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“One million is a rough estimate,” chief planner Jason Thorne told reporters at a technical briefing in city hall Thursday morning. “It doesn’t require developers to build absolutely to the maximum of what’s being permitted.”

It’s a more conservative prediction than the one Housing Minister Rob Flack gave at a press conference last month of 1.5 million homes in 25 years. 

It’s also still quite ambitious, some planning and urban geography experts say. The city .ÌýÌý

“This is probably the most transformational change we’ve had in º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøin decades,” said urban planner Sean Galbraith. “From a policy perspective, it’s doing everything right. The challenge is going to be in the implementation.” 

There are some “yellow-to-red flags,” Galbraith said he sees, however. There don’t seem to be any plans to update the city’s decades-old land-use designations, which would hamper building in areas designated as residential neighbourhoods, where the height cap for buildings, even around transit stations, will be six storeys. 

There’s also a potential issue that could occur if city council were to try to intervene and block densification in some wards. While a provincial decree has, some new builds will still require site-specific rezoning applications, which need to pass through council. In June, suburban councillors defeated a push to allow the construction of sixplexes citywide. This prompted the federal housing minister to issue a warning to the mayor that the city could lose the funding it was given to increase housing supply if it didn’t reconsider. 

“It’s unclear what will happen when somebody actually tries to implement this,” said Galbraith. “The city is going to have to tolerate having a really tall building next to a neighbourhood to achieve this density. If they don’t, then the policy is functionally dead.”

Thorne said it would likely be about a year and a half before ground broke on the first development allowed by these changes. 

“There will be pushback,” said Mayor Olivia Chow at the briefing on Thursday. “People are always worried about change. But change can be embraced. We absolutely need to build more homes.” 

Last year, Toronto’s census metropolitan area gained nearly 270,000 new residents, which marked a record-breaking growth of 3.9 per cent, exceeding the previous record of 3.8 per cent set the year before. In the first half of this year, , according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, said she worried that the province’s new minimum density targets of 200 residents and jobs per hectare near subways, 160 by light rail and 150 by GO transit might incentivize the construction of yet more towers full of shoebox apartments. 

“We recently mapped out targets of 200 residents and jobs per hectare for another city and found that the only type of building possible was towers with bachelor and one-bedroom apartments,” she said. “Developers make more money if they build more small units in towers than big units in shorter buildings.”

She also questioned why only buildings over 30 storeys needed to pitch civic infrastructure projects.

“We want to see complete communities here, including civic infrastructure and a variety of building types, which will be challenging with these targets unless there are significant numbers of jobs,” said Chapple. 

It’s unfortunate, too, she said, that only 53,000 of the new units will be rent-geared-to-income housing. That makes up just five per cent of the million projected homes. But even still, it may be “too much in this market” where developers are saying their costs are so high they can’t afford taxes and development charges. 

“But perhaps between macro changes (such as) interest rate cuts, and federal policy efforts, development will start up again,” she said.