The Ford-Chow Consensus is the Housing Crisis
How the Housing Crisis Governs Itself
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and Ontario Premier Doug Ford collaborate regularly on housing policy. On June 6, 2025, Ford presented Chow with a $67.2 million cheque through Ontario's Building Faster Fund "to get more homes built faster" at a joint press conference explicitly focused on housing, celebrating housing starts while suspiciously brushing aside completions — you know, outcomes. But as far as outcomes are concerned, what their partnership produces is the preservation of a planning system that fails anyone who needs somewhere to live.
This isn't a case of politicians struggling with a difficult problem.
This is the housing crisis governing itself.
Both politicians operate through the same extractive institution: British discretionary planning inherited from centuries of colonial administration. Ontario still uses this English-style system we see in use throughout the Anglosphere, where each individual rezoning or minor variance requires a bespoke process rather than being automatically allowed under uniform zoning code as they do in foreign cities, like Montreal. The system we live under grants incumbent homeowners veto power over their neighbors' land use through consultation and appeals processes. Development becomes negotiation with people who already have theirs. This is what Daron Acemoglu calls an extractive institution in Why Nations Fail—designed to benefit a narrow group while excluding everyone else. From here on out, let us call it “exclusionary planning”, as it’s more accurate.
The institution creates its own political economy, and thereby constituency. Well-to-do homeowners in their older years form the base of both Ford and Chow's coalitions. They don't oppose the housing crisis because they aren't living in it. They are the crisis, from the perspective of those locked out. They bought when housing was affordable and want their neighborhoods preserved in amber. Even when upzoning would increase their land values while reducing housing costs—splitting land value across multiple units—they resist change.
This demographic serves as institutional inertia. Whether Right-NIMBY for Ford or Left-NIMBY for Chow, their talking points overlap enough that they provide a distinction without a difference. The crisis speaks through both political brands with identical results: preserve exclusionary control, maintain artificial scarcity, exclude newcomers.
Neither Ford nor Chow has skin in the housing crisis, and therefore housing becomes an abstract policy issue rather than urgent reality. They track housing starts instead of completions. They announce initiatives instead of building homes. When you don't live the emergency, you don't govern like there is one.
The evidence is straightforward. During Toronto's sixplex debate, Chow remained silent while Councillor Gord Perks reduced citywide reform to nine pilot wards. The compromise motion carried 17-7 to permit sixplexes only in downtown wards, not across the city. Strong mayor powers required only nine votes from twenty-six councillors for comprehensive zoning reform. The Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act (in itself an effort by Ford to punt responsibility for the housing crisis onto cities) specifically lets the mayor pass housing bylaws with one-third council support. She had the authority. She chose not to use it.
Ford follows the same pattern. His 2022 Housing Affordability Task Force recommended automatically allowing residential buildings with four units province-wide. He halted implementation, calling the proposal "off the table" and "a mistake" that would "anger residents." By March 2024, Ford ruled out by-right fourplexes to protect his own neighborhood from change. Both politicians avoid by-right zoning—the one reform that would eliminate incumbent homeowner veto power and end artificial scarcity.
They collaborate on everything except what would solve the problem. Ford focuses on business-friendly metrics, Chow on progressive language. Different symbols, identical substance: exclusionary planning preservation. The crisis maintains itself through apparent political choice that produces the same outcomes regardless of who wins.
Party affiliation becomes irrelevant to housing results. Conservative renters, Liberal renters, NDP renters get nothing. Conservative homeowners, Liberal homeowners, NDP homeowners get preservation of the system that benefits them. The only political identity that matters is whether you're inside or outside the housing crisis.
The housing crisis excludes those who would end it. Young folks, working people, new families, and seniors facing housing precarity don’t have time to show up to planning consultations to say “yes” to developments. When you explain to this excluded political constituency that this is why there is a housing crisis: they will believe you, but they will also tell you that they do not have time nor energy to get involved with housing advocacy. These are people focused on making ends meet, and if they do not have time to dilly dally in WebEx calls expressing they’d like a crumb of housing, I would posit they can’t afford to run for council to fix this either. In essence, those who can afford political participation don't need housing reform, and so the people who can afford to be elected generally won’t care for ending suffering they are not privy to. The crisis creates the political exclusion that maintains the crisis.
