With Board approval, the Affordable Housing Team submitted a brief to the federal consultation on the 2024 budget last week. You can read the full letter here. The brief included some of the issues from the letters many in this congregation signed after our National Housing Day service in November.
We urged Ottawa to
- act with urgency, because millions of Canadians are struggling and because there’s no guarantee of funding beyond the next election
- establish a fund for non-profits to buy existing affordable market buildings, and launch another round of the Rapid Housing Initiative, but at much greater scale, because it moves money quickly
- cover all the municipal costs from asylum seekers, who occupy about a third of Hamilton shelter beds (only about a third of city costs have been covered so far)
- launch the new co-op housing program promised in the 2022 budget.