For the 80,000 people on the Toronto Community Housing Corporation waiting list, last week was not a good one.
Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Kathleen Wynne, likely with direction from the premier’s office, caved and allowed the city to sell 65 of over 600 houses on residential streets owned by TCHC.
Most of these homes are vacant, but if this sell-off is just the start of a larger one, rehousing these tenants will be at the expense of people desperately waiting, sometimes up to 12 years, for an affordable home.
The public housing challenge started with the Conservative government’s downloading of the public housing portfolio in the mid-1990s. Mike Harris’s regime passed the repair backlogs on to the municipalities, handing over the already tired buildings with no funds for fix-ups.
The feds at the same time got out of the housing business, and soon Canada was the only OECD country without a national housing program. Compare this to Sweden, where in many communities, over one-third of people live in mixed-income government housing that includes below-market and high-priced units.
The homes slated to be sold were consciously acquired by the old city of Toronto and other former municipalities in order to diversify its subsidized housing stock. Sprinkled around the city, these houses are often divided into several units that generally have more floor space than traditional tower and townhouse units, the bulk of TCHC’s portfolio.
While the sale of these houses will likely bring in around $300 million (less real estate costs) to be used for repairs, there is no discussion about replacing them. If the 900 units were replaced, the experience of the Regent Park revitalization suggests the costs would likely be in the range of $275 million, eating up most of the profits.
There’s no question that updating housing past its prime and building new spaces will need more cash input from the city, province and feds, likely in the range of $60 million annually for years to come, and that the province should be working with other levels of government to create a national housing strategy as recommended in the Drummond Report. But this on its own won’t solve the problem Toronto has to borrow the creative ideas pioneered in other cities.
A new report is coming from the Wellesley Institute, and director of housing and innovation Michael Shapcott says it will look at how Toronto can borrow creative ideas pioneered in other cities.
New York City’s housing authority, for example, with over 415,000 people in 181,500 units, is turning over buildings to non-profit housing providers who have experience managing other low-income housing.
Toronto has lots of successful not-for-profits working in the field, like DACHI (Don Area Co-operative Homes Inc.), a member-controlled organization managing 41 houses in Cabbagetown. This model would allow close attention to be paid to individual units in a way that TCHC can’t manage cost-effectively now. It would also make it easier to attract outside funding.
TCHC, which has 160,000 residents, could also expand its borrowing through a full implementation of the tower renewal program for energy and other environmental upgrades. The energy savings pay for renovations (and interest on loans) and allow the buildings to be upgraded in other ways that don’t cost TCHC money.
Another successful model is the Regent Park redo. This innovative project took a lot of dedicated work by TCHC staff as well as its private-sector partner, the Daniels Corporation. It wasn’t about quickly throwing up buildings, but about working with the community to address special needs not present in typical private-sector developments.
The plan is to use 3,000 new market condominiums to fund the replacement of 2,083 social housing units and create 700 new ones.
At Don Mount Court, similarly, construction crews are putting the final touches on a new park and road system, and residents have already moved into the 232 new social housing units and 187 market condos.
There are plans for more redevelopments of TCHC properties, including Lawrence Heights and Alexandra Park. These projects are big and complicated, and involve transforming existing communities. In order to get redevelopment right, there needs to be cross-departmental support at the city, a strong team at TCHC, a great private partner and political support to help solve problems as they arise over 10- to 20-year horizons.
Toronto, in many ways, has been a leader in innovative housing solutions. By deepening our successes and doing some creative borrowing from other cities, we’ll start to solve the problems of the tens of thousands of our neighbours who lack proper homes.
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