The furor over the Ontario government’s Greenbelt mess has generated a lot of news stories, and more than a few opinion pieces, most of which are offered from an expert’s point of view.
To date, most have been negative. There have been accusations of back-room deals and general nefarious doings, and multiple calls for resignations.
While the average, non-expert citizen does not downplay the impact of not one but two negative findings by the integrity commissioner, there seems to be a sense out there that the whole fiasco misses the mark on many levels.
A good many of us are wondering how “opening up the Greenbelt” would result in decent places to live – decent meaning walls, a roof, central heat and indoor plumbing – for the people camped out in parks and under bridges. The answer is, it will not.
The Greenbelt tends to be hilly and scenic, filled with great places for multi-million-dollar estates – the ideal investment for some offshore billionaire, or an enterprising and well-connected developer.
The people camped out in the park need modestly- priced apartments close to home, with ready access to some high-level social services supports. Too many of them are living on the street because they have the kind of mental health and addiction issues that make local landlords leery of renting to them, for good reason.
Some may have been functioning fairly well until they ended up homeless, but spending a few winters in a freezing doorway, doing whatever they need to to survive, takes a devastating toll on mental health. These people need a type of housing that does not exist in the open market.
That is where governments – both federal and provincial – need to step in. Unfortunately, what they did decades ago was step out, leaving responsibility for not only administering but funding social housing, to municipalities.
Municipalities do not have the financial resources to handle this particular responsibility. The cost of building a modestly sized apartment building may well exceed the entire budget of many municipalities.
The theory that the market will look after filling housing needs on its own, and all the province needs to do is make it easy for developers to build what they want, where they want, does not hold water. What they want to build is what they have been building for years – those higher-end single-family dwellings that still sell like hotcakes. Great investments.
We have no doubt that the provincial government will make good on its promise of 50,000 new houses.
We also have no doubt the waiting lists for subsidized apartments will continue to rise, along with the number of people camped out in parks. It seems rather like trying to… well, control the spread of COVID by closing down all small retailers but leaving the big ones open.
In the present market, there are plenty of housing options for those with money. It appears those options will continue to grow.
Meanwhile, the options for those without much money are disappearing. When a landlord can “renovate” an apartment and get double the rent from a new tenant, what incentive is there to hold onto the longtime tenant, no matter how good he is about paying his rent on time?
Let this be a plea to the Ford government to look at the problem – the whole problem, not just part of it. It goes well beyond lack of housing, but involves an abysmal shortage of a variety of housing types – and that includes government housing with social services supports in place.
Let this also be a plea to the Ford government not to let the federal government off the hook. Both senior levels of government need to be involved, or rather, reinvolved, with social housing.
The option is watching municipalities flounder under the weight of too many responsibilities and too little funding, while local people die of such preventable things as complications from frostbite, tents catching fire, and untreated chronic illnesses like diabetes. And, of course, drug overdoses.
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Pauline Kerr is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter with Midwestern Newspapers. For question or comment she can be reached at pkerr@midwesternnewspapers.com.
