Summit 10 Key
Takeaways
1. Canada’s Edge Lies in Its Places: To attract talent, spark innovation, and tackle big challenges, Canada must level up the quality of its spaces.
2. Fight Polarization Locally: The erosion of trust in institutions starts and ends in our communities—local action can heal the divides.
3. Build for Beauty and Impact: Infrastructure isn’t just functional—it’s equity, climate resilience, culture, and meaning, all rolled into one. And it’s not inflationary.
4. Act Now by Starting Somewhere: Canada’s housing and mental health crises are everywhere, but proven solutions exist. We need to scale what works—urgently—by learning from the best.
5. Think Local, Act Local: Big changes start small. Empower communities with tools and resources to adapt and scale their solutions.
6. Diversify How We Invest: Canada needs flexible investment tools for every scale and every investor—public, private, and institutional.
7. Data Over Divisions: Drop the politics and act on the facts. Good data drives real change.
8. Digitize for Civic Power: Prioritize digital tools, AI, and accessible data to supercharge decision-making and civic innovation.
9. Own the Public Realm: Progress rests on leveraging the three P’s: procurement, public land, and the public realm.
10. Take Accountability: Canada’s future hinges on a resolution of longstanding jurisdictional problems. Devolve power and resources to communities to realize their full potential.
Full Panel
Transcript
Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software. Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to citytalk@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.
Cathie O’Toole We have an exciting panel here to talk about a very important topic. So we have four exciting guests who are going to bring a very unique and different perspective, each of them, I think, to this important issue. So our topic is Equitable Opportunities for Prosperity and How Infrastructure Builds Inclusive Communities. And the first panelist I want to turn the mic over to is Prentiss Dantzler, who is an associate professor and director of housing with the Justice Lab, School of Cities, Toronto. And I think Prentiss can probably bring a very interesting housing justice perspective to this issue. So if you want to give us a few initial thoughts on this topic, Prentiss, I think that would be a good way for us to start.
Prentiss Dantzler All right. Thank you. It’s good to be here today and see everybody. And so my comments today are really going to be kind of picking up a lot of the themes and ideas that we’ve been talking about. And so a lot of this has been focused on housing and infrastructure. But for a second, let’s like actually think about what infrastructure is actually used for. And so infrastructure is an extension or prosthetic for human uses. If you can’t get somewhere, you build a road. If you can’t get water somewhere, you build an aqueduct or some type of pipelines. If you can’t get people together, you build green infrastructure or public spaces for them to use. And so a lot of the times when we’re talking about infrastructure, we then tend to kind of mirror or think about particular sites where there’s big or hard, however you want to kind of call it, but we forget how much it impacts people’s daily uses. And so there’s a lot of ways in which these infrastructure projects are not just creating equitable communities, they’re disrupting and destroying communities in the process. And so being placed in Toronto right now, we have things like the LRT line that have really ripped through communities, left a lot of businesses out of place. And those communities will never be the same that they were there. And then when we ask our politicians and our policymakers about what’s happening with the line, they say they don’t know what the budget is and they don’t know when it’s going to be done. And so a lot of times when we think about development in this space, we’re not just developing the physical infrastructure, we’re also developing a different social group that is actually taking advantage or using these things. And so when you’re planning for projects, you’re not just thinking about planning for communities, you’re thinking about planning for voters. You’re thinking about planning for people that might be living in these places long term. And a lot of times they get displaced as a result. And so my role at the Housing Justice Lab is really kind of functioning or focusing on displacement. Are we thinking about the nefarious ways or are disadvantaged ways or the serious ways that we’re building stuff and not taking into account a lot of the things that happens as a result? One thing that came up in the last panel that was really kind of interesting and exciting to see is like the invocation of a community land trust. And partly, it’s not just the idea of it as a physical organizational entity, it’s also what it means. It’s a different relationship with property and land, right? And so the idea that we’re sitting on Indigenous land and always paying homage without thinking about using their ideas seriously, I think is part of the problem. And so if we’re actually going to have a really kind of meaningful conversation about infrastructure we need to think about, in the process of creating those opportunities, those projects, what are we losing as a result? And so I’ll stop there for a second.
