Olivia Chow Doesn't Care About the Housing Crisis
The stars aligned, but Mayor Chow chose inaction.
Olivia Chow had the power to solve Toronto’s housing crisis.
She chose not to.
Olivia Chow doesn’t care about the housing crisis.
This isn’t a rhetorical flourish. It’s an evidentiary conclusion. The record is clear: when given the opportunity to enact reforms that would materially improve affordability, she declined. Not out of constraint. Out of preference.
The sixplex vote wasn’t a tragedy. It was a decision. A fully-informed, strategically diluted maneuver designed to produce symbolic victory while avoiding structural change.
What Chow brought forward was not the best she could do—it was the most she was willing to risk. That distinction matters. Because in a housing crisis, the limiting factor isn’t zoning complexity, or community input, or procedural inertia. It’s political courage.
Chow’s council passed a sixplex allowance limited to nine Toronto Wards ensuring that the majority of exclusionary neighborhoods remained untouched. Keep the number nine in mind.
The partial rollout was not an unfortunate compromise imposed by others. It was a tactical substitute for a citywide upzoning motion. The language was progressive; the function was regressive. The signal was clear: this council would defend aesthetic reform, but not actual affordability.
Under Ontario’s strong mayor system, Olivia Chow would have only need one-third of a twenty-six seat council to pass citywide zoning reform on sixplexes. For context, the number twenty-six cannot be neatly divided by three, so you have to round up a bit. The number you round up to is nine.
She had the votes to win, if only she chose the option to win. She simply chose not to win, while claiming her hands were tied.
Instead, she chose to negotiate with councillors whose entire political capital is staked on protecting asset-rich, low-density wards. She chose consensus. But consensus with NIMBY interests is not an act of political maturity—it’s the absolute abdication of agency under the guise of statesmanship.
The federal government made it even easier. It offered $471 million in housing funds contingent on bolder zoning reforms. That funding is now imperiled. Not because Chow was forced into a bad deal. But because she actively replaced the qualifying reforms with a weaker motion. The message to Ottawa was unmistakable: we’d rather preserve the political economy of land scarcity than receive nearly half a billion dollars to fix it.
This is not someone navigating constraints. This is someone choosing them.
Let’s map the incentive structure. Wealthy homeowners retain their exclusionary zoning and inflated property values. Councillors posture as “pragmatic” while shielding their base from even marginal increases in density. New homes remain locked out of high-demand neighborhoods. And renters—the people for whom housing policy is not abstract—receive the usual consolation prize: a headline.
This is not a city failing to build housing. It is a city built to not build. And Olivia Chow governs in alignment with that architecture.
Her administration performs empathy with the fluency of a stage actor, while maintaining the systems that guarantee unaffordability. This is not technocratic mismanagement. It’s symbolic substitution: the deliberate replacement of material impact with rhetorical fidelity. In this performance, nostalgia is not just a feeling—it is the policy. Affluent neighborhoods are curated like museums. Historical memory is weaponized to defend present exclusion. And every inch of forward movement is pre-negotiated down to zero.
It’s important to point out something critical about the false progressives on council: they engage in a near constant inversion of truth. The outward language of justice is used to obscure the continuation of harm. The surface of compassion is applied to decisions that preserve structural violence. In this framework, “affordability” no longer names a condition. It names a performance. The word functions to arrest the very outcome it claims to deliver.
The gravity of the betrayal lies not in what was said, but in what was not done. Olivia Chow had the power. She had the tools. She had the mandate. She had all the votes she needed. And she had the funding. Every variable was in her favour. The constraint was not political arithmetic. The constraint was her.
Therefore, be it resolved that Olivia Chow doesn’t care about the housing crisis.
And be it resolved that in a city like Toronto, that is indistinguishable from choosing the crisis itself.