Abigail Bond was hired to help solve Toronto’s housing problems. Here’s why she’s hopeful for the future

Thestar.com
Feb. 18, 2020
Jennifer Pagliaro

In week two as the executive director of the city’s housing secretariat, Abigail Bond has already been through her first round of budget questioning and answering to council members on key issues like how to tackle chronic homelessness.

She’ll be responsible for implementing the newly approved 10-year HousingTO action plan that includes the goal of building 40,000 new affordable units by 2030.

Arriving in Toronto after nearly a decade in Vancouver -- most recently as the city’s managing director of homelessness services and affordable housing programs -- Bond brings with her a tool kit of things that appear to be working.

As residents grapple with a growing crisis, she sees a way forward. The Star sat down with her to discuss what’s next.

It feels like you’re coming to us from the future and that you may have some insight into the crisis we’re experiencing.

In terms of the housing challenges and issues that people are facing it’s actually quite similar -- the low vacancy rates, the high cost of rents, how rents are increasing over time, just the general difficulty that people are having accessing homes and the fact that everybody is talking about housing are very familiar to me. They remind me exactly about Vancouver.

I’m able to think about some of the things that I was working on in Vancouver, some of the things that we’ve done in recent years and if they’re not happening here, or if things are happening in a different way, thinking about trying to transport some of those things or think about what a made-in-Toronto solution might be to some of those same issues.

One of the things that came up at planning and housing committee this week was the report on supportive housing and you were asked about what Vancouver had attempted. Can you tell me more about that?

The focus on supportive housing was critical in Vancouver over a number of years and several different provincial governments actually. And one of the reasons for that is because it’s a cost-effective way to respond to homelessness. It’s really one of the most successful and only ways to respond to chronic homelessness in particular and so successive governments at the provincial level came up with programs to provide supportive housing, which relied on a very strong partnership at a municipal level where we would provide land and the provincial government would come forward with money to build the buildings and also to provide operating subsidies, which enabled non-profits to then manage them and provide supports for people who are living in shelters or out on the streets. So, it’s a very effective partnership which delivered over 2,000 supportive housing units, 600 of which in recent times were developed in a kind of modular construction.

What are modular units? They’re prefabricated?

There are many different companies that make modular housing and it’s actually not that new in some ways. It’s been used in many parts of Canada, up north for some of the worker camps for many, many years. And it’s basically off-site construction, so it means that the modules themselves are constructed in a factory, which means that they don’t have some of the issues on a site you might have in terms of workforce or the amount of time. It means you can, if you wanted to or needed to you, have around-the-clock production of those units. The ones that we used in Vancouver were fully formed down to the window blinds were in, the furniture was in, everything was in and the units would get driven down from the factory and then craned in to the site in a matter of days. And then it was a couple of weeks to actually kind of put the finishing touches to the building so that they fit in with the community and the context.

We have city-owned sites identified and going through the planning process for eventual affordable housing. Is there an opportunity to do the same thing here?

Myself and my team we’re looking at all options right now. I know that there was an interest from council to actually do something more permanent in a modular format and certainly also in Vancouver they’re also starting to look at that now, so not just the temporary kind of options. So we’re going to look at a number of different sites.

The most important piece is the fact that it’s actually providing home. The modular is kind of an interesting aspect to the construction, but it’s really just the means to an end.

I wonder how challenging it is to arrive in a city where council’s already approved these 10-year targets and you’re being asked to deliver them.

For those of us who work in housing, we’re pretty nosy about what’s going on in other cities. We like to see all the innovations, all the conversations that are going on. So I was kind of watching to see what was happening in Toronto. It was a long conversation with community and many of the things which I see in the plan resonate for me in terms of they came out of important conversations that were happening between stakeholders, with the public, with council and so I’m pleased to see the variety of options and the variety of approaches that are in the plan and so I feel like my job is now to take those things and start to roll them out as real, concrete actions.

The plan is a great platform for me to start with because it would have been hard, I think actually, to come in and have the depth of conversations quickly that you were able to have with your community and the city was able to have over an 18-month period. So, I’m actually very pleased to see the work that’s been done and one of the reasons I wanted to come is it’s an exciting time for housing in terms of the city and the alignment with other levels of government. So, I’m pretty excited about the opportunity.

On that interplay with other levels of government, there’s this constant conversation about programs not being funded adequately.

What I see in the HousingTO plan is similar to the approach I think that was taken in Vancouver which was, it clearly lays out all of the things that the city can do, the things that we’re in control of, the areas that we want to really push for ourselves and then it goes beyond that to really a level of ambition that requires other levels of government to kind of get on board in order to deliver what residents really need. So we will continue to do what we can do and part of that is trying to bring other levels of government to the table.

On the policy side, what is within the city’s control? A motion was moved recently asking the city to consider rent control on units created on city-owned land.

I see that there’s a requirement for us to report back in the fairly short term about the rent control. Those are the things that we’re in control of in terms of both the land aspect and the requirements that we put on partners or the expectations that we have on the partners that will work with us.

One of big things that I want to see happen in Toronto is for us to take a big step forward in terms of the amount of rental housing supply. I feel that there’s room for improvement. I’ve certainly seen that there’s been an increase in the amount of rental that’s being constructed but we need more and over a sustained period of time if we’re going to start see an impact on vacancy rates and also on stabilization of rents because rent control is one thing, but actually in a healthy rental market you would actually see some of those things self-regulate if we had enough supply.

The 40,000-unit, 10-year target seems like a lot and also not enough at the same time. Can we actually do this?

It seems like there was a lot of thought that went into that 40,000 target, both in terms of what the demand might be and how the city might actually deliver on it and so I’m just understanding what that work was and the approaches both through Housing Now and also the Open Door policy, which both support the delivery under that 40,000. It’s going to be really important for us to report back to council regularly about progress that we’re able to make and each time we do that there’s an opportunity to take a bit of a step back and think about, are the approaches we’re taking working? Are they working fast enough? Do we want to tweak the approach or the target at any point?

You were working in the non-profit sector in the United Kingdom. How did working on these issues outside of government help shape how you see these challenges?

I started working in community, so right from day one I think one of the reasons why I feel in love with the housing world is because I could see really clearly how the delivery of a home for somebody just changed peoples’ lives and how issues that they had in their home, whether it was issues around rent or issues or with their neighbours or whatever, was very stressful and difficult. And I hadn’t really understood that until I worked in community, that you can’t do anything in life without a place to live. It really defines almost all your decisions, how you’re able to show up in the world, how you’re able to progress your potential, live your dreams, all of those things. And I was really lucky early on in my career to kind of work in communities where that became obvious, work with organizations who had strong mandate around the delivery of homes to make a difference in peoples’ lives.

It seems like a lot of responsibility too when you’re on the governance side. On a cold day like today, there are a lot of people who are displaced. Does that weigh on you?

It’s one of the biggest motivating factors. For many of the people who work in housing, you often find you’ll have a very similar approach. It’s often very rooted in a strong value system about equity and about who should have access to housing. Housing can be a very complicated area to work in, but at its essence it’s very simple. It’s that really, and as the plan demonstrates, housing is a human right and we should be working to give people the opportunity to exercise those rights.

With a plan like this and the kind of investment, it gives me hope for the future that we’re going to be able to make a difference.