Housing Solutions: Real Estate and Land for Thriving Communities

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.

Carolyn Whitzman Welcome, everyone. I’m Carolyn Whitzman. I’m a housing researcher. And with me today, let’s see if we can do this from next to me to furthest away from me. We have Ana Bailão, who’s the Head of Affordable Housing and Public Affairs for Dream Unlimited. Then we have Deana Grinnell, Executive Vice President of Real Estate for Canada Lands Company. And then we have Nadine Leblanc, Senior Vice President for Policy at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. And then we have Mark Quinlan, who is the Senior Assistant Deputy Minister for Public Services and Procurement Canada. And last but not least, at the end, we have Alain Resplandy-Bernard who is the head of the Direction de l’immobilier de l’État for France. Just to set the scene, in April 2024, in conjunction with the federal budget, Canada’s housing plan announced a public Land for Homes initiative. That program is intended to scale up housing, particularly rental homes for middle income earners on surplus or under-utilised government owned land, federally owned land from former army bases and airfields to post offices. The federal government said it was willing to develop plans itself, but was hoping to model collaborative partnerships with provinces, municipalities, private and nonprofit developers. And Public Lands for Home was explicitly linked to financing instruments like the apartment construction loans program. But there are also, hopefully, potential links with other programs announced, such as an industrial strategy for home building, and I was on the advisory committee for that industrial strategy, as well as commitments in the National Housing Strategy iterated in the housing plan to reduce chronic homelessness and also reduce housing need by about a third of the 1.6 million low and moderate income households currently in unaffordable, overcrowded or uninhabitable homes. So it’s been eight months since those exciting announcements. Let’s find out where the federal government is at. I’m going to start off not talking about Canada, but talking about France. So … Alain, I’ve mixed up Alain and Mark, I’m sorry. In 2000, France created a law requiring all municipalities to plan for 20% non-market housing, then increase to 25% non-market housing. And France has more than doubled its public housing, cooperative housing, social housing stock since then. Can you tell me a little bit more about the role of the national government, the French national government, and particularly the way that the French national government has used land and finance and perhaps construction innovation? I know there has been some architecture words there to enable housing for low and moderate income households.

Alain Resplandy-Bernard Okay. First of all, to protect your ears from my strong French accent, I will switch to French. Good afternoon, everyone. I have the chance of no longer having a [not-audible] so I no longer have a boss. I am a coordinator. I’m here to say the truth. I don’t have a boss anymore. So the law that you’re talking about is a national law. It is imposed on all municipalities. But municipalities remain in charge of delivering construction permits and having their own tools. And we still see a big difference between municipalities that are strongly engaged for social housing and others who pay a penalty, who  prefer to pay instead of building, we still have a big diversity. And then the second aspect, as you mentioned, is using public lands. There’s a big debate about that, which is based on a policy that was developed since 2005 and that was accelerated. Here I will be a bit irritable or a bit teasing, but it’s an interesting tool to develop housing, but it’s not a green solution. Every 3 or 4 years there’s a politician that comes and says, “If the state just wanted to sell us lands, if Alain could take out all the real estate he has in his pocket, the housing crisis would be solved in France.” The bad news is that it’s not true. However, we can do things with public lands. We have laws that now allow us to accelerate construction on public lands. We did a lot of that. But there’s a little debate that is coming in the way and polluting all this. I know you have the same debate. Here is the debate about the cost of those lands that the state is selling to build housing units. There was a bill passed for military re-instated to send for €1 symbolically or for social housing to do a reduction that could go up to 80% of the value. My experience, and that’s where I use my freedom and liberty is, is it’s not working very well. It’s short term gain so promoters in cities can buy these lands and they’re very happy to have these low prices. We did 250 operations in ten years. It’s a loss of value of €600 million for the state. But because of that, it reduces the number of lands that are freed because public owners are senior civil servants. I tell you a scoop here … civil servants are human beings. Civil servants are human beings and they are have economic reflexes. If you are told you have a building, or land that you are occupying, let’s sell it for almost zero. You’ll have no economic benefit out of this for your organization, even if it’s not your money. The reflex will be we’ll not buy this land … if I’m doing a pretext, I still have a team and I still have means to do things so it’s not very useful. And you keep it because you have no economic benefit on it. So all these measures to lower the sales price of lands, it gives you a short term benefit. But finally it gives less free land to build housing units. So that’s the problem. The big curb on construction is the fact that we have a French mayor in the 70s who wrote about that, he said “a building mayor is a beaten mayor.” He builds housing units and will be beaten and defeated at the next election. Because, see, he will bring in new electors that might vote for the opposition and there are infrastructure costs involved. So to break that mold and in everything we tried to do in the sales contracts for lands is how can we align the interests of all the stakeholders, aligne the interest of the state with the interests of the municipality and the interests of the private promoter? And how are we trying to do that? Is that we sell the lands at a pretty low value, but we put clauses in our contracts. We say, for example, for this land or this piece of property, you can do at least 10,000m² of housing units, we’ll calculate the lowest value possible for these square meters. If the stakeholders agree to do more to create and build things that will have more value, the surplus will be shared between the three stakeholders the city, the state itself and the private promoter. And that way everybody has interests in doing housing programs and social housing programs that have the most value, that are as dense as possible because we’re working for a dense city. That’s what we’re trying to do. Thank you.

