Opinion: Toronto’s universities produce top talent – then its housing crisis casts them out

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Students and pedestrians walk along Gould St. on the Toronto Metropolitan University campus on Jan. 22.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

Aidan Thompson is the vice-president of public and university affairs at the University of Toronto Students’ Union.

Being a student at one of Toronto’s major universities feels like one of those “pay half now, buy later” phone plans. You enjoy the city’s perks for a few years, but once you graduate, the realities of high costs hit hard.

With essential expenses ballooning, it’s no wonder more than 40 per cent of Ontario’s postsecondary graduates are considering leaving the province. Cities with universities attract talent, but their increasingly high cost of living means students often cannot afford to live in these places after graduation.

This resulting brain drain weighs on the economy and the future of our cities. It’s a problem that is particularly acute for Toronto, home to leading postsecondary institutions and, at the same time, a housing crisis that is among the country’s worst.

This problem can be fixed, but only if we shift our city to a true growth mindset – and that starts with changing how we think about youth engagement.

Today, Canada is witnessing explosive population growth, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1950s. Back then, the postwar population boom was paired with a postwar explosion in the construction of critical infrastructure. Some policy makers are bringing back strategies that aided that infrastructure boom, such as the standardized, preapproved home design catalogue popularized in the postwar period and recently resurrected by the federal Ministry of Housing.

Yet our cities remain choked by regulation – especially Toronto.

Our sprawling neighbourhoods of single-family homes, artificially restricted to low-density living, spoil any hope young people have of finding an affordable place to live by limiting supply. The large-scale developments that should offer pricing reprieve have their costs driven up by endless community consultations and onerous extra expenses, such as high-priced “shadow studies” and incessant setbacks, all to satisfy NIMBYs who know how to work the system.

If Toronto had kept the attitudes toward homebuilding it had in the postwar era, today’s young people would have a city they could afford to live in.

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Instead, we watch as graduates flee the city because we didn’t invest in building and making it an affordable place to stay. This is an ugly, vicious circle.

Toronto is in desperate need of highly skilled workers: more engineers to fix infrastructure; more architects to design buildings; more city planners to clear the massive building application backlog; more graduates in the social sciences and humanities to reinvigorate our politics, business and cultural sectors. The affordability crisis is pushing these workers away and, without them, we’ll never be able to truly solve this affordability crisis.

Yet when this problem is raised, at every turn, students have to work twice as hard to make our voices heard.

Take, for example, community consultations for new housing developments. Students in these forums are routinely told their perspectives, usually in favour of more density, don’t matter because they won’t be living in the neighbourhood for longer than three to four years anyways, as if a student’s need for housing is some sort of transient, short-term issue rather than a long-term problem to be taken seriously. If this has a grain of truth, it’s only because students cannot afford to live in the cities where they study after graduation. Treating students’ housing needs as transient causes them to become transient.

Or take the city’s approach to budget consultations: courting established neighbourhood groups like residents’ associations while disregarding the hundreds of thousands of students who call Toronto home.

To be fair, this apathy makes some political sense – youth are not particularly involved in local politics. We tend not to vote. But there is more to youth’s value than just our vote. We’re quite literally the future of the city.

Graduates deciding whether to stay or leave for better opportunities is an existential matter for any major metropolis. And that’s what this is really all about – will Toronto choose to be a city that builds, or will it fall into decades of decay?

If you ask the youth, the answer is simple: It’s time for Toronto to get back into the business of building.

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