Housing Community Improvement Plan (CIP)
Barrie to Receive Over $31.9M in Funding
On March 14, the Government of Canada and the City of Barrie announced that they reached an agreement to fast track more than 680 housing units over the next three years. This work will help spur the construction of 4,100 homes over the next decade. The agreement under the Housing Accelerator Fund will provide over $25.6 million.
On March 15, the Government of Ontario announced it will be providing the City with $6,344,201 million in funding through the Building Faster Fund for exceeding 2023 provincial housing targets. The fund rewards municipalities that make significant progress against their targets by providing funding for housing-enabling and community-enabling infrastructure.
Barrie is one of Canada’s fastest growing municipalities. To manage growth and to ensure services and facilities keep pace, the City has a vision and strategy for growth management, and is committed to doing our part to help get more homes, built faster.
Building Progress Dashboard
Housing starts: 1,902 dwelling units started between January 1, 2023 and March 31, 2024. The City defines a housing start when a footing inspection has been scheduled. It means that construction has begun on a new house or multi-unit building.
Monthly building reports include information on building progress, housing starts, building permits issued (includes residential, commercial, industrial, new dwellings, number of new units, etc.), and occupancies granted.
Creating Affordable Places to Live
The City is working to grow its housing options, increase housing supply, and ensure sufficient infrastructure is in place to support growth. The City facilitates the building of homes through planning and building permit approvals, but depends on developers and builders working with community partners to build homes.
One of City Council’s key strategic priorities (2022–2026) is creating an Affordable Place to Live, which includes the following:
- Encouraging a range of housing options to make housing attainable
- Ensuring an “open for business” environment to help encourage job creation
- Developing and attracting talent to support our employers
To do this, the City will measure progress in meeting building and planning targets.
Municipal Housing Pledge
Barrie has prioritized and welcomed growth and development and commits to continuous improvement. In February 2023, the City of Barrie pledged to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing to facilitate the construction of 23,000 housing units by 2031. By the end of 2023, the City had issued planning approvals for 14,641 housing units.
In 2023 the City had 1,809 starts—which exceeded the 2023 target of 1,687. The 2024 target is 1,917 housing starts.
Highlights
Barrie’s 2023 Growth Report showed that the city had 22,298 residential units in the pipeline, and had received $50 million in development charges.
In 2022, Barrie was rated #1 as the overall best municipality across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) for getting new housing developments approved.
For updated information, view the City’s monthly building reports.
Barrie’s Progress in the 10 Housing Accelerator Fund Best Practices
The Government of Canada’s Housing Accelerator Fund provides incentive funding to local governments encouraging initiatives to increase housing supply. It aims to grow the annual housing supply in the country’s largest cities every year, with the goal of creating 100,000 new middle-class homes by 2024-25.
| Best Practice | Status |
|---|---|
| 1. End exclusionary zoning. | In Progress |
| 2. Make municipally owned lands available for housing through strategies such as disposition, acquisition and/or pre-development. | In Progress |
| 3. Increase process efficiency by implementing new technologies or software to speed up development approvals, such as e-permitting. | 🗸 Complete |
| 4. Prioritized/enhanced development approval process for rental and affordable housing. | In Progress |
| 5. Comprehensive review of development charges and fee schedules including waivers, with a focus on permits associated with affordable housing. | Future Project |
| 6. Reduce or eliminate parking standards to increase project viability, density and reduce carbon footprint. | In Progress |
| 7. Eliminate restrictions related to height, setbacks, building floor area and others to allow a greater variety in housing types, including accessory dwelling units. | In Progress |
| 8. Develop affordable housing community improvement plans or strategies/plans for the rapid deployment of affordable housing. | In Progress |
| 9. Design and implement guidelines or pre-approved building plans for missing middle housing or specific accessory dwelling unit types such as laneway housing or garden suites. | Future Project |
| 10. Develop grant programs encouraging the development of housing types that align with the Housing Accelerator Fund such as missing middle, row homes, purpose-built rental and/or that promote new/innovative construction techniques (modular, pre-fab, mass timber construction, etc.) | Future Project |