Letter: How Could a County CIP Help with Affordable Housing Needs?
Bill 60 lets counties adopt Community Improvement Plans. Days after Grey County council backed a study of the new tool, Marilyn Struthers explains how it could be used to support non-market housing.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
In late 2025, the Ontario government made a number of changes in the Planning Act through Bill 60 that affect communities’ ability to create affordable housing. This Act governs how municipalities and counties deal with development planning.
The one very important change is the new ability for counties to create and resource a Community Improvement Plan (CIP). A CIP sets out local priorities and strategies to improve the built, economic, and social environment in designated areas of community life, including affordability.
Already in play in municipalities, CIPs are one tool the Social Finance and Housing Group identifies for municipalities to use to provide an extra measure of support for non-market housing.
Nonmarket housing developed by nonprofit organizations such as Lutheran Social Services, Ainsley Wood Co-op and the Owen Sound Municipal Housing Corporation. In a housing market that has failed as building costs outstrip many working families’ financial capacity, these developments take profit out of the affordability equation.
Increasing our supply of nonmarket housing and enabling local investment are two of the four local housing systems changes the Social Finance and Housing Group calls for in the Whole Community Approach to Affordable Housing.
And we are not alone; all around Ontario communities are working across sectors with local government, nonprofits, charities, foundations and donors to do more in new ways. Community owned housing, permanent affordability.
So, what can our County do to support affordable housing with a CIP that it couldn’t do before?
The Whole Community Approach calls on our local governments — alongside our community organizations, businesses and investors — to further local investment in the housing stock we need.
Our Community Wealth and Housing event series exploring just how other communities are doing this. It sold out this past spring – demonstrating a lot of local interest and concern.
Grey County prepared for the provincial decision on CIPs in their 2025 Housing Action Plan Update. Reaching ahead of the changes, the update suggested how, with the ability to develop a regional CIP, the County can “support offerings of incentives for those housing types and pricings that the market may not be well positioned to achieve”.
Those “offerings” could be a strategy for surplus lands or other kinds of resourcing for affordable units.
Tackling tough problems like affordability and homelessness require a combined regional and local set of strategies. Now municipalities can work together at a regional level through the County, as well as act at the local level.
Adequate workforce housing is critical to the future of business in our region, particularly rental housing at rates affordable to residents in the service industries that make up such a large part of our economic base.
Counties already hold the responsibility for subsidized housing (with a years long waitlist) — shelter for those well below market rates as well as the region’s economic development. Municipalities are responsible for development decisions that create housing adequate to most of their working community member’s needs.
Homelessness is where these two issues meet, particularly in Owen Sound as downtown businesses struggle with a near epidemic of people without homes.
The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH) recent report: Homelessness is a Housing Problem in Canada just brought these two issues into direct correlation linking data on communities with low rates of affordable rental housing to those with the highest rates of homelessness. Cause and effect.
We will not solve the local housing crisis here community by community. As a region of small municipalities our economies and our workforces are interconnected. Economic vibrancy and adequate housing depend on the ability to work together across our spread geography. County CIPs are a new tool to help to achieve that.
Sincerely,
Marilyn Struthers
Social Finance & Housing Group hosted by the Institute of Southern Georgian Bay
Letters to the Editor do not necessarily reflect the opinions or beliefs of The Owen Sound Current and its editor or publisher.
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