An Open Letter About our Housing Plan

December 14, 2022

Dear friends and neighbors,

As residents and representatives of Mississauga, we want to set the record straight when it comes to our government’s housing plan.

Ontario is expected to grow by more than two million people by 2031. This growth was recently confirmed by the federal government’s new annual immigration targets of half a million people a year over the next three years. Most of these newcomers will be welcomed to Ontario in search of jobs and opportunity, with many choosing Mississauga as home. At the same time, we are in a housing crisis because there are simply not enough homes to meet demand. Over the last decade, an average of 2,100 new homes were built each year in Mississauga – far below the number of homes the city needs to match its population growth.

It’s time to get building. That’s why our government has set a new housing target for Mississauga – 120,000 new homes by 2032 – and made a series of other changes to lower municipal fees and make it cheaper and easier to build homes.

Here are the facts:

• Municipal fees are a tax on Mississauga homebuyers, adding more than $126,000 to the cost of a typical home.
• Mississauga alone has raised these fees far above the rate of inflation, up nearly 30 per cent in the last two years alone.
• Between 2013 and 2019, Mississauga only spent 74 per cent of the charges it collected on new homes each year, despite continuing to raise its rates.
• This left the city with a $271 million reserve last year – money that was collected to fund infrastructure, but has only made homes in Mississauga more expensive, putting the dream of homeownership out of reach for thousands of Ontarians.

Our government is making it cheaper and easier to find a home by limiting or eliminating out-of-control municipal fees on affordable, non-profit, and rental housing that Mississauga desperately needs. At the same time, we are reining in fee increases on all new homebuyers to bring home ownership into reach for more families. Mississauga already waives similar charges to encourage building new office space downtown and we are encouraging them to do the same for affordable housing.

The housing supply crisis is hurting hardworking Mississaugans, and they deserve to see their municipal government take this opportunity to make things better. We urge the city and mayor to back the province’s efforts to end the housing crisis and help young people, newcomers, lower income families, seniors on fixed income, and many others hoping to call Mississauga and Ontario home.

Sincerely,