At our housing event on June 6, 2023, Scaling Up Affordable Housing, Dr. Carolyn Whitzman said the federal and provincial governments should be paying most of the costs of non-market housing. But even without money, there are things the city of Hamilton can do. (You can watch the video at https://uuhamilton.ca/affordable-housing/)
- First, do a real housing need assessment, using data from the Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART) project Dr. Whitzman is working on. HART is also working with the CMHC to get better and more consistent information on homeless people, students, etc.
- Set real targets for the amount of social housing that needs to get built. Those targets need to be realistic. Current federal grants won’t produce deeply affordable homes but at least they allow the city to start increasing the supply of social housing. Edmonton requires about 16 per cent of units in all neighbourhoods to be social housing.
- Identify government-owned land and start leasing it or giving it to social housing providers, free.
- Work on property tax exemptions that a lot of charitable organizations should be able to get; waive fees; work with non-profit housing providers to change the zoning to make the projects work financially and to speed up the projects.
- Provides one-stop shopping assistance in dealing with the various grants, as Calgary does.
We will have a full transcript of Dr. Whitzman’s presentation by next week. It amounts to a crash course on the issue of affordable housing.