It’s not rocket science – federal affordable housing funding should be going to building housing that moderate and lower income folks in our community can afford.
Because while rents have skyrocketed – rather than using Canada’s established definition of housing affordability – federal affordable housing programs continue to use criteria that are out of touch with most folks’ financial reality, like 80% of market rent. To make matters worse, these criteria are only applied on a fraction of the units funded!
For example, the Affordable Housing Fund doesn’t have any affordability requirements on 70% of units, and the other 30% that do are so weak that they aren’t required to be affordable to a person working full time at minimum wage – let alone a senior on a fixed income, or a person relying on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) as their sole income.
Or take the $55 billion Apartment Construction and Loan Program, where these weak criteria resulted in only 3% of units built being affordable to those in core housing need in Canada.
That’s not even to mention that even for the minority of units where these weak criteria are applied, most of the time they’re only required to be in place for ten years – meaning that just ten years after a unit is constructed, developers can raise rents as high as they’d like.
All of this is why – in addition to my ongoing push to at minimum double the stock of social housing across the country, remove incentives for large corporate landlords to profit off homes in our community, and bring immigration levels back in line with housing starts – my team and I recently introduced Motion 170. It echoes the calls of both housing policy experts and local affordable housing providers to create clear criteria for both affordable and deeply affordable housing, based on the income of the folks in need of housing rather than market rent – and make sure that federal dollars actually go to building that housing!