Everyone Wants Affordable Housing But Not In Their Neighborhood

[Walter]

Do you want a subsidized housing development in your backyard? Do you want a half way house that integrates prisoners into the community in your backyard? Do you want a safe drug haven in your backyard? Do you want anything in your backyard that will disturb the tranquility and/or lower your property values?

If your answer is YES let you city councillor, neighbors and me know.......

BTW I have two of the three in my neighborhood already.......


My backyard or yours?

Nov. 22 is National Housing Day. Here in Toronto, the waiting list for affordable housing is more than 65,000 households long, and it takes 10 years to get to the top.

To attempt to meet such overwhelming demand, city council approved the formation of an Affordable Housing Committee (AHC) in July to speed up the approval process for new development applications. The AHC will view all development proposals and make recommendations on whether to support them before they are passed along to other committees and city staff for approval.

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, the committee's chair, is optimistic that the AHC will accelerate the process. In January, he says, the committee will compile a set of recommendations for every ward outlining where new affordable housing developments can be built. Mammoliti's hoping such a city-wide plan will leave little room for councillors to play the "NIMBY game."

Michael Shapcott of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee is skeptical about how much the new AHC will really be able to accomplish. "If you add up the numbers, in 29 of the city's 44 wards there's been 0, not a single unit built [since 1999], and one of the key reasons has been that city councillors have a large amount of control over being able to block new affordable projects," Shapcott says. "[The AHC] is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough." DALE DUNCAN

[Bogie]

If you create "affordable housing" in only "affordable housing" areas, away from the more "well-to-do" and "self-supporting" neighborhoods, then we will have created ghettos and segregation. Politically speaking, this is a hard management issue and much opposition would be obvious by those that don't want this type of housing in their neighbourhood.

To address your comment on "half-way houses" ... this is fully disagree on, as far as placing them, unknown, into existing neighbourhoods. Our daughter lives right next door to one (or something similar, as no one will tell us exactly what it is), didn't know about it when she moved in, and it worries us constantly. One of the "residents", a few months back, was arrested for murder in downtown Toronto. They even deal drugs fairly openly and the police are constantly in attendance.

If I am a homeowner, I do not want anything gov't induced, to reduce my investment (property value). I do not pay taxes for self-destruction.

BTW, Walter, please quote, and link, to where your article comes from. It would help greatly in understanding the intent of the original author. You, yourself, have stated, that your quotes don't always come from The Toronto Sun, and I am not a newspaper reader myself to be able to recognize most of the article authors you quote.

[Walter]

The article is from the current issue of Eye magazine which if you are prone to put labels on things would be called a left wing paper and it was to illustrate the hypocracy of politicians and a segment of our society when it comes to social issues. Too many of them are in favour of solving the problems as long as it is NIMBY.

And you are right this type of attitude does cause "ghettos" and many of the people living in these ghettos, who are as hard working and honest as you and I, pay the price. I guess this is the white man's version of the res.

I don't want to pay the price for my own destruction but in a sense we do so when we look at where are tax dollars go....to repair the holes in the social safety net caused by over utilization and poor management of the system.

[Lesley]

Affordable housing is good but unless it's built by Habitat for Humanity it still costs as much as regular housing to build. The cost of the land is still just as high as if it was a residence that you or I were buying. There's no doubt at all that we need affordable housing, that people trapped in high rents will never be able to afford a downpayment and own a home otherwise. The big question is however can we afford affordable housing. I don't know what a townhouse/garden home type residence goes for in Toronto but here it's between $150,000 - 200,000 and the taxes are around $2000 a year. How much of that cost can the taxpayers realistically subsidize? It might be cheaper to provide no downpayment no interest mortgages and tax breaks for first time buyers who qualify so they can buy a house in an established community instead of creating subsidized areas. It probably wouldn't cost any more than building houses, in fact it might cost less because the mortgage would be payed back over time. There would be no ghettos or slums or "subsidized" areas. If the owner defaults then the government, like the bank, has the property and can sell it to recoup their losses.

As for halfway houses, depending on who's in them, I'm with Bogie. I don't want my property values lowered or police at the house across the street at all hours. I don't want to worry about the safety of my child all the time or find needles on my lawn. I chose my neighbourhood carefully and if someone wants to dump a houseful of of people just released from the Kingston Pen in the middle of it I think I'd be out there raising hell with the rest of my neighbours. If that makes me a bad person then I'll have to live with that.