Carolyn Whitzman I’s like to follow up on points that Alain made, as I direct my next question to you, Mark. So there’s an increasing role for PSPC in mapping public land and repurposing land and federal buildings together. How can we work towards ensuring that since infrastructure, as we know, is like a 30 year timeline thing, that whoever gets elected and France has seen left wing governments, right wing governments and whatever the heck is going on right now, how can we create that kind of 30 year view of the dispersal and optimum use of that federal land?

Mark Quinlan Well, that’s a that’s a great question. Thank you, first of all, for for the opportunity to be here. I’m replacing my deputy minister, Ariane Raza, who was really looking forward to participate on this panel. And unfortunately, she had an urgent priority she had to deal with. But I’m really, really glad to be here. I collaborate on a daily basis with colleagues from CMHC and Canada Lands and Alain and I, we had a chance to collaborate and exchange best practices about what France is doing and what the federal government in Canada is doing. And contrary to you, Alain, I still have a boss and a political master currently, but I will still try to say the truth.

Mark Quinlan  We serve the government, the elected government of the day. And our responsibility is to loyally implement the government’s policies. And the government has made a number of statements and taken a number of steps to make more public land available for the development for housing. The Prime Minister has indicated that he would like public lands to remain public and not sell them, so dispose of them through long term land leases where that makes sense. And Government has indicated that it would be willing to explore discounting that land if it has the ability to achieve a number of social outcomes. I mentioned density and climate change and climate resiliency, accessibility. Government has a number of priorities that it’s looking to incorporate in its plan moving forward. Now, PSPC we’re responsible for about a quarter of all of the square meters and the Government of Canada, government departments have about 24,000,000m². We have about seven, mainly office space. The government in Budget 2024 announced that it was going to right size its office footprint, acknowledging that hybrid work mainly three days a week for employees, four days for executives is the way that the vast majority of the public service works. Obviously, there’s tons of exceptions border guards, people handling paper, etc., that come in on a five day basis. But most employees come in three days. And so if you manage office space differently and you go from an assigned environment where everybody gets their own office or cubicle to an unassigned environment, you’re able to really get unbelievable efficiency. And a lot of you are able to free up a lot of office space. And by freeing up a lot of that space, we’re going to do two things for cities. One is right now current government offices are occupied 40, 45% on any given day. So our objective is actually have those offices being about 80% occupied. So you can just think about the foot traffic, the impact on transit, the impact on local businesses of having a lot more people come in to those buildings on a day to day basis. So there’s a positive impact and often we’re talking about, you know, urban cores and then of course, the buildings that we are going to be getting out of are going to be able to be converted into housing. PSPC is also playing a leadership role, we launched following a Budget 24 announcement, the public land bank – making lands and properties and buildings available to be able to be converted into housing or built up for more housing. And so talk a little bit about that. And what are the government’s intentions? Those properties are not solely PSPC properties, but in fact Government of Canada properties and CMHC and CLC, I will not speak for you colleagues, but obviously you guys are playing a central role in that initiative and maybe I’ll stop there.

