Help to fix social housing

Three years after Toronto approved a 10-year, $2.6-billion plan to address the crushing repair backlog at Toronto Community Housing, units are still being closed and the waiting list for social housing continues to grow.

It’s a failure, both moral and economic, of governments that promised to do better.

The plan was to be funded in equal parts by the city, the province and Ottawa.

But neither Kathleen Wynne, who once promised to be Ontario’s “social justice premier,” nor Justin Trudeau, who has vowed to tackle Canada’s affordable housing challenge, have stepped up to pay their share.

The result: this year, TCH expects to close 425 units because they are crumbling, contaminated with mould or otherwise uninhabitable. In 2018, assuming no new funding, it expects to shutter another several hundred units.

By 2023, nearly half of the city’s social housing stock is projected to be closed or in critical condition.

This is a crisis. Nearly 200,000 people are currently waiting for affordable housing in Toronto, and many of them have been on the list for years.

The vast majority of these face crippling rents that eat up much of their income, leaving little for food, clothing and other necessities. Thousands more are homeless. And as the population expands, rents rise and labour becomes ever more precarious, the need is likely to keep growing.

The decision to invest in the repairs should be easy. Aside from the clear moral case for providing decent shelter, there’s a strong economic argument.

A recent study by the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis concluded that the planned repairs promise to create thousands of jobs, spur private investment and generate billions of extra dollars in federal and provincial taxes.

If upper governments continue to look the other way, however, the housing crisis is bound to deepen, as are the associated social ills, including sickness and crime, adding pressures to Ontario’s already overburdened health and justice systems. And, as always, deferring necessary repairs creates even higher costs down the road.

Both Trudeau and Wynne say they are committed to helping poor people in need of shelter, and there have been promising signals in recent months that this is more than mere talk.

The Trudeau government has just concluded a public consultation on what to include in its National Housing Strategy — an overdue effort on an issue that Ottawa has ignored for far too long. Meanwhile, Queen’s Park has recently made welcome investments in affordable housing, including $587 million for municipalities to ward off homelessness.

Both governments seem to be entertaining a host of policy approaches, including the idea of offering housing benefits to people on low incomes that would not be tied to government-operated housing. Such creative measures, while promising, should be seen as supplements, not alternatives, to Toronto’s plan. It makes no sense to allow our existing stock of social housing to fall apart.

There is no easier way for Ottawa and Queen’s Park to provide adequate shelter for those in need than to invest in Toronto’s plan to repair its housing stock. Toronto Community Housing says if it doesn’t get the money by June, it will have to start quickly boarding up units.

Shuttering spaces at a time when we have far fewer than we need would be unconscionable. The provincial and federal governments should ensure in their upcoming budgets that such a move is not necessary. Fixing our social housing is both the right thing to do, and a wise investment.

Aside from the clear moral case to invest, there’s also an economic argument