Ideas About Social Housing

John Sewell has spent much of his political life ruminating about social housing and helping to ensure that it is constructed.
He was actively involved in putting together the purchase agreement that resulted in Toronto’s first non-profit co-operative in the early 1970s, the Don Area Co-operative Housing Incorporated (DACHI.) He helped forge the purchase agreement for the Bain Avenue project that the city agreed to assume, and then worked with residents to convince the city to convert it to a tenant controlled non-profit co-operative. He was actively involved in promoting the City’s assisted housing program in the 1970s, and as Mayor was chair of the City’s non-profit housing company, Cityhome.

In 1986 he was appointed by the provincial government as the full-time Chair of the Metro Toronto Housing Authority, which managed about 35,000 assisted housing units in Toronto, providing homes to more than 100,000 residents. He held that position for a two-year period during which time he created a program of reforming public housing in Toronto to better serve tenants and to better use the subsidy dollars supplied by the public sector. Unfortunately, that program fell into abeyance when he was not re-appointed.

Since the mid-1990s he has been working with tenants in several projects to help redesign housing sites in downtown Toronto.

John’s book Houses and Homes: Housing for Canadians was published in 1994. It summarizes the key issues around housing and housing development in Canada.

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There are two basic kinds of social housing in Canada: public housing, and non-profit housing.

Public housing consists of large projects developed by provincial governments (particularly the Ontario provincial government) in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s. The model for public housing was generally Regent Park, a large project undertaken by the City of Toronto after World Ward II, and promoted as the model in which other levels of government should participate. Two characteristics mark public housing projects.

First, all of the units are occupied by households with low income, whose rents are subsided so residents pay no more than 30% of their income in rent (in the past this was 25%). Tenants whose income rises to what might be called an average amount find their rent is so high it’s better if they move out. This means projects always consist of low income households.

The second characteristic of public housing is design. In most cases public housing projects are based on modern planning principles. Units do not access public streets, but open onto anonymous garden space or private walkways. The problems with this kind of design are described in Chapter 8 of Houses and Homes, and in Chapter 8 of The Shape of the City. Governments stopped funding new public housing the early 1970s.

The second kind of social housing in Canada is non-profit housing. This includes non-profit housing owned by municipalities, by social agencies and unions, and tenant-controlled non-profit co-operatives. Non-profit housing has two general characteristics. First, it is designed to related to public streets and eschews general modern planning principles. Second, most non-profit projects include a mix of incomes so that no more than half of the units are occupied by persons on low income - the remainder are rented at market rates. These characteristics are more fully described in Chapter 9 of Houses and Homes and Chapter 6 of The Shape of the City. Non-profit housing relied on guarantees of capital funding from the federal and provincial governments, as well as operating subsidies from them. The federal government terminated these subsidies for new projects in 1991 and most provincial governments followed suit soon thereafter.

In the 21st century governments have been rethinking the need for new social housing as homelessness has soared in the intervening years after the non-profit programs were ended The exact form these programs will take is still unclear. Some are suggesting capital subsidies, some are suggesting rent supplement. One expects a number of experiments to occur with the limited funding made available by the federal government for the next few years.