Carolyn Whitzman That’s great. And of course, it links in with the discussions in the morning about revitalizing downtowns through mixed use and residential development. Then I think I’m going to go to you next. So, Canada Lands Company also seems to be shifting its mandate to take a stronger role in delivering housing. How do you see public sector developments such as Canada Lands Company working to deliver affordable housing as part of your mandate? And I said I would ask this – do you see a stronger role for direct building in the federal government future?

Deana Grinnell I’m going to introduce myself a little bit and tell you a little bit about Canada Lands, but it is great to be here. Thanks for inviting us. Canada Lands is the Federal government’s Real Estate Development Corporation, so we are what’s called a non agent or arm’s length Crown Corp. We self finance and we acquire former surplus federal sites when they’re no longer required for program purposes. And then we take responsibility for repurposing those. And oftentimes what that means is revisioning rezoning, identifying the new land uses and getting them back into the into the communities that they are in. We do that with the objective of being financially resilient and also delivering social impact benefits as well as environmental benefits. And we do have a priority right now around affordable housing. Our portfolio … We’ve set a general target of 20% portfolio wide. In other words, the lands that we enable, we deliver our lands by doing the infrastructure servicing. Primarily, we act as the land developer, put in the streets, the parks, the public realm and then identify builders, both profit or nonprofit builders to work with. And we’ve identified 20% of affordable housing enabling through our projects so far. And we do that either by the projects being of a certain scale that they can discount that land and fund themselves. Or we work very closely with our colleagues at CMHC through their initiatives. And of course we also work with the municipalities and provinces to leverage their programs into these projects. We have some really interesting changes afoot with the public Lands for Homes Plan and Budget 2024 that are giving us some more tools. And I would say in order to engage earlier to support that disposal process, as we’ve identified certain federal or a priority for federal assets to now move out of inventory, we have a key role in helping with the housing assessments for that, moving them towards the public land bank and then also supporting due diligence and ultimately moving them into our portfolio. And the other tools, I think allow us to be more strategic together. And that’s one of the things I’ve really appreciated about the emphasis on housing at this federal level is now we’re collaborating much more closely around bringing programs together and and outcomes. So I see CMHC speak. You didn’t mention your center of disposal excellence, but they’ve now channeled disposals. Sorry, I can’t stand the word land as the most precious thing, but when it’s moving out of the federal inventory, it does have to go through a process and and now that’s being focused through APC and we are supporting that as well. But to be more strategic, we’re looking at getting engaged earlier, which is potentially taking years off of the disposal process when we can start the planning work and identifying the infrastructure servicing requirements before that land moves out of government rather than sequencing it after. That’s going to save us a tremendous amount of time. We’ve also identified an opportunity to look at underutilized lands and help custodians rationalize their program purposes and identify where lands can actually be repurposed for housing. And we have looked at an opportunity to work with crowns. That’s a latitude that we needed some more authorities to work with crowns more effectively and early. And now we are looking at the possibilities, as Mark mentioned, of acquiring lands below market value. Historically, we’ve always paid market value and then leverage those lands into the marketplace. So acquiring land for lower dollars, we ideally will transfer that benefit out to the builder community. And we’ve also looked at authorities to potentially generate our dividend. When we make a return, that return goes back to the Government of Canada. So we have a double pronged mandate to deliver lands for housing or community benefits and deliver a return. And we’re looking at funneling that return back into social outcomes. So there’s some really wonderful changes, more tools in the tool kit, so to speak, that are really going to allow us to have more impact.

Carolyn Whitzman Really exciting stuff and hopefully it’ll continue to develop over the coming years. I’m going to ask a follow up question to Deana, but just before I do, I want to remind everyone that there’s the opportunity to ask questions. I’m going to ask our first set of questions, and then hopefully I’m going to open it over to the floor. We have one question already, and I’d love to see more. Deana I’m really excited specifically about Jericho Lands, which is a development in central Vancouver, partly because it’s a co-production between CLC and three First Nations, partly because it is looking at green infrastructure in a really exciting way, cultural and cultural heritage in a really interesting way. And part of what it’s been doing is making its own planning rules. So I am going to be a troublemaker and say, what is your feeling about federal authorities making their own planning rules, either with First Nations or as part of a larger social good outcome?