Cathie O’Toole Thank you, Prentiss. That was a really good thought provoking way for us to start. And I think it segues nicely into another, you know, local government kind of perspective on this. If Adam Mongrain wanted to share his thoughts. Adam’s the director of housing for Montreal Vivre en Ville. And I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.
Adam Mongrain Right. Thank you. It’s great being here. And every person that has spoken today up to you as stole in my thunder because I keep editing what I have to say. I wanted to say that. So I’m going to go in unexpected ways. Vivre en Ville is a nonprofit that advocate for sustainable land use at scale, and it’s been founded in ’96. And what we do is, we plead with government to do better with land use for sustainability goals and resilience and prosperity. And every once in a while, the governments, local governments, but also national governments, will turn back to us and say, “okay, we see what you’re getting at. We think we should do this.” But oftentimes they don’t have the internal resources to carry out the work. So we sell expert services to the government. And I was brought on as Director of Housing Policy in 2020 because at the turn of 2018, and 2019, it became evident that the local governments and communities that followed our own advice most diligently were also the places where people could not afford to live anymore. Because when you’re making improvements to the built environment, you are making this place more desirable relative to the places that have not gotten this attention, where every time we improve the built environment, it’s somewhere. I like to point made earlier that everywhere is a place and improvements are not equally distributed and the population itself is not equally within the means to access our most well built environments. So to address this gap, we have now a housing policy department trying to put forward housing policies that make sure that when we improve living conditions somewhere, we’re not digging moats around that place or displacing people outside of the places where we invested our collective wealth. And I will say it’s tremendously hard to do this. It’s not a solved problem Every time we make things more desirable, given that people want to move and people move naturally, it creates a bunch of market effects which are really hard to account for and completely override. But I’m excited that we are here to discuss such dynamics. And I was very impressed by everything that was put forward up to this point.
Cathie O’Toole Well, thanks, Adam. Robert Bernard is with us and he’s the founder of Toboggan Flats and Youthful Cities and has a very cool website. I encourage you to check it out. But I think Robert probably has some solutions to share to some of the challenges that Adam just described. Because Robert’s really focused on the intergenerational equity perspective.
Robert Barnard Thanks. First question, how many people in the room are under 30? Just put up your hand.
Robert Barnard How many people in the room want to be under 30? Just put up your hand. I’ve been doing this …. There’s a theme here. I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I was a youth at some point in time back then. And what I find after doing this, I’m the guy at the dinner table that when someone says, “I just hired a young person and they’re not working out”, I defend that young person. And the reason I do is and when I’m thinking about infrastructure, is the name of the word that comes to mind for me is generational infrastructure, you know, long lasting, multigenerational, big impact. And here’s the project. The project is youth. Foundational. They actually build the bridge between now and the future. There are the talent pipeline we absolutely need in Canada today. They are on the digital highway. You don’t need to get off. They’re actually on there right now. So we really need to bring the energy supply to our cities that are hollowing out because we don’t have young people downtown. We don’t have young people downtown for 2 big reasons. The jobs and houses. Here’s … this is an embarrassing stat for any Americans in the room, but anyone else actually outside of Canada so that the unemployment rate for young people right now, two and a half times the national average. There are 800,000 young people who are not employed, in education, or in training. When the youthful cities did a study recently, 16% of young people in Canada said that they were happy most of the time. 76% said they’re lonely. So the foundational infrastructure we need to build is actually getting off our asses and helping this generation be part of the development of the future cities. And one of the things that we did at Youthful Cities a year ago, actually this conference helped us do it, was decide that we were going to take some action on housing because housing will get young people downtown if we can build it. Used to build condos for the millennials, to buy. Now young people can’t afford to rent those same condos in our city’s downtown. So what we need is to focus a little bit more on how to involve young people in the development of the future of our cities and do it through what I think is kind of human infrastructure. Thanks.
Cathie O’Toole Thanks, Robert. And Tracy Hadden Loh is here with us from the United States. Thank you for coming. And Tracy’s a fellow at the Center for Transformative Placemaking in Washington, D.C. and has some interesting perspectives. She’s been a city council member, I saw and has served on a variety of boards, including transit authorities and bridges. So you know a lot about infrastructure and you know a lot about placemaking. So what perspectives can you offer us from the United States on this topic?
