Summit to find solutions to Ontario's housing crisis comes to Sudbury

Home builders, politicians and regulators were gathered in a hotel basement in Sudbury, Ont., on Tuesday to find solutions to Ontario's housing crisis.

"Anytime you've got too many people looking for too few homes available for purchase, or being built, it approaches what would be defined as a crisis," said Scott Andison, the CEO of the Ontario Home Builders' Association.

The association has been travelling across the province, and in collaboration with Enbridge, has hosted housing summits at each stop. Sudbury was the fourth of six planned events.

"I just think that anytime we can bring together government and builders to talk about ways to get more houses coming online faster, I think that we should take advantage of as many opportunities as we can on this," Andison said.

Derek Cashmore, the president of the Sudbury District Home Builders' Association, says they plan to put together a playbook after the summits have ended with some potential solutions to the housing crisis.

"We're going to have a script," he said.

"We're going to have a playbook and say what's working, what's not working. And then we're going to send it back out to folks and say, 'OK, here's the game plan.'"

Cashmore says some barriers to getting more houses built are unique to particular communities, while others are more universal.

One challenge in Sudbury, he says, is that the city is located in the Canadian Shield, which means builders often have to blast and remove hard rock to get anything built.

More common barriers include accessing land on which to build homes, and a shortage of skilled workers in the construction industry.

Cashmore adds that there isn't one thing that will solve the housing crisis.

"It's like building a puzzle," he said.

"If there's only four pieces to a puzzle, we've only got the first one. You can't complete the rest until you've got the other three pieces."

Susan Cudahy, Enbridge's supervisor of strategic builder relations, says the biggest barrier to building more homes is a lack of communication between different stakeholders.