Mark told me he’s been on a waiting list for social housing for seven years. In Toronto today, if you find yourself unable to afford a place to live, you need to wait that long for help—if help ever comes. When your name finally comes up, your patient suffering is rewarded with an apartment in Toronto Community Housing, which has been called “Canada’s Worst Landlord” by CTV’s W-Five.
Inside Metro Hall, Mark and the other protesters were calling attention to more immediate suffering: They said that the city’s homeless shelters were over capacity. On any given night, people are forced to sleep on the street in the blistering winter cold because there’s no space for them. The city responded that the shelters had plenty of room. Mayor Rob Ford called the protest a “cheap publicity stunt.”
Mark introduced me to a protester named Brian DuBourdieu. He was 55 years old and had lived in homeless shelters for more than 20 years. He told me that sometimes the system seems to have beds, but they’re the wrong kinds of beds—reserved for senior women, or youth, or whomever. Or they’re wrong in a different way, like maybe they’re at a place you expect to be knifed in your sleep. Or maybe you’ve been banned from the only shelter where there’s space.
And all I could keep thinking was 20 years. Twenty years Brian had lived on the street, sleeping in these facilities that are designed to be temporary emergency shelters. He’d only become housed recently because his military pension kicked in and he qualified for housing support through that.
This week, there are a slew of items on city council’s agenda dealing with housing and shelter. One motion would look at streamlining the management of Toronto Community Housing’s waiting list, which is more than 87,000 households long. Another would open more homeless shelter beds immediately, in light of a staff report showing that the system is at 96 per cent capacity (which means full, which means the OCAP protesters were right). Another motion deals with refinancing community-housing mortgages to free up money needed for overdue repair work that will soon cost upwards of $1 billion. Yet another proposes allowing the city to demand affordable units from condo developers under Section 37 of the planning act.
All are worthwhile. But even if every motion is adopted this month, they will fail to significantly change the dire housing picture facing the poor in this city. And all this as Toronto continues on a decade-long housing boom. It’s a perverse twist that the affluence at one end of the economic spectrum—the one that’s made Toronto’s existing homes more expensive and created a bustling market for new condos—has led to disastrous consequences for those who can’t share in the prosperity. The demand that is driving prices up is driving the poor onto the street or out of the city.
There’s nothing new about the poor being poor, but the upward trajectory of city living has pushed rents beyond the means of a growing number of people and made home ownership a pipe dream for the working class. Meanwhile, the federal and provincial governments have all but abandoned the idea of filling the gap by providing roofs over heads or the money needed to purchase them. It’s an affordable-housing bust that looks ever more permanent.
We think of our social-housing policy as a ladder that the poor can climb to stability—from a temporary emergency shelter into social housing and towards self-sufficiency. But due to neglect over a period of decades, the bottom half of the ladder has no rungs. And it will take more than a few items at a city-council meeting to fix that.
Original Article
Source: thegridto.com
Author: Edward Keenan
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