Deana Grinnell That’s a really great opportunity, thanks for the opportunity to talk about it. So Canada Lands often does do its work in collaboration with indigenous partners, and those are generated in a variety of ways. This one in Vancouver with the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations is a 90 acre master plan on the west side of Vancouver. We are actually working together to do a master plan or a secondary plan for those in Ontario language, and we are working with the city of Vancouver. The land is regulated municipally. That’s one thing that when Canada Lands, acquires lands – we’re a corporation we don’t have federal paramouncy, we operate within the municipal regulatory frameworks. But one of the things I’ve always appreciated about Canada Lands and about this partnership is we do do paradigm shifting development. We’re always trying to do better, and that does require sometimes to push the envelope. So in this case, we have thankfully a shoulder to shoulder relationship with the city and of course we do as partners with the Nations. We’ve been able to really change the narrative around what sustainability systems need to look like, what culture looks like on the land base in a community, and how the Nations can express their culture in this urban footprint. We’ve had a very receptive audience, including from our neighbors, not all neighbors. Some of you will find there’s resistance around this project, but we’ve actually had a tremendously positive reception about changing the narrative around what new development needs to look like in the west side of Vancouver.

Carolyn Whitzman Thank you, Deana. Nadine, I think I need to go to you next, because a couple of people have already kind of pointed in your general direction as they talk about finance. So the CMHC also appears to have a changing role in this alphabet soup ecosystem of federal policy. Certainly the role of finance is always central to the CMHC. How can the CMHC improve financing, particularly for low and moderate households and non market public co-op community developers serving those groups.

Nadine Leblanc Well, thank you and special thank you for Mary and her team for inviting CHMC at this event and the panel, very excited to be here and with my colleagues on stage. So for those of you that does not know CMHC, we are indeed a Crown corporation. And what we do best is definitely real estate financing, and that ranges from the lower end of affordability all the way up to market. And we do have a dual role, very interestingly, probably unique to the governance of Crown Corporation. We do deliver on housing programs or appropriation based programs, but we do have a pretty strong commercial role that’s all about ensuring financial stability in the housing market. And with respect to of course, land, not new to CMHC. If you go back into the history we have done land development, land assembly, land acquisition, we actually build housing. We acquired housing for social housing purposes. And here we are, you know, decades and decades and decades later, and we’re going at it again. And so … but this time around, CMHC, through the National Housing Strategy programs, have a few tools, Carolyn, that you’re mentioning in the way that we’re building housing out there, especially when we’re talking about deep and social affordable housing. The first one went, with respect to just from the beginning of acquiring land and more specifically, federal land. We have this very modest program called the Federal Land Initiative. And this … and I say modest because it’s only $200,000 and it provides incentives to builders out there to acquire land at a discount rate and to turn that around into affordable housing. Is it really, really extremely deep, affordable housing? I’ll say the funding is is conducive to what we can buy in terms of affordability, but we do ensure 80% of affordability on all units. But it is very modest and that’s at the acquisition level. I consider CMHC being the back end to what we’ve just discussed. So we’re the financing. That’s our flagship program that we have and we have a few. We have the Affordable Housing Fund that is a combination of grants, contribution and lending. And that permits the acquisition, the repairs, the preservation and new construction of deep affordable housing, including shelters. Not too long ago, we’ve just launched a rapid housing initiative as part of the Affordable Housing Fund. And in terms of what we can do further, Carolyn, to build, I think that this is probably the most generous program when it comes to building a really deep, deep, affordable program of affordable housing. And we do stack these programs. When you think about building more housing out there. We stack our federal land initiative. We work with CLC and then we stack funding and contribution and work with provinces and municipalities to try to make the deal work at the most affordability that we possibly can. But it does require contributions. And so that’s what I say, that the most affordable program that we have is the Affordable Housing Initiative. It is oversubscribed, as you could imagine. The needs out there are extreme. And we have recently made some change to your point on how to improve. We have extended our amortization as an example, the terms and conditions of our loans. We’ve added contributions. We have also reviewed our accessibility, affordability and sustainability requirements and we continue to review, I know some of you will say, service standards – can you expedite your funding? Can you expedite your decision making? We are continuously reviewing our processes to make sure that we we can get that funding as soon as possible out the door. And we continue to review that on an ongoing basis. And we have other programs available for more market and mid-income and we review those as well to to hopefully get the most we can out of our funding in terms of social outcomes. And more to come. More to come. The Government has announced some programs as part of Budget 2024. You’ve probably heard the … Canada’s Rental Protection Fund. And so that’s one that CMHC will be delivering very soon, hopefully. And we have a few more that we’re working on, that was announced as part of a budget 2024. So that’s how we we contribute to the puzzle, Carolyn But more and more is needed, especially when we think about affordable housing.

