When it comes to seeing publicly subsidized housing built in our community, or any other, advocacy is key.
That was one takeaway from a recent visit by University of Toronto associate professor Alison Smith, an authority on issues of housing and homelessness, who spoke to a Jan. 14 Salt Spring Forum crowd.
Smith praised the federal government’s National Housing Strategy, initiated in 2018, and the more recently announced Urban, Rural and Northern Indigenous Housing Strategy. After decades of inaction on the housing front, those steps acknowledge the critical role that senior governments play in ensuring its citizens are adequately housed. But Smith cautioned that it’s one thing to make funding announcements and another for those funds to be translated into completed, habitable shelter.
While the amount committed to the strategy initiated in 2018 keeps climbing, and the government has a “progress report” on its NHS website, exactly how many units have been completed is not easy to gauge. As of the end of September 2023, the site states $38.89 billion in “funding commitments” have been made and 151,803 housing units created or funds committed to their creation. There is a critical difference between a funding commitment and units being created. For true accountability, the “created units” and “funding commitments” for them should be separated in their reporting.
Smith stressed in her presentation to islanders how it’s “really easy” to make a funding announcement about supporting housing, and not difficult to get it into a budget, but not necessarily easy to get it out of the feds’ bank account “and into the hands of the people who need it.”
That’s where focused advocacy comes into the picture. If public funds have been promised for a particular project, the funding agencies must be pressed to spend the money — responsibly, of course.
The Capital Regional District has been taking a leadership role in creating public housing, with its recently announced plan to seek ratepayers authority to borrow $85 million to build housing in the region the latest evidence of that. But provincial and federal dollars are also needed to complete the vision, along with advocacy from citizens to ensure those funds end up unlocking new housing doors.
The question that even the experts don’t discuss is – why all of a sudden do we have this issue? There has never been an open and honest discussion on defining what is affordable housing. There are many ways to pay for these projects without government having to use taxpayers’ money. Just need to look at what is happening here where CRD wants to force citizens to pay on their taxes to subsidize someone else’s rent by using a very undemocratic process as the AAP. I am sure there are a number of people who have a mortgage on their house who are struggling to make their own payments. There has been no open forum to discuss this. Why are taxes needed when this project should be self paying? If the CRD or any level of government can’t figure out how to have affordable housing through self paying then they should resign.