms geared to families.
BCH will launch a request for qualifications this week to find partners to design and construct the units, with a requirement builders prioritize Canadian materials. The government didn’t immediately say how much the project would cost.
Robertson said home ownership has become unattainable for too many, and the BCH plan was part of “a major shift to bridge the divide and make the housing market work better for all Canadians.”
The 25-hectare Arbo neighbourhood is one of 15 communities being built under a major mixed-use redevelopment of Downsview, a former airport and Canadian Forces base near Keele Street and Sheppard Avenue West, that is projected to accommodate 115,000 residents and 52,000 jobs. The federal government already owned some of the property at the site and had announced plans to build on it. The 540 units announced Tuesday are among 1,700 planned for the first phase of the Arbo project.
To help support development in the area, Robertson also announced Tuesday that Ottawa has pledged up to $283 million to upgrade Toronto’s outdated Black Creek sewer system. The system serves more than 350,000 residents, according to the federal government, but at six decades old it’s reached its capacity, which has led to frequent flooding.
Robertson said expanding the system’s capacity would enable it to support more than 60,000 additional homes in the area. The city is also spending more than $425 million on the Black Creek sanitary trunk sewer project.
Mayor Olivia Chow told reporters at Tuesday’s announcement that sewers overflowing during heavy storms has been a problem near Black Creek for decades, and the federal funding will help protect homes and businesses from the impacts of extreme weather.
Carney’s Liberals floated the idea of a new federal housing agency in the run-up to April’s election. When BCH was launched last month, his government gave it an initial spending allowance of $13 billion to finance, incentivize and oversee the construction of new homes. The agency will also be given access to public lands formerly under a different agency, the Canada Lands Company, to use as a foundation for the new homes.
Despite only being weeks old, BCH has already faced objections from critics on the left — who argue it’s too focused on market-driven development incentives, at the expense of more direct government interventions — and from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and others on the right, who argue it’s simply adding another layer of bureaucracy to the country’s housing crisis.
The federal government had previously confirmed that its six initial projects will prioritize factory-build homes, aiming for 4,000 units of housing on sites across the country — in Dartmouth, Longueuil, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Toronto. The exact locations weren’t initially released.
Carney has appointed former Toronto councillor and 2023 mayoral candidate Ana Bailão as CEO of the new agency.
With files from Victoria Gibson.
