Tory urges action on affordable housing
TORONTO • Toronto needs to move faster, and in conjunction with other levels of government, to solve an “affordable housing crisis,” Mayor John Tory says.
Speaking to more than 600 attendees at a “Better City Bootcamp” on Tuesday, Tory said the housing crisis needs a “co-ordinated, collaborated approach,” similar to how the city and province have been working together to expand transit.
“We need to establish a better and more robust partnership going forward because the housing problem is just too big to be borne by property taxpayers alone,” the mayor said. “With diminishing resources, a higher premium than ever is being put on collaboration.”
CivicAction, the non-profit organization hosting the summit at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, had selected for discussion five topics important to the future of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area: affordable housing for seniors, mental health in the workplace, early childhood health care, public spaces, and infrastructure for extreme weather.
The need to retrofit buildings and communities to be age-friendly and helping seniors find services that are available to them via community and digital hubs were ideas brought forth to help alleviate the lack of affordable housing for older citizens.
Other ideas included the creation of an impact index for infrastructure projects to determine which projects take priority, and breaking the link between a four-year election cycle and the lengthy timeline for implementing projects.
To increase available public space, an application similar to AirBnB, through which users can temporarily rent out their homes like a hotel, was proposed to create an inventory of private space for public access.
Not everyone in attendance felt the event was properly represented. Jennifer Arango, a former member of DiverseCity, a project that promoted diversity in leadership in the GTA from 2008 to 2015, voiced her concern when the crowd was called on for questions or comments.
“I’m sad to see that out of 30 people on panels, only five of them are racialized people,” she told the room.
“We’re talking about socialjustice issues without actually naming them,” she said later, adding that such problems as childhood health care, mental health and access to affordable housing are connected to race and class equality.
Responding to Arango’s comment, panel list Dr. Kwame McKenzie, CEO of Wellesley Institute, said equality is necessary for the economic growth of a city. “If we want to do well, we can’t leave people behind.”
CivicAction has hosted a summit every four years since 2002, and inspired such initiatives as Race to Reduce, a friendly corporate challenge where office buildings compete to use the least amount of energy.
Although Tuesday’s summit was mainly to create dialogue, it was hoped the ideas will “catalyze action,” said CivicAction CEO Sevaun Palvetzian.