Tracy Hadden Loh Well, let’s just get it fired up a little bit. And Mary told us that we should not prepare, but I will lose my job at the Brookings Institution if I don’t prepare. So I have a few notes here that I’d like to share. I’m just thrilled to be included in a discussion with thinkers this exciting. So thank you very much for inviting me. So first I want to ask what is infrastructure, which has already been asked several times today, but now you know, I’m going to admit that I have come here from the US to read to you out of the dictionary. Okay. So the Oxford English Dictionary says that infrastructure is the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. And so it seems to me that, like a lot of the debates that we have about equitable opportunity are really fights over whether things like the safety net or economic development programs that are focused on fighting poverty are needed for the operation of a society. And in America, the last time our big federal infrastructure funding law was up for reauthorization, we had an absolutely enormous discourse meltdown over whether child care was infrastructure. These questions about what is in bounds for infrastructure really matter? Because they’re fights not just about whether we will have these things, but to Robert’s point, who will bear the cost? This generation or only future generations. Okay. The OED also had some examples of infrastructure that were helpful – buildings, roads, power supplies. We could have a whole conversation today not about testing the edges of the definition of infrastructure, like is housing infrastructure. But we could just talk about the ways that we design, fund and govern these very traditional and uncontested infrastructure elements. You know, in what ways do we advance equitable opportunity and inclusive communities or not? To Prentiss’s point, it’s going to be eating two elephants to try to do both of those things in the next 40 minutes. So let’s just like start chewing and see what happens, you know, mix it up. I’ll end by just noting that, you know, we set ourselves up for failure or open ourselves up to sabotage when we silo off equity and inclusion as a separate session instead of just like weaving it in to everything we do everywhere. I’ve heard it come up in many of the sessions. Thank you. I heard it come up in many of the sessions earlier today, so I think we are in no danger here. I want to laud everyone who’s been speaking today because I’ve heard it resonating throughout the sessions and I know it will continue today and into tomorrow. So this is just one 40 minutes of many, 40 minutes talking about that important value and topic.
Cathie O’Toole So this is great. Our opening remarks, I think, must have generated a little bit of attention cause I’ve got some questions coming in here. So, you know, I had work to prepare a few questions for the panel, but I think I’m going to start with one from the audience. Carlos Delgado had a question. Prentiss mentioned Community Land Trust. Thoughts on Commercial Land Trust as an Anti Small Business Displacement Strategy.
Prentiss Dantzler Yeah. Yeah. So in the city of Toronto right now, luckily, little Jamaica the neighborhood, just created their own land trust. And they’re particularly focused on commercial development. And so it’s not just thinking about, again, thinking about the social needs or the social functions of neighborhoods or communities. So it’s this point earlier … What does the actual community actually need? And so CLTs, whether we’re talking about housing, commercial business, green space and so on and so forth, we need to kind of think about a more kind of different organizational structure because the one we have right now is that we’re trying to solve solutions without no vision about the actual structures that we want in place. And so a lot of times we’re just kind of … we need more housing. So we’re trying to build more housing, but we’re not having critical conversations about the type of housing that we’re being built. And so in the city of Toronto, we have a lot of condos that nobody wants to buy. And so when we’re thinking about that, you’re also kind of creating a condition about what type of individuals would actually come to that city. If I’m coming out to see Toronto and I want to have a kid, where am I supposed to live if I want to grow my family in the city, where am I going to grow that family? And so the idea is that these cities as kind of places of community building, should serve social functions of individual families. And so one way to do that is CLTs, I think, are kind of really way. But also, again, it changed the ideology of how we treat land and space and property. And so if the idea is that we’re just going keep building more housing, that we have more houses going to market, that everybody’s going to compete to buy, we’re going to be in the same place, depending on the market shifts that are not as natural organic as people want to do. These are kind of decisions that are being made. And so, for instance, other decisions about immigration policy, about infrastructure finance, about how even when you do mortgages in this country, as Americans coming up here to see that I come and try to get a mortgage and it’s like a 3 to 5 year fixed or variable interest rate, where in the States, we’re so used to 30 year fixed rates. It’s kind of crazy. And so thinking about the kind of communities that we want to build, we know we need infrastructure, we know we need housing, we know we need commercial spaces. We know we need schools. We know we need public spaces. And so if that’s what we know we need, how do we design organizational structures, finance tools to create communities and not just individual siloed off projects?
