Budget reveals how public lands will be used to build 1.2 million homes

The budget, however, revealed details about how the federal government intends to use the stocks of public land across Canada to spur housing development.

The government now claims its efforts will contribute to the construction of a “minimum” of 1.2 million of the 3.87 million new homes projected to be built in Canada by 2031.

That’s just shy of the 1.3 million extra homes the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer recently concluded are needed to meet projecting housing demand by 2030.

Last year, the Crown agency responsible for housing said a total of 3.5 million homes will be needed by 2030 to “restore affordability” to 2004 levels.

The budget promises the government will spend $500 million over the next five years on a “Public Lands Acquisition Fund” that Ottawa will use to buy land from other levels of government to “help spur” mixed-market housing construction.

Over the next decade, $1.1 billion will go toward reducing the federal government’s suite of underused office properties by 50 per cent — a move the budget says will actually save $3.9 billion over the next 10 years. The government will also look to build homes on Canada Post properties and by “exploring” development on lands owned by the Department of National Defence, the budget says.

Another $113 million over five years will go to the federal agency, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, to make more federal lands available to “affordable” housing development, the budget says.

Beyond that, the budget pledges that Ottawa will review the “entire portfolio” of federal lands to rapidly find sites to build new homes, and to create a “Public Land Bank” before this fall to show the inventory of available sites.

And, to push investors who own land zoned for home construction to actually get building, it will consider introducing a tax if those lands sit vacant.

Another new housing measure outlined in the budget promises to extend a program to give cities money to provide shelter to asylum claimants — an issue that sparked a feud between Toronto and the federal government in recent months — by three years, at a cost of almost $1.1 billion.

The deluge of new housing measures in recent weeks comes after Canada’s housing crisis exploded into a major political issue over the past year. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has blamed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for failing to prevent rising home costs, while experts have warned that decades-high immigration numbers have helped fuel the need for much faster housing construction to meet the demand in Canada.

In response, the government has promised $15 billion in new loans to build apartments, including $100 million to build homes on top of existing shops and businesses, and attach conditions to federal loans to spur provincial governments to match new funding and cut red tape to speed up new construction.

The government also announced a new $6-billion infrastructure fund over the next 10 years to pay for water, wastewater and other systems, the bulk of which will be available if provinces agree to legalize denser housing, among other conditions.

Ottawa will also attach conditions to federal public transit funding, by requiring communities receiving the money to green light “high-density” housing within 800 metres of high-frequency transit and post-secondary institutions.