Housing requires lottery luck

3,754 people entered draw for 59 affordable units in Regent Park

The odds are far better than Lotto 6/49 but still small enough to make it a long-shot.

It’s the Toronto affordable housing lottery, one of the only ways to get a reasonably priced downtown apartment in a city with skyrocketing rents.

For the first time, said Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) spokesperson Danièle Gauvin, the agency is allocating units through a random “computer generated scrambling system.”

By a late February deadline, 3,754 people had filled out a complete application for 59 new units in Regent Park. That’s odds of about 1.5 in 100, compared to 1 in 13,983,816 for the big payout of Lotto 6/49.

The apartments are not traditional subsidized housing, which has a long waiting list, but affordable, in reach of someone on a modest income and set at or below average market rent.

“In this case there was tremendous interest,” said Gauvin, adding one-bedroom units were the most popular and staff started making calls to the winners recently.

“It wasn’t a first-come, first- serve, it was an everyone gets an equal chance,” she added.

To be eligible, an applicant’s annual household gross income cannot be more than four times the annual rent of the unit.

For example, a single person who makes no more than $46,176 a year could enter for a one-bedroom apartment at $962.

That’s a steal compared to average rent for a one-bedroom in the centre of Toronto, which is now $1,498, according to November 2017 figures from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

The TCHC currently has 600 affordable units, and the Regent Park redevelopment will add 400-plus (including the 59), Gauvin said. Patricia Anderson, of the city’s shelter, support and housing administration division, said a lottery is an “efficient way to provide fair and equitable access to units that are typically rented at or below average market rent to qualifying households,” as opposed to waiting lists or referrals from community agencies.

She said in an email that the random draw will “certainly be one of the models used to allocate affordable housing units as they come on-stream.”

New York City is already doing lots of affordable housing lotteries. There’s even an online map where aspiring tenants can filter and search opportuni- ties by borough.

While Cherise Burda, executive director of Ryerson University’s City Building Institute, doesn’t fault the TCHC, she said the huge demand shows the depth of the housing crisis.

“It’s kind of sad because it shows that we’re seriously not building enough purpose-built housing,” (built for renting) she said.

“Having a place to live shouldn’t be based on luck, it should be based on good planning.”

Geordie Dent, executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations, said he’s not surprised at the number of people who entered the lottery, as the market is in a “full-blown crisis scenario” and likened it to “fighting over crumbs.”

He thinks getting units that are sitting empty into the rental market is one measure that could help.

Mayor John Tory has said there could be as many as 65,000 vacant homes in Toronto, based on census numbers, but that could overstate the number by counting homes foreign or temporary residents are living in.

“Unless the speculative investment stock is actually turned into rental stock, or unless there’s a really dedicated Transit City level program for building housing, this crisis is going to continue,” Dent added.

MAY WARREN METRO TORONTO