Carolyn Whitzman Thank you. And just before I turn to Ana, two reminders … First is if you have any questions, you can use Prezzo to ask those questions … a couple just came in, that’s working. Let me just ask one … And I admit it’s a gnarly question I want to ask you, Nadine. So 50 years ago, St Lawrence neighborhood, downtown Toronto, was built on surplus federal lands in rail yards, 4000 homes, one third public housing, one third cooperative housing, one third private sector condominiums. Are we going to be seeing that kind of mix, that kind of era again? And if not, why not?

Nadine Leblanc Yeah, Thank you for the question. So I think it’s … Well, one would say hopefully we would … we need a diverse, diverse, resilient communities, mixed use when we’re building densification, of course. And in that time, Carolyn, I would say that CHMC had a lot more tools in our toolbox, different tools that allowed for a lot more flexibility and innovation for that era. I’ll say, and I think today, I think we need to think about housing very differently, especially when we think about construction techniques. Even the financing tools that we have, like if you look at CMHC and what we offer, it’s quite conventional in nature. And I think we’re in a world where we need to think about those tools extremely differently. And in order to get to some of these outcomes that we have seen back in the days and we’re working on that, I’m sure you’ve heard as part of the Canada Housing Plan, this whole concept of industrial strategy that is trying to look at things very differently from the construction material and techniques all the way up to financing and financing it in very different way, including the attraction of private capital, because I do think there’s a lot of liquidity sitting in Canada and we just need to kind of move it into the affordable space somehow, some way. But that requires taking on risk and being innovative in the way that we’re thinking about financing.

Carolyn Whitzman Thank you, Nadine. And that segueys very well into Ana. So what do you see as the role of private sector developers such as Dream in delivering new affordable housing?

Ana Bailão … a very important role. But before I get into that, I just want to say how special of a moment this is because I’m sure many people in the room, many organizations in the room, remember fondly when the National Housing Strategy was launched, one of the things that was identified that wasn’t included was federal lands. And so many people in this room have advocated to include federal lands. So thank you for having it. It is, as Alain said, one tool. It’s not going to solve the housing. It’s part of what builds the pricing of housing. But it’s there. And before I talk about the role of the private sector in the public lands, I have to mention something. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing my job, which is Canada is having very different markets. The GTA market, for example, is completely different from what’s happening in Alberta, and this is a great initiative that should have happened many, many years ago. But the reality is that, for example, for a market like Toronto where there’s nothing happening, the last quarter we had one building put in shovels on the ground. This is not going to be the solution that is going to … It’s going to be the solution for the next three years that we need. And so I don’t understand why the three orders of government are not locked in a room as an emergency measure to find out. Aside from this big strategy, how we’re going to tackle these markets where nothing is happening, because in three years there is not going to be any stock coming on board. So great initiative, but we need a lot more to deal with this that is happening right now in certain markets.

Carolyn Whitzman Tell me more …

Ana Bailão Public lands – Dream has a lot of experience with public lands. In 2018, the province of Ontario launched the two first pieces of land on a 99 year old lease. 2019 Dream, Kilmer and Tricon … Three companies, got together and won the bid. I say, and I actually at the time was a municipal politician, was part of the announcement with the minister to put the lands out there, I say is one of the most successful projects and not being biased, now I work for Dream, but last year we were welcoming residents into the first building and this was possible because it was a 99 year old lease with CMHC financing, with municipal supports for the affordable housing and a MZ0 from the province. So there was a series of things that happened, collaboration that happened that were able to create a project with 30% affordable housing. It’s a checkerboard model like we call it. You do not see which units are affordable, and we have agreements with non-profits. Another model we just broke ground in Ottawa, the LeBreton Flats, NCC Land, we bought the land, that one we bought the land and that one we were able to break ground just a few weeks ago on 608 units and 41% of affordable housing. And why were we able to do 41% is because we are actually co-developing with a nonprofit organization. So we deepen the affordability. We create affordability from 59% to 80% AMR, 41%. And then through the Dream Foundation, we’ve committed $150,000 a year so that the organization can do extra programing for everybody in the community. Another one is Key Side. Key Side is waterfront, three orders of government, public land – that one, the affordable housing is going to be owned by the city, we’re going to develop it and the nonprofits are going to be running it. So I get this question a lot from people in the development industry, because now, especially in the GTA, not much is penciling. So everybody is now kind of looking for the affordable housing. Nadine is very, very busy with everybody putting applications nowadays. All of a sudden affordable housing is, you know, something that developers are looking at and everybody says, how do you make it work? Every site is a site. The most important thing is partnerships. And be nimble. And public land is a great component. But I think for people that are developing, it is about stacking. It’s about partnerships. And public land can definitely be part of it. The private sector is about creating the scale that is needed. And I like that the model where we’re actually creating some capacity in the nonprofit sector, because in our country, in Canada, we have a fantastic nonprofit sector, but we need to support them to create extra capacity. And I think the private sector cannot can also play a role in there.