Tracy Hadden Loh Can I also chime in on this one?? Plus one to everything Prentiss just said. This is a big focus of my research and something I’m really passionate about because, you know, we have a traditional way, of course, of managing retail and, you know, neighborhood commercial corridors, main streets, and that works for some places. But we already know that it doesn’t work for lots of other kind of places that are struggling with vacancy. And that want to pursue alternatives to the status quo as a local economic development or placemaking strategy. And, you know, land trusts are one example of a way to innovate around this. But there are incredible innovators trying new approaches to ownership and management, applying a lot of different models. So I wrote a piece a couple of years ago with my colleague … called the Emerging Solidarity Economy that documents all of these, it is like a review, a scan of the landscape and all these different innovative models, of which CLTs are one. So if folks are interested in this topic, I’d encourage them to check out this piece. This year I also put out a piece called Helping Communities Buy Back the Block that is about pursuing alternative ownership, management and revitalization strategies for Main Streets and neighborhood commercial corridors that are not … that the status quo is not capable of doing anything other than devaluing. So I think there is huge potential in these kinds of strategies and that, you know, we’ll see more and more of this in the coming years. This is just the beginning, I think, of many people starting to confront the reality that, you know, the rise of e-commerce, globalization, etc.. There are many … The pandemic … There have been many, many pressures on retail as a sector. Business models have evolved very rapidly. There’s been tons of creative entrepreneurship to respond to this. But really, only the biggest players have had the kind of capital to deploy, to line up the built environment and storefronts behind their new strategies. And there needs to be something for everyone else, or we’ll only have the big players because it’s just going to continue to be the case, right? Like from that AI panel earlier, that the pace of change is going to continue to get faster, but the built environment will always remain much slower to evolve. So we’ve got to bring new tools to the table to help the built environment adapt.
Cathie O’Toole So we’ve already talked about Community Land Trust a little bit, but are there any other models for inclusive development that inspire you?
Robert Barnard Can I talk about my own? Okay. And it’s not my own because I actually, you know, co-founded with a lot of people to get this going. But I think, you know, a year ago at this conference, we were looking at an idea inspired a lot by CUIs work on taking vacant office buildings and turning them into housing. And we said, you know, if you did that and you took a model that’s popular in Europe, the United States, Asia, and in other words, everywhere else except for Canada called Co-living, and you put that into an office conversion, you could do it faster and cheaper. And Co-living is actually bringing people together as opposed to isolating them apart. Sounds like a good idea, right? It’s a year and we are making some progress. But it takes a lot to get housing built in this country. And I think … but one of the opportunities, what we’ve seen over the last year is how everyone wants this to work. Like when you ask for a meeting, people want to figure it out. In fact, one of my colleagues, Theo, is downstairs doing a deputation to Toronto City Council to act because they’re going to put forth a motion to start looking into Co-living in Toronto. Calgary’s already passed an incentive for $60 a square foot to build Co-living in converted office buildings. So, you know, our goal and the other great thing about these conversions, is you can build housing once you’ve got a permit in nine months, which means fast. And what we need is, as you know, in the last panel, listen to the vibrancy that young people bring 24 hours a day to a city. We can bring those young people downtown. We can give them affordable housing. They will reinvent the cities for us. So it’s one idea. And we hope that we inspire Co-living to go across the country in all kinds of different ways. But that’s one of the pieces that we’re working on to bring more equity to housing in the city.
Cathie O’Toole I think it’s a fabulous idea, and I think it’s almost a flashback to the rooming house era. But a much cooler, much more upscale rooming house. From what I can tell.
