The problem with Toronto City Hall as landlord

Theglobeandmail.com
April 28, 2017
By Marcus Gee

One way to ease the housing crunch, all right-thinking people seem to agree, is to invest in social housing. Ottawa is putting aside billions for the purpose. Toronto is building more of it, while imploring senior governments for help with fixing what it has. Social-housing advocates accuse governments of retreating from the field and say it is high time for them to jump back in.

Before taking this leap, they should have a long look at Toronto Community Housing. What they will see is sobering.

TCH is the second biggest social-housing outfit in North America, with close to 60,000 households of low or moderate income spread around 2,100 buildings. Many of those buildings are falling apart. Leaky roofs, busted elevators and faulty plumbing are commonplace.

The situation is so dire that, even though the agency has 181,000 people on a waiting list for a subsidized place to live, it has started to close down whole housing blocks because they are beyond saving. Only this month, city hall moved to demolish a townhouse complex of 134 units. Hundreds more units around the city face shutdown.

The leadership of the agency has been through years of turbulence. The agency brought in a new chief executive after a spending scandal, only to see him leave in 2014 after a damaging ombudsman’s report.

Its interim chief stepped down this week.

A major report last year called Toronto Community Housing “unsustainable financially, socially and from an operating governance perspective. It is at the centre of a crisis that has been 30 years in the making.” It called for a big shakeup.

The solution to all this might seem simple: new leadership for the organization and more money for repairs. But it isn’t the money or the management that’s the problem. It’s the model. Governments make lousy landlords. TCH is a great clumsy beast, with layer upon layer of officials to handle its vast portfolio. No wonder trouble breaks out in its upper ranks.

Public housing has a sorry record in North America. Cities from New York to Chicago to Toronto built scores of housing projects in the decades after the Second World War. Most soon became as shabby as the slums they were meant to replace. Isolated islands cut off from the bustle of city life, they were miserable places to live. Many have been knocked down. Some, like Toronto’s Regent Park, are being rebuilt, with new streets and market housing mixed in to ease their isolation.

Even with better design and the noblest intentions, public housing tends to fall into disrepair and dysfunction. Without an ownership stake, those in charge let maintenance and service slide. Frustrated tenants grumble about the dirty hallways, the unlighted stairwells, the thugs that hang around after dark.

The result is a repeating cycle of complaint and excuse that you can see on display at city hall year after year. Tenants come down to complain. Officials say they will do their best to make it right. Mayors blame premiers and prime ministers for failing to cough up enough for all the repairs and the new units that are required. Toronto’s John Tory was upholding a fine old tradition when he scolded the provincial government this week for failing to hand over the millions he wanted for housing repairs in the latest budget.

The idea that senior governments can be talked into producing the money that will fix public housing for good is a stubborn fantasy. The government of Ontario has the world’s biggest subnational debt. Counting on it to come through seems hopeful in the extreme.

Put the problem this way. Does anyone really believe that, 10 years from now, Toronto public housing will be well managed and neatly maintained; that all of its repairs will be done and all of its complainers silenced; that tenants won’t still be calling for better security, cleaning and maintenance; that mayors won’t still be crying poor?

Instead of leaping back into public housing, governments ought to be moving out of it. Far better to hand the job to non-profit housing groups or free up market providers to help fill the need for low-cost rental apartments. Cities should never be landlords.