I went to the Homelessness Action Group meeting an Trinity-St. Paul's United Church. City Councilor Adam Vaughn was a special guest. He said that the number of shelter beds in the city is actually declining because they are closing more places than they are opening. The closures are due to problems with deferred maintenance that requires capital expenditure to repair. The city wants the Province to pay for the work (approx. $30 Million) but the Province won't allocate the money. So, unsafe places are being closed faster than new places are coming on line.
Councilor Vaughn suggested that the city may just have to eat the cost of those capital repairs like they did with the subway improvements a few years ago. In that case, a major accident prompted the city to spend the money on repairs. But the loss of life due to the lack of shelter beds means that we have already had several TTC accidents. If you doubt this, check out the Homeless Memorial at Holy Trinity, Eaton Center. They have several hundred names of people that have died on the street. Not good. And what's $30 Million in a budget with $1.6 Billion for capital improvement in 2008 (and another $8.2 Billion for 2008 Operations)!
Strategically, though, the real problem is the lack of low-income housing in the city. Fixing that requires tweaking city/provincial rules around development. You see, left to their own devices, developers are not going to provide new low income housing--it's not profitable. That means that in the areas of the city where population is increasing, the increasing demand for low-wage work will be filled with people commuting into the city core. That means more demands on public transit and various other problems. What city needs is to be able to more strictly control what kinds of housing is built where in order to guarantee financial diversity in neighborhoods.
This could be done by changing zoning regulations to allow proscriptive and inclusive zoning. Inclusive zoning means that the city could require developers to achieve a certain mix of units in a given development. For example, requiring that a new condo tower have at least 20% family-sized units and half of those designated for low-income families. Proscriptive zoning goes even further, and allows the city to be quite specific about what developers are required to build. Take a look at the corner of Bathurst and Dundas. There is a one-story McDonald's there. It's a big waste of space in a tight part of the city. With the right laws in place, the developer could have been required to build to the maximum height allowance. The upper stories could have been housing.
The major counter-argument for such increased regulation is that it would "hurt" developers. But real estate development has been so crazy in Toronto for the past many years that the city leaders would welcome a cool-down in downtown development. There are condo towers popping up everywhere, and putting the breaks future development would give city services time to absorb the new demands.
What's important right now is not that developers get rich or that the skyline have bigger buildings, but that the communities being built are ecologically sound--that is, that they are good habitats for people. And that means planning neighborhoods, not just letting people build whatever they want.
Adam Vaughn is a convincing speaker. He's obviously a career civil servant (and before that a well-known reporter) who has a profound knowledge of how this city works. I hope he has some success in his plans!
-t
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