The city counts units built and calls it a housing policy

The housing target is a number of units. It is not a number of affordable units, and the reporting does not separate the two, so the city can hit its target while the shortage it was written to address gets worse.

This is not a Sudbury invention — the provincial framework counts the same way, and every municipality in Ontario is filing the same shape of number. But Sudbury chose to adopt the measure without adding one of its own, and nothing prevented it from adding one. A city is allowed to publish more than it is asked for.

The theory behind counting doors is filtering: build enough of anything and the pressure comes off everything, as households move up and vacate what they leave behind. It is not a foolish theory. In a market with a functioning middle of the ladder it broadly works. It works slowly, it works unevenly, and it works least well for the households furthest down — which in this city means the people the housing conversation is nominally about.

There is also a political cost to the current measure that council should care about even if it disputes everything above. A target reported this way is unfalsifiable. It will be met. It will be announced as being met. And the people on the waiting list, who can read a vacancy listing as well as anyone, will conclude that the city is either not paying attention or counting on them not to. Neither reading helps the next time the city needs public support for a housing decision.

Report units by rent band, quarterly, against the incomes actually earned in this city — not against a provincial average median that describes somewhere else. It costs a staff report and a spreadsheet column. Council should direct it at the next planning committee, and residents should notice which councillors argue that the column is unnecessary.