Toronto’s chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, had a warning for city council recently: as much as councillors (and the voters they ultimately answer to) would like to see the breakneck pace of development in the city slow down, “hitting the pause button,” as one councillor put it, on new construction wouldn’t magically solve Toronto’s problems, and the burden of that slowdown wouldn’t be spread fairly.

“We have a tremendous amount of immigration coming to this city … If we slow down growth, we will continue to see prices continue going higher and higher,” Keesmaat said. “The risk is, if we don’t continue to approve and build a significant amount of new housing, we’ll simply see housing prices knock out a whole tier [of residents] from being able to access market housing.”

It’s possible to be sympathetic with Toronto council about the magnitude of the problem they face: not only has the entire region been working through a construction boom, but Toronto’s share of new applications has grown. According to Keesmaat, Toronto’s share of the GTA’s new home completions in 2015 is more than double what it was 20 years ago.

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The problem is, sympathy won’t get the region’s growing population housed any cheaper — nor is the issue restricted to Toronto. It’s a constant of municipal politics everywhere that while nobody is actually opposed to new housing (“How dare you call me a NIMBY!”), everyone always thinks new housing would be better built somewhere else.

Anxieties about over-building like Toronto’s, multiplied across the GTA, almost certainly have large and negative effects on the economy. We can’t say for sure because Canadian data-keeping is laughably poor on this front, but a recent report from Gallup in America cites housing costs (along with education and health care) as among the primary causes of the generation-long withering of the middle class. In short, families are paying more and getting less from their housing budgets, whether they rent or own.

“In 1980, the rent-to-income ratio for the median family was 19 per cent; by 2014, it swelled to 28 per cent," the Gallup report found. "The costs of owning have also increased … People are now living in smaller homes that are older and located farther away from their places of employment.”

Allan Kingston, a non-profit home builder in Los Angeles, reportedly once said that “homes are where jobs go to sleep at night.” It’s a kind of gross way of getting policy makers to take a basic human need seriously — recasting it as an economic policy — but it gets the point across.

Canada is a country where arcane issues like dairy supply management take up a huge amount of political time and energy (check out the Conservative leadership race), but the spiraling cost of housing is treated as an occasionally interesting business story. This is crazy: if policymakers could reduce shelter costs by 10 per cent it would be the equivalent of reducing household budgets by nearly the amount spent on meat, dairy, and eggs. That’s real money that consumers could spend on anything else in the economy, or just save.

Worse still, when a government can be moved to act on affordability, the actual policies have ranged from ineffective to counterproductive. In British Columbia, a tax on foreign owners has so far merely stabilized — not substantially lowered — home prices, and the Liberals there just announced measures to start inflating the market once again. In Ontario, the government’s expanded rebate for first-time home buyers will probably do less harm, but it doesn’t tackle the fundamental problem. It would be more honest to say the best solution the Ontario government has offered to people suffering because of high housing costs in the GTA is expanded GO Transit service to Barrie and Waterloo.

This just asks families to trade money for time. What Toronto, Ontario, and Canada desperately need is a housing policy that doesn’t ask families to endure either high financial burdens (for owners or renters) or life-consuming long-distance commutes. And that will take help from the feds (who regulate banks and mortgages), the provinces (who fund big-ticket infrastructure), and municipalities (who approve the construction of new homes). Oh, and this needs to move quickly.

We’ve had periods of consensus on housing policy before, in the years after the Second World War and again on a smaller scale in the 1970s, when all three levels of government co-operated to produce redevelopments like the St. Lawrence neighbourhood in Toronto. What’s needed now will be more difficult. With sprawl no longer an option, new housing projects increasingly mean fights in established neighbourhoods. Our politics aren't built to resolve these arguments quickly.

There are any number of possible solutions for the taking — from massive public-housing expenditures to massive private redevelopments — but the one thing we know won’t work is saying no.