Robert Barnard Definitely, rooming houses has come up all the time. If you’re on the West Coast, some people will use the acronym SRO. I think, you know, what we’re seeing is that a Co-living model is about building community as a, you know, as a part of it. And the original rooming houses did that for newcomers to the city. They did it really well, it’s got a bad rap right now for probably lots of good reasons and some bad reasons. But fundamentally, if you can build a sense of community, you’re going to be able to bring back young people into that downtown core. And that’s what we really need right now.
Cathie O’Toole An excellent, inclusive model. So what are some other ideas of inclusive models that inspire you?
Adam Mongrain I don’t want to do cheap controversy, but I am going to say things that are not … that don’t get unanimous support. I think that a lot of the enthusiasm about community ownership, which we have to be in favor of because it solves a real problem, is essentially admitting that what we need to do is escape tenancy or escape the rental market and rental pressures. And every time we turn our attention to things like community land trust as a way to save some people, it’s like we’re being flooded by raising waters and we’re throwing out a couple of life savers that they’re saying like, these people can actually make it through the worsening conditions. The rental market is not something that existed before humans. It’s a human tool. This is something we can influence and we can actually address and make better. And to Tracy’s point, is child care infrastructure? I believe the relationships between tenants and landlords and property owners and people who live on a territory are part of the infrastructure conversation, and we could have much more serious conversations amongst ourselves and amongst other people about things like rent control. And I know this is the point I know is going to be controversial. I know that Econ 101 says no rent control ever, but it’s not the last class in economics Econ 101. There are things we can think about harder – There are things we can say amongst ourselves to go over the kind of defeatism of saying like, we need community ownership, because if we don’t, we’re going to get crushed forever because it’s going to be held forever outside of what we can own ourselves. And I think that just condemns a lot of people to worsening conditions, because it’s not true that all of these solutions scale at the speed that we need right now.
Prentiss Dantzler There’s a few programs I’ll point out. And so the city of Toronto had one program that a lot of community groups that I work with always point out, and that’s the MURA program, multi-unit rental acquisition program, because it allowed them to take stock of some of the units in their neighborhoods before developers could come in and do kind of high density development. Part of the other piece of that kind of support was to have core funding for community organizers to do that work. And so we’re really thinking about communities that are the best experts. They’re doing this on a volunteer basis. And so a lot of the times when they’re trying to compete to do these programs, they’re trying to learn at the speed after working a job or two. And so what if you had committee organizers that had core funding to do this work on an ongoing basis? And so shout out to groups like Moss Park Coalition, the Toronto Community Benefits Network, places like that, this kind of commercial development piece like Kensington Market, they’ve been trying to get their establishment so they can deal with the commercial space issues in their in their businesses. The other point in kind of thinking about how do we kind of think about some of these other programs are just like, how are we really kind of designing cities to be more connected? And so the fact that we have like all these kind of big metropolitan cities that tend to get a lot of the focus, but we know that there are smaller towns and places that are not getting that same attention. And so how are we going to create this kind of knit … I actually like the idea of like knitting across this country. Are we kind of thinking about that? And I say thinking about the other kind of communities being the space of the voices and how can we employ them? And so that way it’s not always a top down approach. And then we’re arguing about we don’t have enough money to do these things. And then also, you don’t have the backlash when development comes up.
Cathie O’Toole Great thoughts. So we have another question that’s come in from the online audience. Algorithmic exclusion of people from housing through software applications is common in the United States. How common or prevalent is it in Canada? I don’t know the answer to that. I’m hoping one of the panelists might have a thought to offer.
Prentiss Dantzler I don’t think we know either. I think part of the issue this comes up constantly is like we have really bad data issues in Canada, right? And so if I wanted to look at how many institutional investors own property in this neighborhood, I don’t know where to go to get that right. And most cities in the States, you can log on to your local city municipal website, going to open data, find a property, see the owner, see your contact information, and so on and so forth. Here’s these weird privacy laws that protect people. And so we have to do these wrap arounds or as other companies like turn their impact, like, Hey, can I get property data? And it’s not available. And so when we’re thinking about how many of these companies are using this, it’s really complicated. There’s some great work by a partnership called the New Housing Alternatives Partnership, which I’m a part of in a couple of other a lot of other colleagues, academics and community members across the country are thinking about new ways to do this. And one way that we’re engaging in this research is the thing about data access as a data justice issue. You can’t build good housing and employed communities to do the work. If they don’t have access to good real time data at their fingertips and you can’t charge them exorbitant amounts of money to do the work because they don’t there smart meter, they’re really doing this on a community basis. And so I think partly we don’t know because we are just not giving that kind of information out and we don’t have good data practices or governance issues or practices here in Canada.
