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September 21 and 22
2 days, 2 disciplines, 2 ways to participate – defining our professional roles and uniting to build more equitable, accessible and inspired communities.
#2GETHER2022
Government Lands Dr. David Amborski and the Centre for Urban Research have been focusing on examining tracking government lands and potential surplus or available lands to develop affordable housing. Today, the inventory and tracking of government lands are widely dispersed among different agencies and sub-agencies that control their ownership of lands under different bureaucracies. We will examine how urban and suburban areas' limit of land inventory and supply along with the poor awareness of municipal and government lands available for affordable housing has limited the number of affordable housing units being released onto the market. We will look at the newly update government land database and maps that can highlight potentially unpublished government properties that could be used to address the housing supply shortage and support affordable housing at a reasonable cost. Non-Profit Perspective - Key Barriers Rural Development Network or Habitat for Humanity will be providing an on-ground perspective of the difficulties and barriers to building affordable housing. They will discuss case study examples of regulatory and high due diligence costs, and the fight for finding land or property to build on at a lower cost to meet affordable housing rent requirements. They will also speak about the change in the industry building traditional single-family homes toward mid to high-density development by working with developers or the city in urban areas. The non-profit will briefly speak about how using data intelligence and online tools will reduce costs and resources as many non-profits have limited staffing and cash flow. Data-Driven Devin Tu will talk about the partnership with CMHC and Affordablee.ca and their release of a new data intelligence tool for free for all government agencies, non-profit housing builders, and planners across 16 cities. Based on interviews of 30 different affordable housing partners, he will talk about his finding on the key barriers to building affordable housing, specifically around planning regulations, costs and financing, and land opportunities for housing. He will talk about the data-driven analytics and GIS mapping that can be used to identify key affordable housing locations and the risk in a few minutes. He will talk about the launch of free data tools to help urban planners to support building more affordable housing.