Thousands continue to wait for social housing

Tue Feb 05, 2008

By: By Reka Szekely
DURHAM -- With an average 30-month wait, thousands of applicants remained on the waiting list for Durham social housing last year.

Overall, there were 3,650 applicants on the waiting list at the end of 2007. Of those, 237 had special priority, meaning that at least one member of the household is being abused by someone with whom they currently live or from whom they have recently separated. Non-priority applicants are placed on the list chronologically.

The average wait in the Region was 30 months for those without priority and seven months for those with it. A total of 454 households received rent-geared-to-income housing last year.

The housing crunch was felt most steeply in the west end of the region. Families without priority waited an average of 67 months or five-and-a-half years, for housing in Ajax. In Pickering and Uxbridge, no non-priority families were housed in 2007.

About 50 per cent of the Region's available housing is in Oshawa, with 15 per cent in Whitby, 10 per cent in Ajax, nine per cent in Pickering, eight per cent in Clarington and three per cent or less in each of Scugog, Uxbridge and Brock.

Mary Menzies, acting director social housing for Durham Region, said long waits often force tough decisions on families.

"For a lot of families, they're choosing between feeding their children or paying their rent that month," said Ms. Menzies, adding that kind of hardship creates a tremendous amount of stress on the family.

At just more than two years, seniors had the shortest average wait.

Singles and couples with no children had the longest.

Part of the problem is there is very little turnover in homes for single people or couples with no children, said Ms. Menzies. Another part is social housing has been traditionally geared toward families and seniors.

"It was only in the late 1980s singles were even considered eligible for social housing," said Ms. Menzies.

Singles and couples represent 32 per cent of the social housing waiting list, but they represented only 12 per cent of those actually housed in 2007. That's down two per cent from last year.

Even for singles with priority, the average wait was 13 months.

"It's still a very long time for someone living in a situation where their safety is in jeopardy," said Ms. Menzies, adding that Durham's network of shelters do a great deal to help.

There was, however, a 39 per cent decline in special priority demand from last year. That was a result of administrative clean up of the database.

Ms. Menzies said that although the 131 new housing units announced in January will help the overall situation, it's going to take a community effort to reduce the size of the list.

"It's not just an issue of building housing, it's helping people improve their economic situation."

Social housing tenants still waiting to hear their fate

Tue Jan 29, 2008

By: By Jillian Follert

OSHAWA -- The uncertainty continues for 80 tenants at two of the City's oldest social housing buildings.

For more than two months, people living in affordable and rent-geared-to-income units at Chris Mason Hall and Owen D. Friend Apartments, have waited on pins and needles as council mulls over what to do with the aging properties.

And it looks like they'll keep waiting.

On Monday night, council had the chance to scrap a proposed plan to sell off the buildings, but instead decided to send it back to the committee level for more debate.

Last fall, council's finance and administration committee voted in-camera to sell the properties on the open market, because they require between $500,000 and $700,000 in repairs over the next five years.

The decision, first reported in This Week, sparked concern that the buildings wouldn't remain social housing if sold. Durham Region already has a serious social housing gap, with about 4,000 people on a waiting list.

On Monday night, Councillor April Cullen made a motion to scrap the sale and do the renovations.

"I want to stop using people who are disadvantaged as a political football. There are people who spent their Christmas wondering if they were going to have a place to live," she said. "I want to put this issue to bed tonight. We have a shortage of affordable housing in this city and I think it would be inappropriate to sell these buildings and take the chance that they could be torn down or replaced."â?¨ But her colleagues weren't convinced.

Councillor Robert Lutczyk wants to investigate selling the properties to the Region of Durham -- which already manages them -- saying that is the level of government responsible for social housing. He suggested this option despite originally voting to sell them on the open market when consideration of selling to the Region was also on the table.

Mayor John Gray said it makes the most sense to keep the properties and do renovations slowly over time, saying it would cost more to transfer them to the Region, because the repairs would have to be done first and the mortgages would have to be discharged.

"I'm not interested in doing that because it's too costly," he said. "My hope is that councillors will decide to develop a work plan, so we can see these buildings rehabilitated over time and keep the arrangement we have now."

City Treasurer Rick Stockman said the amount outstanding on the mortgages was about $38,000 for Chris Mason Hall and $296,000 for Owen D. Friend, as of 2006.

Mary Menzies, acting director of housing for the Region, couldn't guess how Regional council would respond to a request from Oshawa to take on the buildings, but said the Region already needs to make millions in repairs on its own stock of housing and questioned why they would willingly take on more liabilities.

The debate continues at the next finance and administration committee meeting on Feb. 5 at 9 a.m.