Tracy Hadden Loh So I’d love to follow up on that a little bit and just point out, actually, I don’t think we know how much the share of rental inventory in the United States that is professionally property managed. Right. Which I think is a pretty requisite step to the kind of price manipulation that I think the person asking the question is referring to. We do know, you know, with some certainty that it varies a huge amount from community to community. But there many of these same data issues. And so I have some colleagues that did a paper looking at this topic and one of their main recommendations coming out of the research they did looking on this topic, is that an actual feasible intervention to try to start to like better understand and regulate this issue is to mandate the creation of rental registries, right? Because, you know, being a landlord is already a regulated activity. And so this isn’t like creating some giant new bureaucracy, you know, or, you know, imposing some like costly and onerous new requirement that’s going to require a ton of new staffing. It’s really just a different form of organizing information that could be empowering to all kinds of actors in some ways, probably also including landlords. But it will allow everyone to kind of get at least like a shared set of facts about what it is that’s going on. And so that to me seems like a super logical step that state and local governments should be pursuing as they think about trying to better understand this issue.
Cathie O’Toole I think Adam and then Robert might both want to jump in on this.
Adam Mongrain I finally have good news. We built one. We built a rental registry.
Tracy Hadden Loh See, anyone can do it.
Adam Mongrain The Housing Supply Challenge, supported by CMHC. And our reading is the same. This is something that we need because we don’t have privacy laws, we have secrecy laws, and it serves no one. I do think that our culture of secret in procurement, in price and in private negotiations is not helpful to the challenges of the moment. So we landed at the same conclusion, having a full inventory of all rentals. Their price enterprise histories will allow us to catch a lot of what’s going on in our communities and make sure that they do stay inclusive. Because, you know, even if the infrastructure is there, the schools, the parks, if your rents go from 1000 a month to 3000 a month in one year, you’re going to replace your population and kids don’t pay rent. And everyone that’s going to be in those units are going to be people with adequate incomes, not because of the size of the unit, but because of its price. And so I wanted to put it out there that the rental registry we built through the housing supply challenge is made for governments. It’s not made for us. It doesn’t make sense for nonprofits to be owning tools like this. I know that Washington, D.C. is also working on a rental registry as well.
Tracy Hadden Loh That’s right.
Adam Mongrain Please take it away from me. I built it so it would be a solved problem for governments to actually go forward and demonstrate leadership with data, clarity and information transparency.
Cathie O’Toole Robert …
Robert Barnard I think I’m going to pan it back a little bit. Like how many – what percentage of young people in Canada rent? Anyone know? Actually, yeah, 100%. Well, actually, we didn’t know at Youthful Cities …
Tracy Hadden Loh It depends on at what age do kids start paying rent?
Robert Barnard Well, that could be it. But I think that when we asked the question at Youthful Cities and then sort of forward it on to Toboggan Flights we didn’t we couldn’t find the answer in Canada. We couldn’t find a really good answer to that question. So we just said, “okay, let’s go find it”. And then once we find it, let’s go open up that data so everyone can use it. So I think the answer I think was … Sarah’s somewhere …. And she probably knows the answer. I think it’s about 58% or something are renting. What the other one that I wanted to come back from this morning was that only 21% of young people by the time they’re 30 own a home in Canada. 21%. What was it in the US? 30? So behind, behind, behind. We need to get ahead ahead ahead. But I think our goal is to just plug these holes any way we can, thanks to CUI for helping us out with that study. School of Cities helped us out with that study, Generation Squeeze. So it’s building those coalitions to generate data and then release it to the world and let everyone use it.
Cathie O’Toole So we have another question that’s come in and it’s kind of looking at the other end of the spectrum. It’s asking if there’s an example of a successful co-living project targeting single seniors to address that segment of society or any with the mix of demographics.
