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A non-profit organization, for low income individuals seeking housing

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The Outrageous Canadian Housing Market Bubble Explained

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One way to demonstrate social innovation is by asking our City Officials what they plan to do about affordable rental stock. Besides providing welfare, subsidized living, and ushers like renting to own properties, what can be done when coming to the starting rate with renting units in general.

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Housing is over priced, and people who make minimum wage can not afford a home.

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In 2001 the federal government along with the provinces and territories made an agreement to come up with a plan to improve affordable housing over a five-year span. This plan was called Affordable Housing Initiative (AHI), which would eventually commit $1 billion towards this cause. Then over two years $1.6 billion dollars were pledge in the 2005 NDP/ Liberal budget (a.k.a. Bill C-48). The year after in 2006 the Harper government distributed this money into three housing trust funds from the federal government budget. While this framework was not a part of the AHI, yet it has added energy and power to the housing front.

After years of debate stretching back to the 1980s, rent supplements have become quite popular in Ontario in the past half dozen years, especially as vacancy rates increased. One of the more well-known rent-supplement programs of recent years is the one created to help house former residents of Toronto's Tent City squatter camp. The Emergency Homelessness Pilot Project (EHPP) began in September 2002, almost immediately after Tent City residents were removed from their squat.

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Toronto's latest investment in affordable housing

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We would like to bring to you the VILLA. We are a not-for-profit organization, funded by the government of Canada, offering substantial housing for those who are in need.
Our luxury Villa has multiple locations all over Canada, seeking to help those that need spaces for family, children and, expecting mothers. When you come into our facility you will be provided with a caseworker that will assist you during your stay. You will be assessed, this is necessary so that we can help you, regain your financial stability, with possibilities of becoming a full-time resident at the Villa, with low income, subsidy assessments for each individual needs.

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Ignored & Ignited: Many Canadians struggling to find affordable homes

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The city needs more housing.

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A second policy change that would improve affordability is rapidly expanding construction and acquisition funding so that more affordable housing can be created.

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Overcrowded housing during the pandemic increases residents’ vulnerability to the spread of other infectious diseases and bacteria, such as the common cold or flu. It limits privacy and personal space to work, play, learn and relax. Further, it can place added strain on relationships both inside and outside of the home

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Overcrowded housing during the pandemic increases residents’ vulnerability to the spread of other infectious diseases and bacteria, such as the common cold or flu. It limits privacy and personal space to work, play, learn and relax. Further, it can place added strain on relationships both inside and outside of the home

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One way to demonstrate social innovation is by asking our City Officials what they plan to do about affordable rental stock; besides providing welfare, subsidized living, and, ushers like renting to own properties. What can be done when coming to the starting rate with renting units in general. In Natasha Bulowski’s article in 2020, the Ottawa-Centre Councilor Catherine Mckenney had much to say. She adds, “When we talk about affordable housing, supportive housing, social housing, we can’t look at a profit margin. We have to look at a health, social service margin. We have to make sure people are well taken care of and once you put profit into that you will lose that.” Mckenney also presented suggestions such as, “To drastically increase the construction of new affordable rental units, preferably by public or non-profit actors, in combination with provincial and federal rental assistance programs; meanwhile people can afford to pay for their homes.” If we carefully and strategically experiment with these collaborations, we can in turn produce communities that are supplementary, as well as connected through this inclusive development. With fair housing laws, and access to public transportation.

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The current solution is subsidized housing, shelters etc. However, this is not working because many people are still on waiting lists that go anywhere from 2-5 years and even 15-20 years.

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If we can retain focus on building large-scale community housing, there could be significant transformations made throughout our City. Affordable housing should not only exist within the confines of red-zone areas. But branch off into different sectors of the City. Quoting the author of ‘6 Things Canada Could (But Won’t) Do to Solve the Housing Crisis’. “Part of what made home ownership affordable in Canada in the post-war boom years was the construction of large-scale community housing projects, financed by taxpayers. It meant that a significant chunk of residents, those at the lower end of the income ladder, simply weren't in the "free market" for housing, reducing demand and helping to keep prices in check. We stopped building those large-scale projects back in the 1970s, and there is now a five- to seven-year wait list for subsidized housing in Toronto.” By reintroducing well aged techniques and courses of action, we can significantly expand views, opinions, and perspectives that have been accumulated over the years.

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The demand for housing has become more than the supply of them. Thousands of immigrants are migrating to Canada every year, but new housing is not being developed proportionately. Lack of available land is not a problem as Canada is the second largest country in the world. Lack of government intervention, government policy, low income, and inflow of money from foreign countries is the fuel to this issue. Pinki (2019) states that, “these factors include insufficient income, access to desirable employment, cost of living expenditures, and the foreign investors’ speculative purchasing habits. As a result of these factors, continually rising housing costs are making it increasingly difficult to address the affordable housing problem”. Proceeding, this issue could be solved by the government or private sector taking the initiative to develop more housing at a lower price. Developers are taking this chance to create a vacuum of housing supply, generating the prices of houses to be increased along with the growth in demand. Olive (2020) states that the production of said accommodations have not been kept up with, within the GTA’s rapid population growth. Between 2016 and 2019, the GTA added more than 325,000 jobs, but only 102,000 new homes. Only two per cent of those new homes are classified as affordable.

