Facing an annual $90-million gap in its budget for social-housing repairs, Toronto councillors on Friday confirmed a decision to sell 56 vacant homes owned by the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC).
The city's executive committee also gave Davenport Councillor Ana Bailao the task this spring and summer of determining if TCHC has a worthwhile choice other than to sell 675 other houses 2,000 people live in.Bailao's five-person group will report to the committee in September, and TCHC will study another 186 of its scattered homes - most serving as rooming houses or supportive housing - before decisions are made on them. Though Mayor Rob Ford announced this "compromise" at the start of the meeting - at which 117 people were registered to speak - many tenants and supporters were determined to make the case against selling off any of the homes."We tenants feel that we are being used as pawns in a crisis we did not create. And that, my friends, is discrimination," said Wallace Simpson, a senior wearing the "We're Not For Sale" T-shirt of a group called Tenants For Social Housing.It is governments that have caused the funding problem, not tenants, Simpson told the committee.Janet Davidson said she was in a Thornhill shelter when TCHC placed her in a standalone unit in Riverdale. "Since then, I've been able to give my children a pretty balanced life," said Davidson, who doesn't think she could have done as well "in the projects."She said she's not blind to the city's need to sell assets, but asked why it could not just sell its vacant homes and give someone else the opportunity she's had.Sherri Williams, another tenant, said her time in a TCHC highrise was "horrendous," but since moving to a single-unit home her son is more manageable and his grades are up. "When you see good, you want good. When you want good, you do good," said Williams."That's why scattered units work."Bud Purves, TCHC board chairperson, said he's not proud of the condition the authority's buildings, which house 164,000 tenants, are in, but after years of looking for "silver bullets" to solve its repair backlog, now up to $751 million, something significant must be done."We have $2.2 billion in debt," Purves said, addling while the authority also has $6 billion in assets, it can't access that equity and sees the assets "crumbling before our eyes."Selling scattered units - 1.3 per cent of TCHC's stock - on the open market will extend the useful life of its highrise buildings and do the greatest good for the most tenants, said Purves. "Our proposal is to let the market solve the problem."The meeting was shown pictures of a vacant damaged townhouse in the city's east end. The repair cost is "$50,000 we just don't have," Purves said.City Manager Joseph Pennachetti said without the sales, which will generate $222 million the average state of repair the city's social-housing "could fall from fair to critical" by 2018, with real serious consequences for tenants.But Pennachetti didn't hide the fact that without more help from the federal and provincial governments, the backlog of repairs will grow anyway. A report Friday said the city would need $150 million more a year from 2013 to 2017 and $90 million annual thereafter to achieve and maintain a state of good repair.Joy Connelly, who blogs on social housing, said she welcomes a task force but argued a one-time cash injection won't solve TCHC's funding problem. Non-profit groups may be able to manage some of the stand-alone units better, she said.