Affordable Housing Team
The First Unitarian Church of Hamilton
November 28, 2019

The Honourable Ahmed Hussen, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Families, Children and Social Development
House of Commons
Ottawa K1A 0A6

Dear Minister:

Congratulations on your appointment as Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, including responsibility for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and affordable housing.

Affordable housing was clearly one of the most important issues debated during the recent election campaign, and we urge you, as minister, to not only continue but to build on the good start made by the government in its first term. We welcome your recent statement that “the federal government’s role is to be a strong and reliable and long-term partner” in tackling what you recognize as a housing crisis in Canada.

The Affordable Housing Team of the First Unitarian Church of Hamilton* is particularly happy that you have some knowledge of the challenges and opportunities facing the City of Hamilton, given that you worked in the Hamilton-Wentworth social services department in the early 1990s. Although the Hamilton economy is in many ways stronger today than it was in the 1990s, our revitalization has certainly left some behind. By many measures, the challenge of housing affordability in Hamilton, serious in the early 1990s, has only become more urgent in recent decades, as indicated in a few statistics cited at the end of this letter.

Yet we are optimistic. Hamilton City Council typically co-invests, through waivers of parkland and developments fees, and many of the city’s non-profit and co-op affordable housing providers are ready to build. With federal leadership, the conditions are ripe to make a significant dent in the backlog of repairs and in building the new units that Hamilton residents so badly need, if conditions outlined below are met.

A first step is a solid commitment in the Throne Speech to affordable housing as an urgent priority of the government, including recognition that realizing the right to housing for everyone requires a commitment to simplify and speed up approvals of funding for projects and a commitment to substantially increase the funding for all aspects of building, renewing and supporting affordable housing. Increasingly, we need to think of affordable housing as a basic local utility, like water or electricity—basic to the success of our cities and towns. Increased housing funding, paired with Infrastructure, Natural Resources and other ministries’ funding for climate initiatives to reduce energy use, could also help meet Canada’s climate responsibilities.

We have begun conversations with housing providers in Hamilton about what is needed to maximize the possibilities to preserve and grow the supply of decent, safe, affordable housing in Hamilton. Here are some key priorities they’ve identified for the federal government:

