We know how to build affordable housing, so why don’t we?

MPP Chris Glover –

The St. Lawrence neighbour­hood is a model community. It’s a healthy mix of co-operative, social, and commercial hous­ing knitted together along David Crombie Park. St. Lawrence Mar­ket, the community centre and local schools serve as hubs where community members meet, play, shop and become friends.

Housing co-ops in the commu­nity provide permanently afforda­ble housing for their members, who are not tenants but share ownership of the co-op while liv­ing there. While some residents are subsidized, others pay the full cost of operating their units, which, because co-ops are not-for-profit, is substantially less than for-profit housing. Co-ops are democratically run.

So why did we stop building model communities like this?

Many co-ops in the St. Law­rence neighbourhood date back to the 1970s, when they were spearheaded by then Conserva­tive Mayor David Crombie. The most recent – the Performing Arts Lodge and Older Women’s Network Co-op – date back to the NDP government in the early 1990s.

Since then, almost no afforda­ble housing has been built in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood or anywhere else in Ontario. The ideology changed. Neoliberalism became dominant, typified by the Gordon Gecko quote, “Greed is good!”

In 1995, Conservative Premier Mike Harris was elected and im­mediately cancelled projects for 17,000 units of affordable hous­ing. He then downloaded social housing to municipalities, which do not have the tax base to even maintain downloaded burdens, let alone to build new housing.

Federally, Liberal Prime Min­ister Jean Chretien cancelled the National Housing Strategy that was funding construction of co-ops, social and supportive hous­ing. Instead, Chretien introduced legislation to foster Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which provide tax subsidies to corpora­tions looking to invest in real es­tate.

The combination of cancelling affordable housing projects and unleashing REITs has been dev­astating. REITs gobble up billions of dollars of housing. Just one of these corporations, Core Devel­opment Group, has announced its intention to buy $1.5 billion worth of housing in Ontario. Tax-subsidized REITs have mas­sively inflated housing costs to the point that most young people may never be able to afford to buy a home, and 50,000 Ontarians leave Ontario each year – many because of housing costs.

A recent University of Waterloo study shows that corporate land­lords, including REITs, charge 44 percent higher rents than oth­er landlords and increase rents an average of five percent every three months. They buy up hous­ing in low-income neighbour­hoods, they evict tenants, and then massively raise rents. In part because of REITs, the city reports that Toronto is losing 15 units of affordable housing for every one that is built.

Today in Ontario, one in five renters pays more than half of their income in rent, 80,000 peo­ple are homeless, and the prov­ince has 1400 encampments.

The Ford government came to power promising to address the housing supply shortage to make housing affordable. But the gov­ernment has given billions of tax dollars to developers, made secret deals to pave over the Greenbelt and demolish heritage properties like the Foundry, and sold tax­payer-owned properties like the Hearn Generating Station to their friends.

The result of all these actions is that housing costs and rents have increased by 40 percent in the past seven years, and Ontar­io has the second-lowest level of housing starts of any province. Most recently, the Conservatives introduced Bill 5, enabling them to override all municipal and pro­vincial laws – all in the name of building housing.

But all is not doom and gloom. Mayor Olivia Chow and Toronto City Council are leveraging the value of public land to build af­fordable housing, including a 600-unit co-op on Eglinton Ave­nue. Existing co-ops are looking to expand, and churches are start­ing to build affordable housing on their lands. The federal gov­ernment has restarted the Nation­al Housing Strategy – although some of its budget is being fil­tered through public-private part­nerships in which corporations finance and control projects in ex­change for a 30 percent taxpayer subsidy.

To make housing truly afforda­ble, we need to look in our own backyard and stop the corporate subsidies, the favours to political friends, and the overriding of cur­rent laws. We need to push gov­ernments to start building com­munities like St. Lawrence again – so everyone has a home they can afford.

First elected to the Legislative Assembly in 2018, Chris Glover is the Member of Provincial Par­liament (MPP) for Spadina-Fort York. He is the NDP’s shadow minister for Sport, Technology and Innovation, and for Demo­cratic Reform. A former Toronto District School Board Trustee, Glover has also served on the To­ronto Board of Health and been an adjunct professor at York Uni­versity.