Social Policy in Ontario

Toronto’s social-housing crisis continues to fester, with no remedy in sight.

Take the latest developments at Toronto Community Housing Corporation, the city’s wholly owned non-profit housing agency.

TCHC recently announced that it will be closing about 400 units next year because it doesn’t have enough money to repair them. That’s on top of 600 units already slated to be shut down this year.

These closures represent a devastating step backward. The city is currently grappling with a pressing shortage of social housing, with some 181,000 people now on the waiting list.

The needed repairs aren’t simple things like broken faucets or chipped paint, but rather big-ticket items like roof repairs, plumbing problems, broken elevators and other issues that make these units uninhabitable.

To deal with these issues, the TCHC has a decade-long, $2.6-billion repair plan. But that’s where things get sticky.

That plan envisions about $440 million being spent next year, but TCHC says it can only access about $82 million. So once again the city is looking to the province and to Ottawa to do their part.

Premier Kathleen Wynne has recently talked a big game about the need for joint cooperation among the three levels of government on the housing file, but on social housing the province was largely mute when its Fair Housing Plan was announced last week.

That plan was more focused on efforts to dampen housing speculation, and cool the red-hot real-estate market in Toronto and its surrounding region.

Now the city is hoping there will be money for social housing fix-ups in the provincial budget Thursday, though Toronto Mayor John Tory said he’s heard no whispers from the province on this front.

As for the feds, Ottawa promised $11 billion for housing over 11 years in its 2017 budget, but officials have up to now been coy about how and when the money will be released, and what it will go toward. (The details of Ottawa’s National Housing Strategy won’t be revealed until later this year.)

So there’s no indication any of this will save the 1,000 TCHC homes set to close. And thousands more homes could be shut down in the coming years if things don’t turn around, TCHC warns.

Last week, former Toronto mayor John Sewell lambasted the city at an executive committee meeting, saying that rather than closing down social housing units it should try to partner with private sector developers and build new units on land the city owns. Market units could be built on the same land to finance the plan, Sewell argued, similar to projects like the redevelopment in Regent Park and Don Mount.

Whatever the merits of that idea, it’s a whole lot better than closing down units while pinning the city’s hopes on money that may or may not be forthcoming from upper levels of government.

Investing in social housing isn’t sexy. It’s certainly not as headline-grabbing as efforts to address Toronto’s overheated real-estate market. Nevertheless, politicians at all levels of government must make public housing in Toronto and other parts of the country a top priority. Everyone deserves a roof over their heads and to live in dignity.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2017/04/26/urgent-action-needed-to-halt-shut-down-of-social-housing-units-editorial.html