Priority to Ensure Housing is Affordable
Challenges
Affordable housing and homelessness issues have continued to sparked emotional, difficult debates at City Council. Because the causes of homelessness are complex and diverse, decisions and progress are a struggle and difficult to sustain. Barriers to change on this priority include inadequate funding from other orders of government; laws, by-laws and processes that made creative responses difficult and misconceptions about homeless people and affordable housing.
In addition the Toronto Community Housing Company, home to about 164,000 low and moderate-income tenants and a corporation in which the City of Toronto is the sole share-holder, faces enormous infrastructure and maintenance challenges. Over the last five years, a series of City Council reports identified that the downloading of the social housing stock to the municipality was creating a significant and increasing financial burden.
In June, 2005 the City considered a report describing the physical condition of Toronto Community Housing Corporation buildings - Toronto’s social housing stock. The report indicated an immediate need for $224M of capital repairs (2004 dollars) to address deferred capital work that was transferred through the downloading of social housing and total capital repair costs (including the deferred work) over the next ten years of $908 million. These funds were considered essential to ensuring housing stock in a state of good repair and providing tenants with a safe and healthy living environment.
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