Note: This story was updated on October 16, 2014 to include Doug Ford’s comments on Toronto Community Housing.
TORONTO – An Ipsos Reid poll conducted for Global News suggests 90 per cent of Torontonians think it is increasingly difficult for average people to live in the city.
Nearly 8 in 10 think affordable rent for reasonable housing is out of reach in the 416.
So how are the Toronto mayoralty candidates addressing the matter of affordable housing?
Olivia Chow, Doug Ford and John Tory have all released their policy plans for the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC).
Let’s start with some perspective on the social housing pressures in Toronto.
The TCHC population is larger than those of some of Toronto’s largest bedroom communities, including Oshawa, Ajax, Pickering, Barrie, and St. Catharines. The number of TCHC residents is comparable to the City of Greater Sudbury, which boasts about 160,000 locals.
READ MORE: 90% say life in Toronto is increasingly difficult for average people
On its own, TCHC would be the eighth largest municipality in the GTA. The corporation owns more than 2,000 buildings and it is no secret that many suffer from a lack of attention. The best guess is it will take ten years and about $2.6 billion to take care of the repair and maintenance backlog.
Olivia Chow
Chow was the first of the front runners to present her housing plan. She is focusing primarily on the need to build more rental units, as opposed to building more city-owned housing.
She has committed to building 15,000 affordable units in four years by offering incentives to developers. The number would represent 20 per cent of all new residential units.
Chow’s promise means 75,000 residential units would have to be built in the city to meet that goal.
That number sounds like a lot but the Chow campaign insists it’s a realistic number considering the current state of high rise residential construction in Toronto.
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The advantage to this plan is it creates mixed-income neighbourhoods. Chow’s carrot for developers would be to defer the development charges for ten years on the affordable units. The deferral could be renewed.
Landlords could raise rents beyond the “affordable” threshold after the initial period. But the Chow campaign says they would get hit with retroactive development charges.
As for the state of repair of city owned buildings – Chow says Toronto’s in limbo until Ottawa and Queen’s Park agree to chip in more than $1.7 billion.
John Tory
John Tory’s housing plan takes aim at the repair backlog by investing more than $800 million into TCHC.
For the record: This is already being done. City council already approved the budget and TCHC is starting to invest the city’s share.
Tory says by making an immediate investment he can more easily pressure other levels of government into coughing up their share of the cash.
Tory would also support a National Housing Strategy and review incentives to encourage more affordable units in new builds.
But, unlike Chow, Tory doesn’t offer any guarantees on new builds. Instead, he says he’d order a complete review of the TCHC with a report completed in six months.
Tory says the objective would be to identify how “we can fix this corporation once and for all.”
Doug Ford
Doug Ford laid out his social housing commitment on Thursday morning after canvassing the TCHC buildings in Regent Park. His message was more politics than policy inasmuch as he insisted the Miller administration left a “complete disaster at Toronto Community Housing.”
He did point out that the repair backlog was out of control and growing at a “staggering $100 million a year.”
He, like John Tory, is focused on the need to deal with the repair backlog in city owned housing. Ford wants Toronto to move forward with repairs without waiting for federal or provincial cash commitments. (NOTE: Ford also mistakenly says Tory wants to wait for other levels of government to fix the problem. Not so.)
Ford did point out his brother’s administration took aggressive corrective measures to deal with questionable spending practices at the TCHC.
“We found deep rooted problems and we immediately took action,” he said.
That action amounted to a corporate house cleaning. Council supported Ford’s move to replace the CEO and the board of directors and to install new senior management.
Ford reminds us that TCHC has under gone a major overhaul with a sharper focus on oversight and transparency. (NOTE: He did not reference issues that led to the new CEO’s departure under a pall of scandal and accusations that he failed to follow procedure around hiring, firing and promotions.)
Ford noted the last council did unanimously approve an $800 million, 10 year spending and financing plan to cover Toronto’s share of the repair backlog. The investment has begun – $128 million this year and another $175 million in 2015.
Beyond suggesting it means more fridges will be repaired, more security cameras installed, and increasing the effort to fight bed bugs, Ford made no specific commitments. He did say, however, that tackling the repair backlog would be his “top priority.”
His general commitment is to ensure TCHC residents have “clean and safe” living conditions.
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