Big-city mayors looking for better housing promises

Mayors from Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Halifax, London and Kitchener are meeting to push federal parties on housing.

Thestar.com
Sept. 23, 2015
By David Rider

A half-dozen big-city mayors are huddling in Toronto to crank up pressure on federal parties to help cities struggling with social housing costs.

“We need help - this is a need approaching a crisis,” Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson told the Star in an interview en route to Toronto for Thursday’s meeting with Mayor John Tory, Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson, Halifax’s Mike Savage, Kitchener’s Berry Vrbanovic and London’s Matt Brown.

Edmonton has just 11,673 social housing units, expiring federal funding agreements and “a federal government that seems like it doesn’t really want to be in housing,” Iveson said. “That’s a recipe for disaster.”

To those who say low-income housing is a municipal or provincial concern, Iveson argues that many tenants in his city are First Nations, Métis, Inuit, immigrants or refugees. What’s more, when people are homeless, or in insecure housing, they are much more likely to interact with the justice and health care systems, with big costs to society and all levels of government, he said.

“Housing is part of the solution to those rising costs, otherwise we’re reacting rather than preventing” problems, Iveson added. “There is an inextricable federal connection to housing.”

Since big-city mayors kicked off their urban issues pressure campaign in Toronto last February, the Conservative, NDP, Liberal and Green parties have all made pledges on social and/or affordable housing.
“My sense is there is still time for each of them to do a little more,” Tory said in an interview.

“If parties make clear that (their promised) infrastructure money could apply to social housing repair and reconstruction, that would be very helpful to us. There’s an indication of that from the Liberals but not as much from the others.”

Toronto expects that almost 60,000 of its social housing units will require $2.6 billion in repairs over the next decade. Operating costs for Toronto Community Housing are about $400 million a year.

Asked if the mayors are having the desired impact on the federal election campaign, Tory said: “I think we all collectively have a huge sense that we’ve been listened to ... but we still have almost four weeks left for progress.”

In their closed-door meeting at city hall, the mayors also plan to share information about their respective plans to help Syrian refugees in light of the federal pledge to resettle 10,000 in Canada by next September.

In an open-door meeting at city hall Sunday, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., the public is invited to learn what they can do to help Syrian refugees resettle in Toronto.