Lauren Griffith says opposition to proposed supportive, modular housing is without foundation.
The 29-year-old Barrie woman says concerns about fundamental changes to the Brock Park neighbourhood, such as more crime, less safety, illegal drugs, environmental impacts and falling property values because of the Vespra Street project pale in comparison to real-life situations for those with housing challenges.
“I can understand their fears or their worries, but the fear of something being changed in their back yard versus my fear of not being able to provide a stable home for my children?” Griffith told BarrieToday. “If my daughter sees a ‘for sale’ sign she goes, ‘Is that where we’re going to live today?’ Because we’ve moved so much.”
City council added the $3-million project to its 2021 budget in January, a plan to build an unspecified number of 450- to 500-square-foot, stackable housing units for one person, each costing about $195,000, to help alleviate the city’s homeless situation.
But area residents and homeowners have signed a petition opposing the project, saying they weren’t consulted about the development, that it could go on other city land in Barrie, and that the old fire-hall site could be better used as a city park.
Griffith said this type of housing, however, could help people like her who are struggling with their living arrangements.
She has two girls — eight-year-old Harlome and Morgan, six — and hasn’t worked at her restaurant job since December because of the pandemic. After she was unable to pay her rent, and she had a mental breakdown, Griffith and her girls moved in with their father.
“We’re not together,” she said. “I know in the eyes of the law we’re common-law because we have kids together and we’re living together again, but we don’t have a relationship outside of parenting our kids and being friends.”
Griffith said those who oppose the Vespra Street project have the wrong idea about the people who would live there.
“Subsidized housing and low-income housing are for people like me. It’s for people that don’t have that middle-class lifestyle, that really just work to survive,” she said. “It’s frustrating to have to constantly say to people, 'I didn’t make the wrong life choices, it’s just this is my situation and I should not have to suffer because certain people don’t understand how we can get into these situations’.”
Griffith also doesn’t buy the argument that a supportive, modular housing project would hurt property values in the Brock Park area near downtown Barrie. She said city investment in the neighbourhood should, if anything, help property values there.
And she has another point to make about property values and their relative worth.
“To me, they’re saying that the worth of their home… is worth more to them the someone like me being able to have a single place to live,” Griffith said. “I don’t think that it’s fair to put the onus on people that don’t have control over this. We don’t control property value inherently by being poor or asking to have a place to live that we can actually afford.”
Griffith said she earns $15 an hour, when working, or just shy of $1,900 a month. Her current place has rent of $1,800 plus utilities, which she splits with her children’s father. She is receiving employment insurance now.
Part of the problem with rental housing stock in Barrie, she says, is income properties are bought, rented for as much as possible, then sold at a profit.
“We have a housing crisis. It’s a real thing,” Griffith said. “It’s a severe problem and I personally can’t help but attribute it to people choosing to own income properties. My last landlord, she was from Toronto, she was using that property to, I don’t know, just make more money, I guess.
“As a private landlord, they can choose to have the rent be as high and as low as they want. They have a screening process to be whatever they care it (the rent) to be,” she added. “These are the same folk that are denying me a chance to even live in their house, and then they won’t even give me the chance to have a house, by theirs.”
When Griffith did work, it was 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., or school hours, to accommodate her daughters, who she describes as high-functioning autistic.
“Due to our financial insecurity and being at the whims of landlords selling their homes out from underneath us, my oldest daughter has moved six times in her life, and she's eight,” Griffith said. “She'll ask us every so often about moving again — being able to go back to the houses to relive the good times she had there. That breaks my heart as a mother.”
She understands the city’s supportive, modular housing project still requires many steps before it’s built, but it does offer some hope.
Its $3-million cost, including a $500,000 estimate for soil remediation (capped at $750,000), will be funded from debt, with final amounts to be determined through request-for-proposal planning and approval of a building proposal, with the annual debt servicing costs to be paid from the reinvestment reserve and that money be leveraged to access other funding opportunities.
After consulting with the County of Simcoe and social agencies dealing with homelessness, and before issuing the request for proposal, community and corporate services general manager Dawn McAlpine will report back to Barrie councillors on the target residents for the project, subsidy sources, key project parameters and how the city’s funding can be leveraged to access other funding opportunities.
City staff will then issue a call for proposals for a service provider to construct and manage the project, and operate the housing units.
Staff will also hold a neighbourhood meeting with the successful proponent and area residents to get feedback to help the overall implementation of the project.
