Dermot O’Kane, Planning Manager (Plans and Policy) at Belfast City Council, one of Urban Retrofit’s local authority partners, reflects on affordable housing delivery in Toronto and Montreal and the lessons that might be drawn for planners in UK cities thinking about the affordability dimension of urban retrofit. 

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I have recently returned from a thoroughly informative and enjoyable two-week study tour of Canadian cities with the Urban Retrofit project team – an experience made all the better by the variety, calibre and enthusiasm of the participants involved and the richly eclectic projects we visited. 

What quickly became clear as we travelled around was that the aims of Urban Retrofit and the many projects we visited in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton were broadly analogous to the policy approach set out in the Belfast Local Development Plan 2035 and, in particular, our ambitions for affordable housing and climate change. 

The opportunity to speak first-hand with planners and other built environment professionals in Canada really underscored how important it is for planners to guide and deliver planning policy all the way through to successful implementation. What stood out was the tenacity, commitment and skills of planners and other built and natural environment professionals operating within ever-changing and complex administrative and financial environments and their ability to encourage consistent urban retrofitting outcomes. 

Delivering high quality affordable housing was a common ambition in the Canadian cities we visited – much as it is in the UK. In Montreal, we visited public sector-led redevelopments and a community-based project where protecting existing affordable housing and building new affordable homes is strongly supported by local government and underpinned by a relatively robust stream of funding from the Quebec provincial government. 

The impact of this funding landscape was evident at both the planned Namur-Hippodrome development in the west of Montreal, where a former horse-racing track will be transformed into a mixed use neighbourhood, and at https://technopoleangus.com/enTechnopôle Angus to the east of downtown, where a mixed residential and commercial scheme has been successfully delivered in on a former railway works. 

What impressed most about these projects was the attention paid to design quality in all aspects of the development, including the affordable housing, as well as the strong influence of continental European typologies and the integration of student accommodation with affordable housing – an approach that is increasingly relevant to planning decisions in Belfast and other UK cities. Notably, the scale and proposed densities at Namur Hippodrome alone would have almost met Belfast’s residential growth strategy in its entirety in what is a relatively small pocket of the Montreal metropolitan area. 

At a much more local level, we were lucky enough to witness first-hand the sheer doggedness of community representatives working to support and protect affordable housing in the core of the Montreal, where we spent an inspiring few hours with Nathan McDonnell walking around the Milton Park neighbourhood on the edge of downtown Montreal. Milton Park has a rich history of community activism dating back to the 1970’s where concerted efforts were made to protect the area from ever-expanding residential and commercial developments. 

This activism resulted in one of the largest concentrations of co-operative houses in North America. The community’s spirit of resilience is still evident today in a series of local street greening projects and a community agriculture project that coordinates food distribution to poorer households. 

In Toronto, the context for affordable housing is very different. Funding is scarcer, supply is thus constrained, and the housing market has become chronically unaffordable. The impacts of these challenges and how to address them is therefore front-of-mind for community housing practitioners and planners in the city. 

On our study tour, evidence of innovative problem-solving was particularly noticeable at Alexandra Park, a 1960s social housing development just to the west of downtown Toronto. Here, Toronto Community Housing (TCH) is in the midst of building high-quality, tenure-blind affordable housing – some of it to Passivhaus standard – using the profits drawn from market housing on the same site. Crucially, the housing agency were able to do this without reducing the overall number of affordable homes in the neighbourhood – an outcome that sadly persists in some UK and Canadian cities. 

Whilst it’s true that this public-private approach may be hard to transfer to cities with less buoyant housing markets, it is nevertheless notable that our guide,  a senior development official of TCH, insisted that community collaboration was key to the success of Alexandra Park. On our visit, he explained how TCH built trust with the local community by supporting them to get involved in an inclusive design process that demonstrably incorporated their ideas into the plans. Equally important, I would argue, was a committed  senior  TCH development staff member  and their teams’ personal commitment to stay with the project and see it through to completion, especially given concerns that the community had about feeling abandoned in the past. 

One of the chief outcomes of this community-based approach was the decision not to move tenants out of their homes during the redevelopment. We learnt how this had occurred on large-scale redevelopments in Toronto in the past and disrupted the social fabric of the communities affected. At Alexandra Park, the development was phased in ways that allowed the community to remain in-situ and thus intact. 

Although the scale and density of the new development we observed at Alexandra Park has been built in close proximity to more modest housing – something that would likely prove challenging in the British planning context – it was apparent that the delivery of affordable housing was deemed to be at the heart of the ‘public interest’ intent of planning. 

Both Toronto and Montreal have, to a greater and lesser extent, witness significant demand for new housing and although there were similarities in their approaches, the solutions in financing and scale were quite different. The focus on community-based approach, innovative funding solutions, and different densities and typologies will be worth monitoring as we seek to solve similar challenge in Belfast and elsewhere.