TCH goes digital to fill subsidized units
City hopes new system will fill apartments faster as vacancy rates increase
When Dave Smith was offered a subsidized Toronto bachelor apartment in January, it was the culmination of nearly two decades spent on-and-off the city’s social housing wait-list.
“I applied, I think this was around 2001 or so,” said Smith, 41, by phone from the downtown shelter where he’s lived for roughly a year. When he first applied for housing, he was struggling to make rent and later turned to couch-surfing. “It was really, really rough at the time.”
But as he waited for a chance at a subsidized unit, Smith’s application was bumped from the wait-list several times. He’d missed some of the requirements — check-ins and updates to his file — needed to stay in the years-long line, said his current housing worker, DeShawn Lett.
It’s a situation Lett sees frequently. And too often, she said, her clients didn’t even realize they’d lost their spot in the housing line — a symptom of what she sees as a lack of accessible information. But this year, that could change. Toronto plans to roll out a new, digitized system to handle its social housing wait-list — a list that, as of January, has more than 81,000 names.
According to the city, under the new system, applicants will be updated electronically about any changes to their files, will be able to confirm their interest annually online — currently a manual process — and will be reminded digitally when they need to update the information in their file.
The city hopes that the new system will fill empty units faster, as vacancy rates in Toronto Community Housing have steadily increased under COVID-19. The plan is to move from a system where applicants wait idly for offers, to a choice-based system, where applicants nearing the top of the queue can select units of interest from online vacancy listings.
“We know right now it is frustrating for people, and there is a sense that they don’t get enough good information,” said Mary-Anne Bedard, general manager of Toronto’s Shelter, Support and Housing Administration (SSHA). The new system, she said, “will put the control in their hands.”
The current wait-list process has been criticized for being inefficient. In 2019, Toronto’s auditor general found that just 13 per cent of offers were accepted. Some people couldn’t be contacted when offers went out, while others declined, which they could do up to three times. Those issues cost the city $7 million in 2018 alone, the auditor found, and left units empty.
The city aims to roll out its new wait-list system at the same time it adopts a provincially mandated one-offer rule, which will see anyone who rejects a social housing offer without extenuating circumstances lose their place in line.
Doug Rollins, SSHA’s director of housing stability services, said the one-offer rule would have been challenging under the current system — with applicants receiving offers “without much warning,” often after years-long waits.
Jim Dunn, a professor at McMaster University with expertise in social housing, said a key concern with one-offer systems was applicants accepting units only out of fear about losing their spot in line, then immediately looking for a transfer elsewhere.
“You’re not going to improve successful tenancies by forcing people into units they don’t really want,” Dunn said.
That’s the kind of issue the city is hoping a choice-based housing offer model will mitigate. Units will be listed for a minimum of two weeks, Rollins said, then offers will go to whoever has the highest standing among those who expressed interest, based on chronology and priority.
Some details of the new system aren’t yet ironed out, including how high someone will have to be on the wait-list in order to view listings.
While both Dunn and Lori Oliver — a Queen’s University doctoral candidate whose research also involves social housing — agreed that having a choice-based model will likely fill empty units faster, both noted that demand will still outstrip availability.
“Small measures to more rapidly house individuals are not going to help the flow of individuals entering this wait-list,” Oliver said.
Right now, the city warns of a seven-plus year wait for subsidized bachelor units and a wait of more than a decade for anything larger.
“The need is still more units, more money for housing subsidies, and better functioning buildings (that) people want to live in, and people want to stay in,” said Dunn.
Still, Dunn believes a choice-based model will be “advantageous,” since applicants can choose based on their most current needs — rather than receive offers simply based on what’s listed in their file.
The new system sounds good Lett, but she hesitates to say how effective she thinks it’ll be before rollout. “I hope it does work,” she said. “For now, it’s just a vision.”