From Housing Now to Housing When? Exploring the State’s Approach to Affordable Housing

This paper offers an explanatory framework for the genesis, operation, and outcome of the City of Toronto’s Housing Now Initiative. To better understand the roles of the state and civil society within this policy initiative, this paper seeks to uncover theories that aid in an explanation of the development and implementation of the Housing Now Initiative and the roles of different institutions in the shared objective of creating more housing. The final outcome of this major research paper is an explanatory framework of the genesis and operation of Toronto’s Housing Now Initiative.
The Housing Now Initiative is an approach to leverage City of Toronto-owned land for the development of affordable housing within mixed-income, mixed-use, and transit-oriented communities. The Housing Now Initiative aims to address the need for affordable rental housing in Toronto, as indicated by the low residential vacancy rate, the significant number of people experiencing homelessness each night, and the increasing unaffordability of housing. Toronto is also expected to grow both economically and in population, further increasing the pressure to expand rental housing supply. Using state theory, the concept of hegemony, growth machine theory, and Social Reproduction Theory, this paper will suggest that the Housing Now Initiative represents a condensation of a relationship of forces between the dominant classes (i.e. real estate developers) and the dominated classes (i.e. those seeking affordable housing) as mediated and condensed by the state, particularly the City of Toronto. Furthermore, it will be suggested that the state upholds the hegemony of the dominant classes through a growth ideology with the goal of guaranteeing the reproduction of labour power to fill the gaps left by the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Such an analysis points to the codependent relationship between real estate developers and local governments and allows for further investigations into the efficacy of state-led initiatives to increase the affordable housing supply in Toronto.