This pattern now replicates federally. Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, a millennial with skin in the game, understood the crisis from experience. His replacement, Gregor Robertson, brings Vancouver planning department baggage—the same exclusionary system that creates housing crises wherever it operates. Robertson took over the housing portfolio on May 13, 2025, after Erskine-Smith's term ended March 14, 2025.
Robertson's Vancouver record demonstrates the crisis operating through progressive branding. His housing reforms were rendered toothless by planning staff through stepbacks, setbacks, and height restrictions. When this former Mayor was selected as housing minister after Mark Carney campaigned on ending the housing crisis, arguably, the crisis itself may have captured federal policy.
Initially observed in a previous piece, most Mayors are ill-suited to reforming planning systems, because they first learn about urban planning from a broken system interested in self-preservation—as any system is wont to do. As a result, Mayoralties are popularity contests that elect figureheads who turn out to be urban planning neophytes easily captured by planning departments. Ford and Chow don't understand institutional problems because they are part and parcel of the institution’s problems. The exclusionary system is their reality—their shadows on the wall. Rules-based alternatives like Montreal exist outside their experience—the cave entrance being 500km away.
The symbolic moment arrived when Doug Ford asked Olivia Chow on a date. Not politicians crossing party lines, but the housing crisis comfortable with itself. Two supposed opponents aligned in serving the same extractive institution.
The Ford-Chow Consensus reveals something simpler than political failure. There are no Ford housing policies or Chow housing policies. There is only exclusionary planning reproducing itself through whatever political vehicles are available. The crisis doesn't need opposition when consensus serves its interests.
The housing crisis operates by preserving the conditions that create it. Ford and Chow govern those conditions. Their collaboration isn't enabling the crisis—it is the crisis exercising political power. Different parties, same outcomes. Different rhetoric, same preservation of artificial scarcity.
Once you recognize this, the Ford-Chow Consensus becomes visible everywhere. Ontario's housing crisis centers on the Toronto area, with Chow governing the epicenter. Housing demand spills from Toronto into the rest of the province. But the pattern repeats across municipalities: Ford-Brown, Ford-Sutcliffe, Ford-Dilkens. Municipal politicians claim their hands are tied by community consultation. Provincial politicians blame municipal red tape. Federal politicians defer to local democracy rather than enforce Housing Accelerator Fund conditions. All serve the same extractive institution that creates housing scarcity by design.
The housing crisis has political representation. In Ontario it governs through the Ford-Chow Consensus. Every collaborative announcement, every symbolic initiative, every avoided reform demonstrates the crisis maintaining itself through institutional power.
This is what the housing crisis looks like when it has political control. Not politicians failing to solve a problem, but the problem governing itself through politicians who serve its interests. The Ford-Chow Consensus is the housing crisis. The housing crisis is the Ford-Chow Consensus.
Really sharp piece. That point about Montreal and rules-based planning is key. We don’t need more pilot projects or case-by-case rezonings. We need province-wide rules that say if a proposal meets the criteria, it gets built. No appeals. No drawn-out consultations. Just a clear process that actually delivers homes. Cities like Montreal and Tokyo already do this. It works.
And the problem isn’t whether we allow fourplexes or sixplexes. The real issue is how zoning is structured in the first place. It’s layered, confusing, and built to slow things down. What we need is a full cleanup. A simple, cumulative system where the closer you are to transit or a main road, the more options you have. No guessing. No special approvals. Just clear rules.
Right now the system gives power to people who already own homes and know how to block change. Ford and Chow have both had chances to fix it and didn’t. That’s a choice.
It might not feel politically easy, but it has to be made doable. Ford could sell it as cutting red tape. Chow could sell it as fairness. If they won’t do it, they shouldn’t be the ones in charge.
If we don’t change the structure, nothing else changes.