Let Builders Build: Why Financing and Bureaucracy Are Killing Canadian Development
Let’s say you’ve got a fully-zoned mid-rise condo project on a transit line in Toronto. The land’s been assembled. The site plan’s approved. The neighborhood association hasn’t even tried to sabotage it (which might be a first). It’s a 70-unit infill that adds density, fits the city’s housing goals, and won’t block anyone’s sun or skyline.
And still—it can’t get built.
Why? Because the developer is stuck in an endless loop of planning department ping-pong and bank committees that treat every deal like it’s radioactive.
The numbers work. The builder’s ready. There are buyers. There’s demand.
But the money? Nowhere to be found.
When the System Is Designed to Waste Time and Talent
This is the real tragedy of Canadian housing right now.
The issue isn’t NIMBYs or concrete prices or even interest rates (though none of those help). The issue is that we’ve built a development system where the people who are actually trying to build housing are forced to spend half their time chasing approvals and the other half chasing capital.
Developers aren’t developers anymore—we’re compliance officers, amateur politicians, and part-time investment bankers. Instead of solving the housing crisis, we’re solving PowerPoint formatting problems and waiting 3 weeks to hear if a bank's “internal risk appetite” includes financing homes in, you know, Canada’s largest city.
Planning is Broken. Financing is Worse.
Here’s what the process looks like right now for a mid-sized urban development:
Two years to get rezoning and site plan approvals.
Six months of reworking the project to fit shifting market conditions.
Another six months to a year finding financing—equity, debt, mezz, pref, maybe some bridge. CMHC if you’re brave. A mortgage broker if you’re desperate.
More time waiting on permits, value engineering, coordinating consultants, and arguing with a hydro company that ghosted you after quoting $900,000 to move a pole 12 feet.
At this point, you’ve built nothing. But you’ve spent millions and wasted years of your life navigating systems that claim to support housing but are actively designed to prevent it.
Who Is This Helping?
It’s not helping young buyers. It’s not helping cities that desperately need more housing.
It’s not helping skilled trades sitting idle between jobs.
It’s helping no one—except maybe people who want the current housing shortage to remain a permanent feature, not a bug. Because if the goal were truly more supply, we’d stop treating housing development like it’s money laundering.
The banks are too risk-averse. The cities are too slow. The incentives are backwards.
And the developers—the people actually trying to get things built—are stuck trying to brute-force their way through it all with a smile and a spreadsheet.
There’s a Better Way
Here’s what this could look like:
A dedicated Housing Development Bank—backed by the feds, focused only on real supply creation. No strip malls. No flex industrial. Just housing.
Standardized underwriting: If your deal is zoned, market-feasible, and shovel-ready, it qualifies. Period.
Incentives tied to actual completions, not approvals or press releases.
Penalty points for municipalities that hoard approvals but produce nothing.
The point is: stop making developers play on hard mode when they’re the ones actually capable of delivering supply. We don’t need subsidies. We don’t need grants. We need a system that doesn’t treat every new building like a suspect transaction from an offshore shell company.
Final Thought
Developers want to develop.
Builders want to build.
So why does the system make that feel illegal?
If this country really wants housing, it’s going to have to stop handcuffing the people trying to deliver it. Because right now? The only thing growing faster than our population is the pile of paperwork standing between us and the homes we actually need.