Offer working-class families decent homes

Re: The downside of intensification, April 24. Elizabeth Payne shows the other side of the coin in her column. New condos are nice, but they are putting the squeeze on the workingclass family that used to live in the older accommodations that stood in their place.

Every day at Action-Logement, we see men, women and families searching for a place to call home. We help them apply for affordable housing and find deals in market rentals. They are honest, hardworking folks earning minimum wage. They are down-on-their-luck regular Joes, battling sickness or injury and surviving on social assistance or a disability pension until things get better. They are newcomers to Canada with hope, a profound desire to work, and a little bit of money (or sometimes none at all if they are fleeing war and persecution).

Their prospects are not great. Many will wait for 10 years on the wait-list for social housing before getting an offer. Meantime, they will try to get by in the private market paying more than they can afford on rent, forced to cut down on food and clothing and forget about children’s education and retirement savings.

Private market rent costs a family working full-time earning minimum wage nearly half of their income (CMHC recommends 30 per cent maximum). For ODSP recipients it’s 70 per cent, and someone on social assistance spends almost all of it (see the Alliance to End Homelessness Report Card). Have a look on Kijiji. Rent at less than $500 a month is rare. For someone on social assistance, that means there’s about $100 left after paying rent. That’s roughly one dollar per meal for the month, and nothing more.

There are a lot of hard-working people running not-for-profit housing and co-ops. That is the work of communities creating safe and affordable homes. The City of Ottawa has also done a good job by adding almost 900 new affordable housing spaces in 2012, although only 139 of those are permanent units. And the provincial and federal governments are contributing financially to help mitigate the problem. But they aren’t pulling their weight.

The private sector has to be a part of it. They will say that they build what the market wants, but do they really? Working-class families are waiting 10 years for an affordable place to live. It looks to me like there’s a market for that. ÉTIENNE GRANDMAîTRE SAINT-PIERRE, Executive Director, Action Housing, Ottawa