• The money that’s available in the Co-investment Fund needs to flow much more quickly. What’s needed is a sense of urgency—based on need but also on the potentially short life of the government. The federal process, we were told, needs to be simplified, streamlined and expedited. One housing providing has its Letter of Intent yet, with its project half built, it still doesn’t have a signed agreement for the funding.
• Seed money for the early expenses involved in getting local approval of projects needs to be both larger and to flow earlier. One local coop has already spent more than a half million dollars for all kinds of studies and is still eight to 10 months away from a possible construction start on a project of less than 20 units. CMHC’s website says that “Advances will be processed once invoices are provided, activities are completed and supporting documentation is received.” Advancing part or all of the seed money in stages and starting much earlier would encourage new projects, speed up that preliminary work, and save non-profits and co-ops the costs of bridge financing that can be challenging to arrange with conventional lenders.
• We heard that the commitments in the 2017 National Housing Strategy and the subsequent budgets are a good start but not nearly enough. Even by the estimates of the Strategy, the National Housing Strategy would help only about a third of the 1.7 million Canadian households who find themselves in core housing need—and the Parliamentary Budget Officer concluded that “it is not clear that the National Housing Strategy will reduce the prevalence of housing need relative to 2017” based on proposed funding levels. By either calculation, too many Canadians are left struggling to afford adequate housing. The goal of 10,000 new units a year should be tripled, with a proportionate increase in funding.
• The government needs to amend the criteria of the Co-Investment Fund to require a significant proportion of units to rent for well below the current requirement of 80 per cent or less of median market rent. There is a large need for deeply affordable units, as shown by the recent Statistics Canada housing survey that found 283,000 households in Canada with at least one member on an affordable housing wait list. Roughly 40,000 households in Hamilton earn too little to afford rent at 80 per cent of the 2018 median local market rent. The Parliamentary Budget Officer concluded that the government’s funding to help low-income Canadians is actually reduced from the 10-year historical average. The government should require a larger percentage of units in proposed projects to be affordable than it does now and to require deeper affordability, in addition to the increased funding mentioned in the previous point.
• The government should work with other levels of government and non-profit affordable housing providers to make it easier for non-profits with equity in their developments to leverage that equity to build more affordable housing, without having to wait for operating agreements to expire.
• CityHousing Hamilton has applied for significant National Housing Strategy repair dollars for its 7,000 public housing units that are, like most such units across Canada, old and in serious need of upgrading. A subsequent application will be coming for the city’s non-profit sector. Approving those requests would make it possible to preserve the significant asset that is the city’s existing affordable—often rent-geared-to-income—units and allow these housing providers to shift more of their focus from repairs to expanding the number of units badly needed in the city.
• It is commendable that the National Housing Strategy places high priority on affordable housing to marginalized groups. However, it needs to be recognized that while the crisis of affordability hits marginalized groups hardest, it isn’t restricted to them. Lots of working people who could once afford Hamilton’s rent or housing prices can’t today. Wages and incomes for a significant majority of Canadians have not kept up with rising rents, let alone housing prices. As one indication, a study released this summer showed there are very few neighbourhoods in Canada where someone working fulltime at minimum wage could afford the average rent. A person would need to work 54 hours a week at minimum wage to afford the 2018 average market rent in Hamilton and actual rents on vacant units are even higher. Even without explicit discrimination, those with smaller incomes are disadvantaged, especially in the private housing market, in their ability to afford even inadequate housing.
• Hamilton is not unusual in having a disproportionate number of Indigenous people who are homeless or face challenges finding adequate housing they can afford. Only a few dozen new units have been built specifically for Hamilton’s Indigenous people in the past two decades. The Parliamentary Budget Officer found that projected National Housing Strategy spending on Indigenous housing will be substantially lower than over the past decade. In keeping with the government’s commitment to reconciliation, there needs to be a large increase in spending for Indigenous housing, both on and off reserves.
• Finally, we strongly endorse collaboration and co-operation across departments and all levels of government to design and implement housing and homelessness policies that reduce administrative burdens for project proponents, flow money faster and improve systems planning. However, the need is urgent and the federal government should not wait for collaboration to move ahead quickly on the priorities identified above. It is clear that the market is not meeting the needs of a significant number of Canadian households and a major increase in non-market housing is essential to easing and eventually ending the crisis of affordable housing we currently face.

You will find an active, capable group of housing providers in Hamilton who are eager to get on with making the National Housing Strategy a success by building several thousand news units and repairing even more in Hamilton. With the approval of our congregational board, we support the proposals local housing providers made that we have outlined above as necessary steps to make that level of activity possible and we urge you to take the lead in getting your government’s approval for these proposals.

We look forward to your response and wish you well in your new portfolio.

Bill Johnston
Co-chair, Affordable Housing Team
First Unitarian Church of Hamilton

*The mission of the Affordable Housing Team is to work to increase the opportunities for people in Hamilton to have housing that is appropriate, safe and affordable, with the supports they need to stay housed. The Team has raised more than $30,000 in three years for an affordable apartment building just constructed by Sacajawea Non-Profit Housing Inc.; helped organize public awareness events including a Hamilton Centre candidates meeting on October 15, 2019 with community partners; and engages in research and in advocacy at the federal, provincial and local level.

Some indications of the housing crisis in Hamilton:

• Average rents jumped 27 per cent in the five years to 2018;
• Some 6,700 households are on wait lists for subsidized housing (compared to less than 3,000 in the late 1990s)
• Hamilton has lost 1,708 units of affordable housing as operating agreements with senior levels of government ended, and it has been able to approve construction of only 1,011 new units since 2003, many of which have higher rents than the units that were lost.
• 45 per cent of Hamilton renters pay 30 per cent or more of gross household income for housing (compared to about 30 per cent of renters at the beginning of the 1990s)
• The cost of buying the average home jumped from 2.6 times the average income to 4.8 times between 2000 and 2015 and prices continue to rise faster than incomes.