Helen Lam | Contributor
Featured Image: Better and more affordable housing could be available for York students in the next 10 years. | Courtesy of Ilayda Öçalan
The Affordable Housing Committee at York (AHC) will submit a request for proposal to build affordable housing at the intersection of Keele Street and Finch Avenue as part of the City of Toronto’s “Housing Now.”
AHC at York University was established in 2016 to facilitate the creation of affordable cooperative housing at or near York University,” reads the official page on York’s website.
The Housing Now program is an initiative that aims to activate 11 sites owned by Toronto to develop affordable housing within mixed-income, transit-oriented communities.
The units’ rates will be at approximately 80 percent of Toronto’s average market rent. Households earning between $21,000 and $52,000 a year should be able to afford them. City Council created a $1-million non-profit housing capacity fund to support non-profit organizations’ participating in Housing Now and to encourage their involvement in the units’ long-term operation.
Bria Hamilton, the community representative of AHC, comments on the importance of speaking to students about the issue.
“Last year, the Affordable Housing Committee received a grant as a part of the Housing 2020-2030 action plan to host a community consultation,” says Hamilton. “This provided us with the opportunity to hear the voices of underrepresented members of Toronto’s renters: students. They are a group of people continuously targeted by unsafe and unlawful rental situations, and we’re hoping to bring these issues into the affordable housing conversation.”
Housing Now is one component of the recently released municipal Housing TO 2020-2030 Action Plan, which sets out 13 main goals to assist over 341,000 households and guide housing investments by the federal and municipal governments of approximately $23.4 billion over the next nine years.
In it, some actions include transferring units from Toronto Community Housing Corporation to non-profits, supporting home retrofits for older adults, and redefining “affordable” housing in Toronto to cost no more than 30 per cent of gross monthly income.
On December 17, 2019, City Council made some amendments in terms of bringing more attention to the issue of lack of student housing: it adopted a motion to request the Executive Director, Housing Secretariat to incorporate the work of the Student Dwell TO project into the next annual update to City Council on Housing TO 2020-2030.
The Student Dwell TO project is “a multi-university research project about access to affordable housing for post-secondary students in the Greater Toronto Area,” according to the official website.
Tristan Laing, another community representative of the AHC, explains the need for recognition of students as a population in need of better and more affordable housing.
“Despite the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of students in the GTA, many of them renters, various levels of government continue to not see ‘students’ as a specific group requiring targeted solutions to address the way the housing crisis is impacting them,” says Laing.
Although the AHC is making progress, and Mayor John Tory has announced that he will strive to fully fund the Housing Now plan, it will be a slow process.
One newly-confirmed housing boost effort is a federal-provincial partnership providing rent subsidies to low-income residents including renters in Toronto. Efforts like this may help ease the financial burden of housing for students until more affordable housing is in place.
