Housing focus of city summit

National Post
April 28, 2015
By Kathleen McGouran

Affordable housing for seniors, public spaces and infrastructure for extreme weather are among topics civic leaders will meet to discuss at a summit on Tuesday promoting the health and resilience of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.

The Better City Bootcamp summit, hosted by the nonprofit organization CivicAction, brings together three tiers of government, the private sector and academics to talk via a series of five panels focused additionally on mental health support and early childhood health.

“We don’t believe that any one sector, or any order of government, has purview over these big urban challenges,” said Sevaun Palvetzian, chief executive of CivicAction. “We are an organization at the nexus of where those sectors converge.”

Palvetzian said on Monday panel topics were determined based on “pockets of needs that were popping up” in regional research reports.
In a poll of 865 Torontonians released by Forum Research on April 11, 21 per cent of respondents said top spending priority should be given to repairing Toronto Community Housing Corp. buildings, followed at 19 per cent with building the downtown Toronto relief line.

Palvetzian said the topic of housing for seniors was chosen because the number of people 75 years and older is expected to triple by 2040. She said 25 per cent of TCHC residents are seniors, who wait, on average, 5 1/2 years to receive a subsidized housing unit.

CivicAction has hosted a summit every four years since 2002. Discussions at previous summits have sparked initiatives to help solve the issues presented during the summit. Palvetzian hopes this one will be no different.

“The conversations that we have tomorrow should do one thing - catalyze action,” she said, hoping initiatives outlined in one earlier summit - a bid to reduce energy use in office buildings - will also be realized from Tuesday’s panels.