Ontario Construction News staff writer
The City of Toronto’s Plan to Create Supportive Housing Opportunities report, identifies the current initiatives underway for 2020 and highlights a number of strategies that will be pursued to reach the target of creating 18,000 units of supportive housing over the next ten years, will be debated at the Planning and Housing Committee on Wednesday.
The Plan to Creative Supportive Housing Opportunities report identifies the current initiatives underway for 2020 and highlights a number of strategies that will be pursued to reach the target of creating 18,000 units of supportive housing over the next ten years.
City staff have outlined a series of approaches that, if approved by City Council, would create 600 units of supportive housing this year.
“The report gives us a roadmap as a city to add 600 supportive housing units this year,” said Toronto Mayor John Tory.
“This is exactly the type of innovative thinking that I have been encouraging our staff to undertake and I am grateful to them for their efforts in this regard. It will help us to get more supportive housing built faster”
Tory was in Ottawa last week, meeting with Federal Minister Ahmed Hussen and other MPs, attempting to encourage them to join the City in funding more supportive housing.
“Our HousingTO Action Plan is predicated, as it must be, on a three-government funding partnership to get supportive housing built and staffed. There is no other way,” he said.
The proposed multi-pronged approach includes layering supports that will enable people experiencing chronic homelessness to achieve housing stability in private market rental units through existing supports such as the Home for Good program.
It also includes the renovation and conversion of existing housing units into supportive housing opportunities and innovative pilot projects such as conversion of shelter sites into supportive housing for long-term shelter stayers and use of modular housing. These opportunities will be further developed as part of the HousingTO implementation plan that will be brought to the Planning and Housing Committee for approval in June 2020.
The HousingTO 2020-2030 Action Plan, approved by City Council in December 2019, established a target of 40,000 new affordable rental homes approvals including 18,000 units of supportive housing over the next ten years. The HousingTO plan identified that achieving this supportive housing target is critical to addressing homelessness and the housing needs of vulnerable residents in the city.
“To continue to manage the flow of new people becoming homeless and significantly decrease the number of current homeless residents, we need to continue to create as many housing opportunities as we can to assist them in moving to long-term housing with the supports they need to prevent more people from becoming chronically homeless,” said Deputy Mayor Ana Bailão, planning and housing committee chair.