Carolyn Whitzman Thank you, Ana. There were some great ideas there. The partnerships idea, the idea of rapid approvals, which made a huge difference. And also the idea that the private sector can develop as possibly the public sector can, but not necessarily be the provider. Now, I see that questions have been coming in. Okay. That one’s been answered. Crystal asks, “How is the CMHC aligning to the housing action plan? CMHC rules often impede aligning funders, portfolio approaches, acquisitions and development on land leases so the CMHC as a barrier to stacking programs…” Nadine I’m afraid I have to hand that one to you.

Nadine Leblanc Yeah, no, and we get that question all the time, So thank you. It was Crystal. Thank you for the question. I think that’s the so that is the ultimate question on how can we always look to better align our tools with the outcomes that we’re looking for for the Canada Housing Plan and also the National Housing Strategy? We are now, as you all know, we’ve talked about the bit of the change that CMHC has gone over the last few quarters and now we we are partnering with HICCC that has now become the policy advisor of Canada and to the minister when it comes to housing. And CMHC can now better focus on delivering on its program that’s been given to us by the Government of Canada. And so we look to review our programs all the time based on the feedback that the partners and the stakeholders are providing to us. And the funding that’s tied to these programs are tied to the outcomes. And so the deeper the contribution, the more we can align affordability, accessibility and and suitability where it becomes a little bit more difficult. And it’s not that we’r… e absolutely trying … some of you you’re probably witnessing MLI select right now in the market. These are commercial tools. These commercial tools have prescribed parameters from Department of Finance as well as the Office of the Financial Institution, and we need to comply with those commercial parameters, unfortunately. But it does, I say unfortunately, but at the same time, they’re there to protect the financial stability of the Canadian system. So they have a dual purpose there. So we stretch those parameters as much as we can to align to affordability and the social outcomes that we’re trying to get as a country. But it’s a bit more difficult on the commercial side. But we have to … we have a role and the accountability to continue doing that, and we will for sure. So thank you, Crystal, for the question.

Ana Bailão Carolyn, can I just add because CMHC is hit over the head all the time. We’re always criticizing CMHC and and there was very good reasons and sometimes there is still is. We keep pushing. But there has been a significant difference in the attitude and the level of service done by the CMHC. We feel it. They’ve now launched a program called The Frequent Builder. And it’s huge for the developers to get the, you know, allocation of those funds in three months, basically. It’s a huge difference. So kudos to CMHC and the improvements that they’ve been doing. It makes a difference in delivering housing.

Carolyn Whitzman Thank you, Ana. And we’ve got 15 seconds for a gnarly question for you from Andre Darmanin, so what would you like to see done differently at the municipal government level, given your previous experience in municipal government? I didn’t ask that. Andre did.

Ana Bailão I think  there’s two things. I think there’s the planning and zoning, the speed of the approval, so all of that is something that for profit and nonprofit, everything … there’s a lot of things that people, that we talk about in housing that affects both in the same way. So the planning is a big part of it. And I think we need to rethink the way that we charge for development charges for the infrastructure. We cannot accept this growth paying for growth anymore. It needs to be challenged. This concept needs to be challenged and we need to have a conversation about it.

Carolyn Whitzman What a great final word. Okay. So the time has just ripped by. I would have liked to have twice as much time, to be honest. Thank you to my five panelists and thank you for those excellent questions, everyone.