Robert Barnard Absolutely.
Tracy Hadden Loh Yeah, absolutely.
Robert Barnard Tons, actually. And that’s the, you know, the current form of co-living in Canada is seniors homes and student residences. They’re already there. They’ve been there forever, will be there for a long time. And in Europe, when you’ve got co-living going, which has been going steadily now for 10 or 15 years, we’re starting to see all kinds of niche groups using Co-living because it’s a very good way to live. So I think in Europe, they call it kind of young seniors are co-living. They’ve got single parent co-living, they’ve got co-living for people that are just focused on wellness. Like it’s a really fascinating sector that for some reason Canada is so far behind on. But I think we’re going to catch up soon.
Cathie O’Toole Quick lightning round for us to wrap up. Any ideas on how governments can be incorporating a social equity lens in making infrastructure decisions?
Adam Mongrain I would say think harder about rents in general. If you don’t account for the price effects in essentially a secondary market like market transactions and real estate are between not producers. You know, the new build is always going to be a tiny segment of the entire housing stock. If you are doing governmental interventions, you’re bringing price effects into markets and consumers are going to be arbitrating these things between themselves. Think about ahead of time and think about what you want to happen on the ground after your intervention, I think is going to … much like culture, the point that was made about culture, it can’t be an add-on after, like it can’t be “We’re going to make something someplace neat and then hope that people live in it”. First, think about how people are going to access this territory and then provide for that.
Prentiss Dantzler Don’t use equity to hide other kind of identities that you don’t want to talk about. Right. And so, like even today, I’ve been hearing like this idea of racialized, everybody is racialized, but we treat white people as if they don’t have a color. And so it’s like treat them as the reference case or the default. And so everybody internalized that into their logic of how they plan, other ways in which we kind of think about equity and just not just talk about, AMI. We need rent geared to income, if incomes are not going to be rising that fast. And a lot of the housing is drastically and devastating out of reach of even people who are at median income. We need to have a better measure of a better kind of proxy for what we’re actually talking about. And so when we’re thinking about equity, be a lot more intersectional in terms of how you’re thinking about these programs and these policies.
Tracy Hadden Loh I think when people are bringing up better data, disaggregated data, different ways of using data, this is all really getting at a different approach to government that is around like changing how success is defined. Progress toward it is measured. And, you know, we change the way the government works when we change that, when we measure better, when we change the goal and when we hold ourselves accountable to that. Right. Like if you, you know, in transportation, right, this means like instead of saying like, you know, my goal is like your level of service everywhere or whatever to say, like, I’m going to pursue the goal of accessibility and I’m going to disaggregate data for different populations to understand relative accessibility. But what would it look like on the housing side, for example, if we actually had standards like level of service type standards, right about like what the amount of pain that we as a society are willing to tolerate and below which we do not want individuals or communities to be falling. You know, the data about housing, they’re relatively straightforward to collect. Like we can relatively easily find out how many people are being failed by the housing system as it currently operates. We just have to decide to hold ourselves accountable to a standard for that, in order for that to change.
Robert Barnard I think, you know, generational equity around budgeting would be a great start. If I’d ask that question that I started off with, how put your hand up if you’re 30. If I asked you that question 50 years ago, half of you would have put your hand up. And we built a lot of universities and colleges 50 years ago. Now we build hospitals. So we’ve got to think about how do we shift that around so that we’re investing in a foundation that’s actually carry us forward and pay for the hospitals.
Cathie O’Toole I really liked Tracy’s reference to service standards. And, you know, one of the things that, as somebody who needs city I’ve been thinking about is service standards and the level of service and everybody having the same level of service is not necessarily equity. One of the things we’ve done, and we’re only in our second year of doing it, so it hasn’t really come to fruition yet. But we’ve adopted social equity and deprivation index into our capital budget prioritization work. So when we’re evaluating, you know, which capital budget projects move forward and how we prioritize them, we’re starting to take those kind of things into account. Level of service, I think, will be a future evolution. So the panelists have done a great job. Thank you very much for answering all the questions that came to us today.