[URBAN NOTE] "Provincial Housing Strategy an Unusual Show of Responsibility"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Catherine McIntyre describes Ontario's belated shift towards an actual policy for affordable housing in the province. This is something that affects me: I'm lucky, but I do not count on my luck to continue.

In 1999, Michael Shapcott met with a federal minister to propose the government reinstate a national housing strategy. It didn’t go quite the way he hoped.

It had been a decade and a half since the feds started gradually cutting spending on social housing and three years since they stopped funding it altogether. Homelessness across Canada was spiking—since the mid 80s, new social housing infrastructure plummeted 95 per cent, and in Toronto, shelter admissions quadrupled. “I brought these issues to the minister,” says Shapcott. “He told me to fuck off—that they were out of the housing business.”

In various forms, that attitude permeated government at the federal and provincial levels for another 15 years. “The notion was that homelessness is something in the pathology of individuals,” says Shapcott, director of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. “They’d say it’s unfortunate, but it’s not a government issue.”

Now, after more than 35 years of pressuring governments to take responsibility for housing, Shapcott and fellow social housing advocates finally feel like they’re being heard.

Last week the Ontario government announced updates to its long-term affordable housing strategy. While most of the report was regurgitated from the provincial budget released last month, there’s one new item, inclusionary zoning, that may actually help alleviate housing insecurity.