About 70 people showed up last Sunday, including about two dozen from our congregation, to our showing of the housing documentary, Thinking Beyond the Market: A Film About Genuinely Affordable Housing. Dr. Brian Doucet, who made the film about affordable housing solutions and policies being applied now in different Canadian communities, joined a panel that included Michelle Baird, director of Hamilton’s Housing Service Division, Karl Andrus, Executive Director of the Hamilton Community Benefits Network, and Hojay Byfield, co-chair of the Stoney Creek chapter of ACORN Hamilton.
Several of key takeaways from the film and discussion.
1 Landlords must not be allowed to raise rent without limits when a unit is vacated. However, this practice is currently legal in Ontario, encouraging landlords to get tenants with affordable rents to leave so the landlords can raise the rent by large amounts. Doucet said eliminating that rent control exception would be an effective, and inexpensive, way to preserve affordable units and keep tenants from being evicted.
2 The solutions shown in the film need to be multiplied hundreds of times across the country. We need vastly more federal and provincial investments in non-profit and co-operative housing. Andrus urged the city of Hamilton to raise money for housing by issuing bonds, using the city’s good credit rating to get low interest rates. Doucet said mixed income housing, desirable for social reasons, also provides more rent revenue to cover costs.
3 Andrus showed slides about the many initiatives the city has taken to get more affordable housing built, which Baird noted is starting to happen, with a half dozen beautiful new buildings under construction this past year.
4 The film and Byfield, emphasized the importance of supporting tenant unions, whose pressure is essential to getting good housing policies such as Hamilton’s anti-renoviction bylaw but also making sure good policies are actually enforced.
Many of those present signed form letters to the Prime Minister and Housing Minister urging more federal funding. You can find the letters here. Mailing them to the address indicted on the letter does not require postage.