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Due to the increased pricing of affordable housing, many are left in despair, here is an example of how some people live in Canada, one of the richest countries in the world, yet still so many continue to become homeless, due to the lack of affordability.

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What it's like to be homeless in Toronto

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The social problem that needs to be identified is the lack of affordable housing. There are minimal government housing and a substantial amount of new products within the housing community. Unfortunately, none of these homes are beneficial to low-income individuals and families. The housing market and rentals are highly-priced where most individuals with minimum wage jobs can not afford to have a roof over their heads.

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The social problem that needs to be identified is the lack of affordable housing. There are minimal government housing and a substantial amount of new products within the housing community. Unfortunately, none of these homes are beneficial to low-income individuals and families. The housing market and rentals are highly-priced where most individuals with minimum wage jobs can not afford to have a roof over their heads.

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Many of these current government-funded houses are completely neglected, in unsustainable living conditions, bug infestations, and hazard concerns. Still, these are continuously being neglected, left in the dark leaving many people vulnerable having no means to afford housing. In the areas that contain these government properties, lots of crime happens in these areas, young women, children and expectant mothers live in fear of their safety while gun crimes, drug trafficking and unsustainable living conditions continue.

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Fried, J. N. (2012;2015;). Who really drove the economy into the ditch? Algora Publishing

Bulowski, N. (2020, May 01). Our opportunity to end housing poverty. Retrieved April 14, 2021, from https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/our-opportunity-end-housing-poverty#:~:text=Rental%20support%20subsidies%20and%20housing,find%20rentals%20for%20reasonable%20prices.

Olive, D. (2020, February 15). Toronto housing is getting out of reach - should private companies start providing homes for workers? thestar.com. https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2020/02/15/toronto-housing-is-getting-out-of-reach-should-private-companies-start-providing-homes-for-workers.html.

Tencer, D. (2019, May 06). 6 things Canada could (but won't) do to solve the housing crisis. Retrieved April 14, 2021, from https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/05/04/canada-housing-crisis-solutions_a_23721633/

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Toronto's housing crisis shows no signs of abating.

The city is already among the 10 most expensive major housing markets in the world, as measured by the ratio of household income to house prices. And Toronto house prices are forecast to jump again this year, by just under 10 per cent in 2020, according to a report last month from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board.

We have a housing crisis because there aren't enough houses. It's that simple, though policymakers don't seem to understand that.

Supply has not kept up with the GTA's rapid population growth.

Between 2016 and 2019, the GTA added more than 325,000 jobs, but only 102,000 new homes. And only two per cent of those new homes are classified as affordable.

Unfortunately, we have misdiagnosed the problem. We have attacked only the demand side of the housing crisis, when our problem is lack of supply.

The Bank of Canada has kept interest rates artificially low in a bid to make our insufficient supply of houses somehow affordable. Toronto's surtax on foreign home buyers tries to make the limited supply of houses affordable by discouraging offshore buyers.

The feds' stress tests on mortgage applicants have tried to make a limited housing stock affordable by discouraging would-be buyers of modest means.

Last September, the feds launched a first-time home buyer subsidy, again in hopes of making the existing supply of houses more affordable.

Those measures, most of them efforts to manage demand, have been in place long enough to have made a difference.

And they haven't.

Those responses to the housing crisis have failed because they have not increased the supply of homes, period.

Economists describe that misguided approach as too much attention to demand, and scarcely any to supply.

Some solutions that might work:

Scale up the National Housing Strategy. Ottawa has been financing up to 125,000 new housing units over 10 years to 2027.

But that's a meagre 12,500 units per year for the entire country, when the GTA alone welcomes more than 100,000 immigrants a year in need of housing.

Ottawa can make a meaningful difference by boosting its new housing to at least 50,000 units per year, starting now, or 250,000 units by 2025.

That would still be a lower level of federal housing provision than the 1980s, just before Ottawa effectively quit the housing field.

Scale up "worker housing." In December, Toronto city council approved the HousingTO plan, which would provide 40,000 new affordable rental units over 10 years to 2030.

Here again, the effort is insufficient - just 4,000 new housing units per year. And almost half of those units would be social housing.

True, social housing needs a boost. But the housing crisis is most acute in the shortage of "worker housing" - shelter for Torontonians with too much income to qualify for social housing, but not enough to afford decent shelter.

Example: Average monthly rent for a one-bedroom Toronto apartment hit $2,300 last month. A daycare worker, with average annual income of $32,920, can afford to pay just $823 in monthly rent, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp (CMHC).

