Two key issues limit the supply of public and private affordable housing in Barrie — land availability along with funding for supportive and subsidized housing.
In its final report, which will be presented to councillors Monday night, the city’s housing affordability task force offers recommended actions to deal with these issues.
Its purpose is to provide these actions to make faster and greater progress on the goals of the city’s affordable housing strategy, and to inform the update for the next strategy (2023-2033).
Mayor Jeff Lehman, the task force’s chairman, says there’s no one way to achieve housing affordability.
“The housing crisis is a really complex problem that needs multiple solutions,” he said. “Homelessness needs supportive housing. High rents need more purpose-built rentals. High home prices need demand-side measures like offshore speculation taxes and new, less expensive built forms.
“It also needs all four levels of government – fed, province, county, city – working together. The task force provides some ways to do that and I really want to thank the members who brought a variety of different perspectives but particularly a focus on solutions. I think the report includes a number of bold steps and I’m excited to bring it to council," Lehman added.
These recommended actions include allowing housing as a right on large, well-located commercially zoned properties, eliminating parking standards entirely for affordable, rental, supportive and social housing, offering public land to non-profit and charitable housing providers and builders, looking at tiny homes, including a project with the Barrie Royal Canadian Legion to build a tiny homes community for veterans, pursuing hotel, motel conversions to create supportive housing communities, have one city planner dedicated to oversee and ensure the delivery of Barrie’s affordable housing strategy and take $5 million from the city’s community benefit reserve for a new supportive housing capital fund.
“I think the immediate needs are for supportive housing, to address homelessness, and to start opening up sites for purpose-built rentals, to help ease the pressure on rents,” Lehman said. “To do this, we need someone living and breathing the affordable housing file, so the dedicated planner is important right away.
“This will give us capacity to do so much more, and the priority there is probably the New Foundations project (medium-density housing on institutional sites, as approved by council a few months ago) and then getting public lands available for supportive and subsidized housing, similar to the Rose Street (former OPP building) project,” he said. “Acquiring and converting hotels or other properties for supportive housing, in conjunction with the County (of Simcoe), is probably the next most critical priority.
“Supportive housing capacity is our best bet to fight homelessness on a large scale, and medium-density housing on institutional and ultimately commercial sites can create new affordable housing in the short- and medium-term.”
How this will be paid for, and by whom, remains a question.
Lehman notes the city’s capacity to make major capital investments is limited, as it already helps fund county projects.
“So additional capital will have to be targeted and we will need our partners,” he said. “The community benefit reserve can fund a limited degree of additional investment, but we need to see federal and provincial dollars in Barrie for projects that require government funding.
“That said, the issue of housing affordability is really about making sure the market is functioning, so the private sector is building rental units and homes at a range of rent and purchase price levels – so that is more about planning policy and addressing the factors that drive up prices and rents,” Lehman said. “Many of these are outside of the city’s control, but some we can affect – such as the availability of land.”
Although this council is in its fourth and final year in office, the mayor said there’s plenty of time to get things done.
“This is why I wanted a task force on housing. The point of it was an action plan, not a study or long-term strategy,” he said. “I think many of the steps (recommended actions) can be approved by council on Monday night and staff can then take them forward.
“Some may require additional or later budget approval in future years, but the recommendations are designed to provide immediate steps and, of course, some are already under way.”
Councillors will consider a motion Monday night to support the task force’s recommendations in principle, that staff report back by Feb. 14 with intended timelines and resources requests, that staff apply to the federal housing accelerator fund for grants, have a city planner dedicated to affordable housing and hold a closed-door meeting by Jan. 31 to allocate funding to look at potential supportive housing projects.
Also, that the County of Simcoe be asked to look at potentially increasing the density for its project at the former OPP station site at Rose Street and Highway 400. It is to include two wings of 10 and eight storeys of 150 affordable and social housing units, Ontario Works and children’s services, along with other social and community supportive uses.
If endorsed, city council would consider final approval of this motion at its Jan. 17 meeting.
The task force report says housing is a fundamental need and should be reasonably accessible to all citizens. A foundational place to call home and feel safe is at the core of mental and physical health, the ability to support each other, to participate in society and the economy, the report says.
If it’s believed housing is a right and if strong, resilient, low-crime communities are wanted, then communities are needed that offer many good choices and safe options for stable, affordable housing with great access to services, healthy food, training, education, employment, sports, culture and civic involvement, the task force report says.
It all starts with access to housing options; take that away and everything else that comes after it goes, the report says.
Even the term ‘affordable housing’ is problematic, the report says, as it’s often obscured by the question ‘affordable to whom?’
The housing situation in Barrie is a crisis not only because of how it has made homelessness worse, the report says, but because it threatens to make more people homeless or housing insecure. And because the cost of housing has become a much harder burden to bear for such a broad range of residents.
The housing crisis is really several separate problems, which affect each other to some degree, the report says, but require much different approaches. Homelessness needs investment in supportive housing — a combination of affordable housing with intensive and trauma-informed co-ordinated services to help people struggling with chronic physical and mental health issues to maintain stable housing and receive appropriate health care.
The housing market crisis in Barrie is fundamentally one of a shortage of mid- and low-cost rental housing, the task force’s report says.
It’s problem statement is ‘What direct actions can the city take to rapidly expand the supply of rental and market affordable housing built by the private sector, and the supply of supportive and affordable housing built by the public sector?’
Land availability, along with funding for supportive and subsidized housing, are two issues fundamental to the economics of housing affordability, and factors that can be substantively affected through planning policy and other local initiatives.
In short, the report says, this is where a city-led task force might make the biggest difference.
But while the high cost of home ownership requires both supply and demand solutions, the report says, many need to be driven by the federal and provincial governments.
