MPP proposes Golden Girls Act to allow seniors to share homes
Louise Bardswich did the math. She was helping her mother move to a retirement home a few years ago and it only took some simple sums to calculate that she wouldn’t be able to afford a similar place by the time she got to that stage of her own life.
Now she’s one of four women in their late 60s and early 70s — who have become widely known as the Golden Girls of Port Perry, Ont.
The nickname is a nod to the 1980s TV show about four women who live together.
Like their fictionalized counterparts, the Port Perry foursome live under one roof with communal dining, living room and kitchen. Each maintains a spacious private ensuite bedroom. Their downtown heritage home has been renovated to include accessibility features and a suite for a live-in caregiver if required.
It is affordable and “it solves all the other issues of safety and the companionship,” Bardswich said.
But the arrangement that makes so much sense would never have been possible at one time in the Township of Scugog because of objections by local politicians. First-term Durham MPP Lindsey Park says that kind of opposition to affordable housing solutions for seniors can’t happen again. She has introduced a private members’ bill called the Golden Girls Act, which is expected to be debated in the legislature on Thursday.
The bill is designed to amend the provincial planning act to prevent municipalities from using local bylaws to prohibit seniors from similarly cohab- iting, Park said.
“Municipalities should not be trying to get in the way of seniors with innovative solutions,” said Park, an MPP with the governing Progressive Conservatives.
“Seniors living together can reap significant health, economic and social benefits and seniors are the fastest growing part of the population, both in Durham Region and provincewide,” she said.
Before Bardswich embarked on creating a shared home, she and housemate Martha Casson were helping the builder who eventually renovated their house with a similar home for another group.
That project fell apart over the course of a yearlong battle with the Scugog Township.
Local politicians, who may have been concerned about boarding houses and illegal nursing homes, couldn’t grasp the concept of unrelated adults wanting to live under a single roof, Bardwich said. So they tried to create a bylaw to prevent it.
With her sights set on a similar arrangement for herself, Bardswich said, “I found it really stressful. I couldn’t get my head around it. I just couldn’t figure out why they objected. Everything that they would come up with just didn’t make sense. They went through such odd contortions in trying to come up with a bylaw that would prevent this kind of house being built,” she said.
Eventually the Ontario Human Rights Commission stepped in and the township parked its objections. The builder’s buyers had already given up by then but the road was cleared for Bardswich and her housemates.
Doug Tindal, who, along with his wife and a couple of friends, has been trying to expand their Wine on the Porch co-housing community in Toronto, says governments need to make it easier to think beyond traditional housing scenarios.
“There does need to be a way for people to proceed with a variety of co-living, co-housing options. It doesn’t exist.”