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."
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