The foundation is being poured and the bricks laid to increase Barrie’s housing affordability.
City councillors approved a motion Monday night to support the housing affordability 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.
“Our goal was not to do a study, not to give you recommendations that were going to sit on a shelf, but rather to give you an action plan,” said Mayor Jeff Lehman, who is also the task force chairman. “These are actions that we feel, while bold, are achievable and immediate steps in many cases that we can take to try and address the housing crisis in Barrie.”
The County of Simcoe would also 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’s 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.
City council will consider final approval of the motion at its Jan. 17 meeting.
The task force report concludes two key issues limit this city’s supply of public and private affordable housing — land availability along with funding for supportive and subsidized housing. It offers recommended actions to deal with these issues, designed to make faster and greater progress on the goals of the city’s affordable housing strategy, and to inform an update for the next strategy, which goes from 2023 to 2033.
“It pulls together a whole lot of the issues and concerns and options that are available,” said Coun. Clare Riepma. “It pulls everything together very well and gives us some very good direction as to where to go from here.”
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 we have shown political will to be interested in this and to designate this as a priority, regardless where we land in the coming moments and coming weeks, I think the report is a really great resource,” said Coun. Ann-Marie Kungl.
Coun. Robert Thomson said this is an important beginning.
“If you don’t get in the driver’s seat to drive the bus it never leaves the station, so I think this is a start,” he said. “There are some questions, but I think it’s a good start.”
And the city already has a head start on new housing affordability projects.
Council approved a motion last fall to inform all owners of institutionally designated properties in Barrie of its intention to allow housing as-of-right on this land, and inviting them to contact the city to discuss the potential for the construction of affordable housing on their properties.
Once projects are determined, city staff will seek proposals from consultants in accordance with Barrie’s procurement bylaw to conduct feasibility studies for affordable housing projects on institutionally designated properties, owned by non-profit or charitable organizations.
The studies are primarily for properties zoned institutional, as well as for certain places of worship outside of institutional zones. Many of these sites are large and have the space to build affordable townhomes or small- or mid-sized apartments in conjunction with the existing permitted use.
Lehman said it’s a daunting talk for local government to affect housing market forces, however.
“The only thing that’s going to bring down rent… is a fundamental change in the way stuff gets built in Barrie, is that we have way more rental apartments,” he said. “We need thousands of units to move the needle on rent and that’s why you’re seeing… the recommendations being about how do we get the private market, private developers, to build way more rentals.”
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.
Its 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 programs.
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.
