Thousands of community housing residents are breathing a little easier this weekend. On Friday Rob Ford appointed a task force to find a solution to Toronto Community Housing’s repair backlog that doesn’t involve selling off their homes.
Ford had been backing a staff recommendation to auction off 675 stand-alone houses owned by TCHC in order to pay for much-needed maintenance at its larger properties. With the repair backlog sitting at $650 million and growing by $100 million every year, the TCHC leadership wants to take advantage of Toronto’s hot housing market and raise $222 million from the sale.
But faced with a tenant backlash and a newly emboldened council that recently defeated him over his budget and transit plans, Ford twice deferred a vote on the sale and Friday appointed Councillor Ana Bailao, a centrist on council, to head up the task force. Left-leaning councillors had raised concerns about finding homes for the 2,600 tenants who would be displaced by the sale, given that there are already 80,000 people on TCHC’s waiting list.
Bailao and the mayor will choose up to four housing experts to serve on the working group, which will then execute a property-by-property review of the homes.
Bailao is confident that there are other ways to address the repair backlog than selling the houses on the open market and forcing tenants into TCHC highrises.
“The reality is these houses are extremely expensive to operate for the city but they have an important reason for being in the affordable housing sector. We don’t want to diminish our affordable housing stock,” says Bailao.
Alternatives she has been given a mandate to consider include off-loading the properties to a non-profit group like Habitat for Humanity to operate as affordable housing, asking tenants who are able to buy their houses to do so, and devising an intergovernmental strategy to secure long-term funding from other levels of government.
The task force will report back in September, and no matter what it recommends Bailao is insisting that tenants have a voice in the outcome.
“I don’t think tenants have been involved in the process enough,” she says. “This has to be a bottom up solution.”
Over 100 people signed up to speak at the special session of Ford’s executive committee on Friday, many of them tenants who say they don’t want to be uprooted. The houses being considered for sale are so-called “scattered” units, most of which are single-dwelling homes embedded in mixed-income neighbourhoods, and are a far cry from the notorious TCHC high rises.
Doris Power said that being forced to move to an apartment building would be devastating for her son Jordan, who has autism and Down’s syndrome.
“This is a boy who’s going to be at risk in some of those ghettos,” she said. “I live in a healthy neighbourhood. That’s my community. To move me out of it is going to break my family.”
Rosemary Da Silva, who lives in one of the scattered homes in Leslieville with her daughter, welcomed the task force.
“It’s a step in the right direction. It’s chance for us to look at something other than a mass sell-off,” she said. “I enjoy my neighbours, my neighbours care about us. They want us to stay.”
The executive committee did approve the sale of some homes on Friday. Fifty-six properties that are currently vacant and in disrepair will go on the market as planned.
bens@nowtoronto.com