The city's $23.4-billion plan, to be jointly financed with Ottawa and Queen's Park, would benefit from focusing on where the need is greatest. That is affordable housing units for low-income workers, including teachers, nurses, orderlies, transit workers, cooks, nannies, security and custodial staff, and sanitation personnel. These are people who provide essential services to the city but cannot afford to live here.

Get employers to provide housing. The University of British Columbia has built up an inventory of rental units for faculty and staff that now numbers 685 units, administered by the arms-length UBC Properties Trust. Rental rates for UBC employees are 25 per cent lower than Vancouver's sky-high market rates.

Resort operators in Whistler, B.C., began building worker housing in the 1980s. Today's Whistler Housing Authority manages 2,033 rental and ownership units for workers in the town. Developers of new resorts and other enterprises in Whistler must provide new employee housing, or pay the housing authority to build it.

As mortgage costs soared, Bristol, England, faced an exodus of municipal workers priced out of the city. So Bristol has built a 161-unit housing development for municipal employees. City-employed residents of the new Elderberry Walk will pay 90 per cent of market rent. Or they can take shared ownership with the city of their units, accumulating equity while making payments on a comparatively modest mortgage.

A similar plan is underway in San Mateo, Calif., which is detailed along with other innovative projects in " Housing a Generation of Workers," a must-read report by the Toronto Region Board of Trade and social-services provider WoodGreen, released last month.

"By building homes close to employment, we can help reduce commutes, congestion and air pollution while improving workers' quality of life and productivity," that report asserts.

Readers will recognize in the above examples the model of the company town, where employer housing was provided of necessity due to remote location.

It's time to revive and refine that model. Since it would be built from scratch or occupy retrofitted buildings, the new affordable housing would boost the energy efficiency of the city's entire building stock.

Hospitals and universities should be required to provide housing provisions for their modestly paid interns, teaching assistants and support staff. Employers would pay into a city-wide trust that provides affordable housing close to work.

For that investment, employers would be rewarded with lower employee turnover and absenteeism.

Through a city-wide affordable housing trust for employees, employers can provide self-financing, self-administering housing with minimal if any burden on the employer.

Employers are better able to attract the best and brightest workers (a boon in solving Toronto's skills shortage problem ) if a decent, affordable place to live comes with the job.

Including residents on the housing trust's board of directors would reinforce the trust's independence from the employer.

Toronto has proven it can build large amounts of affordable housing quickly. It did so at the end of the Second World War in preparation for the baby boom, and again in the 1960s and 1970s to accommodate waves of European immigrants in flight from postwar economic malaise and Cold War tyranny.

In this latest Toronto housing renaissance, the new homes would be more varied in design and function. They would be located throughout the GTA rather than concentrated in ultra-high-density districts and would be small-scale (or "human-scale"), blending into established neighbourhoods.

The alternative is a GTA in which people cannot afford to live, which is not sustainable. We're getting dangerously close to that point.

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Opinion | Toronto housing is getting out of reach - should private companies start providing homes for workers?

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Toronto's housing crisis shows no signs of abating. The city is already among the 10 most expensive major housing markets in the world, as measured by the ratio of household income to house prices. And Toronto house prices are forecast to jump again this year, by just under 10 per cent in 2020, according to a report last month from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board.

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The current solution is subsidized housing, shelters etc. However, this is not working because many people are still on waiting lists that go anywhere from 2-5 years and even 15-20 years. According to (Bulowski, 2020). "An estimated 2.4 million Canadian households experiencing core housing need in 2020, according to Macdonald's assessment, many middle-income households also struggle to find rentals for reasonable prices.” What are people to do in the meantime if shelters are full, and subsidized housing wait lists are so long? There needs to be consistent work put into place within all communities to build realistic homes that do not just present luxury, but affordability to.

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The current solution is subsidized housing, shelters etc. However, this is not working because many people are still on waiting lists that go anywhere from 2-5 years and even 15-20 years. According to (Bulowski, 2020). "An estimated 2.4 million Canadian households experiencing core housing need in 2020, according to Macdonald's assessment, many middle-income households also struggle to find rentals for reasonable prices.” What are people to do in the meantime if shelters are full, and subsidized housing wait lists are so long? There needs to be consistent work put into place within all communities to build realistic homes that do not just present luxury, but affordability to.

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(This is what current housing in shelters looks like today)

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New affordable housing plan announced by the City of Toronto

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New affordable housing plan announced by the City of Toronto

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City of Toronto has come up with a 10 year plan to build 40,000 new affordable housing by 2030 which will provide housing to more than 341,000 households.

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After years of debate stretching back to the 1980s, rent supplements have become quite popular in Ontario in the past half dozen years, especially as vacancy rates increased. One of the more well-known rent-supplement programs of recent years is the one created to help house former residents of Toronto's Tent City squatter camp. The Emergency Homelessness Pilot Project (EHPP) began in September 2002, almost immediately after Tent City residents were removed from their squat.