A year ago, Toronto approved a plan to get more affordable housing built . It’s now clear that essential workers need urgent action.
There’s much to learn from housing models that are already in place
Ayear has passed since Toronto city council approved its plan to build 40,000 new rental homes over the next decade — a response to a projected population growth of more than one million people by 2030.
Like all good goals, the city’s targets are ambitious — and they’ve already made progress through creative ways, such as by embracing modular supportive housing.
However, the city won’t be able to reach this milestone alone. Funding from other orders of government will be essential, but to build the housing needed for low- and middle-income workers, Toronto needs to embrace building at a significant speed and scale.
For instance, downtown’s Local 75 co-op building has been rightly praised for its design and long-term affordability. But to hit the 40,000 homes target, we would need to start construction on a similar 85unit building every week — an unmanageable volume for the city to handle.
Approving housing projects is only one aspect (though an important one). Those homes would also need to be built quickly and affordably enough to pass the savings on to future residents. Here, we don’t need to start from scratch — there are strong workforce housing
models that have been implemented in Toronto that we can learn from and build on.
The Toronto Region Board of Trade and WoodGreen — the city’s largest business chamber and social service agency, respectively — have partnered to share a new report detailing housing models that Toronto could repeat and scale across the region.
There are a variety of different models, but perhaps one of the most scalable models focuses on affordable ownership.
Take, for example, one housing complex in Weston Village. Being built by non-profit developer Options for Homes, the project will deliver more than 230 affordable-ownership homes with little government subsidy.
Through having a strong con
struction partner and its signature down-payment support program, Options for Homes’ model is achieving two things all Toronto developments could greatly benefit from.
The first is density, using less than an acre of land for hundreds of units. The second, affordability — right now a twobedroom is priced under $600,000 with low down payments.
This model of collaborative partnership and creative financing, along with the others profiled in the report, can inform new approaches to close the widening affordability gap
faced by Toronto’s residents.
With a second wave of COVID-19 hitting the city and businesses again forced to close their doors, it’s likely that more people may lose their jobs. An estimated 10 per cent of renters in the city are at risk of eviction. That’s more than 130,000 people.
Lest Toronto add to the already substantial wait lists for subsidized housing and shelters, we must act to keep the city affordable.
The virus’ presence in our lives also demonstrates our continued reliance on essential workers, many of whom earn less than $60,000 and can afford to rent a one-bedroom in only three Toronto neighbourhoods, according to the board’s Economic Blueprint Institute. Forcing these workers further
out of the city, or into overcrowded living situations, only threatens to diminish a workforce we’ve explicitly said are vital to our society.
The city’s latest housing plan is one year older, but we are decades wiser. We know the way we’ve been building homes isn’t cutting it, so it’s time to embrace housing models that excel. We must — and can — get affordable homes built faster, because Toronto’s workforce demands it.