Two Toronto councillors demand free housing now

Torontosun.com
Nov. 26, 2019
Sue-Ann Levy

A motion to council this week from the two NDP councillors demands that the city agree to building 1,800 new units of supportive housing starting now.

And the motion from Councillors Joe Cressy and Kristyn Wong-Tam urges council to agree to build 18,000 new units over the next 10 years.

No dollars are attached to the motion but it calls on the province and the federal government to each fund one-third of the unspecified amount to address the city’s “growing homelessness crisis.”

The motion, entitled Ending Homelessness -- Building New Supportive Housing Now, also proposes the city’s housing bureaucrats come up with a “bridging strategy” to move 1,800 households into stable housing while the new units are being built.

“During the first weeks of 2018 alone, we saw four Torontonians lose their lives on our streets … this year during the height of our first snowstorm on Nov. 11, we lost another community member who died in a bus shelter near the Ferry Docks,” the motion from Cressy reads.

Sources told the Toronto Sun earlier this month that the wheelchair-bound man who died Nov. 11 -- Richard -- had been a fixture in the area (at the bottom of Dan Leckie Way) for two years and no one helped him, including his councillor.

The source also said he refused shelter because of the way he was treated there.

“We cannot wait,” Cressy opines in his motion. “Without new supportive housing this crisis will only continue to grow and we will continue to see tragedies unfold on our streets.”

Last December council approved a Housing Now initiative that aims to create 10,000 units of new residential housing units on 11 city sites with 7,500 of them affordable rental units.

The first such site plan on a former Green P lot at 777 Victoria Park Ave. comes to council this week amid considerable backlash from residents living near the site.