Welcome to the second in an installment of blog posts by LISPOP affiliates on different aspects of the Ontario provincial election. Our second post is by Wilfrid Laurier University political scientist Laura Pin.
Ontario residents are going to the polls in a few weeks. Amidst the many crises animating the political discourse, housing affordability has occupied a central place. Rising home prices have garnered a slew of think-pieces about the inability of middle class would-be-home-owners to break into the housing market.
The governing Ontario Progressive Conservative Party has argued in recent policy documents, as well as its electoral platform, that the housing crisis in Ontario is primarily a supply problem. Developers need the freedom to do what they do best – build housing – to help would-be-homeowners access the housing market.
This position – that new build housing supply will address housing affordability issues – begs the question: affordable housing for whom? Moreover, the amount of public attention access to homeownership has occupied in public discussion of housing belies a housing crisis that has been far more acute and ongoing for a very specific group of Ontarians: those who are un/under employed and rely on social assistance as their major source of income.
Ontario has two main social assistance programs for working-age people: Ontario Works (OW), available to residents without other means to support themselves and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) available to residents with a documented and qualifying disability that limits their ability to seek employment. In practical terms, many people receiving OW do have disabilities, just not disabilities which qualify them for ODSP, which provides a higher monthly rate of support. As documented in this short film made by two of my collaborators with lived experience of homelessness, the social assistance system is dehumanizing, demoralizing, and debilitating.
For both OW and ODSP the shelter allowance provided each month for a single person is $497, and this amount has remained stagnant over the last decade. As anyone with the slightest knowledge of the rental market in Ontario knows, the shelter allowance of $497 is comically out of tune with average market rents (AMRs) – less than half the AMR in most jurisdictions. People formerly able to cobble together living arrangements, albeit in unsafe, overcrowded, and inadequate conditions, are in truly dire straits, leading to the severe individual and social outcomes associated with systemic homelessness.
Theoretically, people in Ontario with low and fixed incomes can access social housing: government-assisted housing that provides rental units below market rates. In practical terms, Ontario has the longest social housing waitlists in Canada, with waits of eight years or more, not just in large urban centres like Toronto, but also smaller communities. In my work in Dufferin County, Ontario, an urban-rural community north of Toronto, we’ve seen individuals housed in motel rooms for years, while they unsuccessfully search for housing on an ODSP budget. In fact, 85% of people experiencing homelessness and near homelessness in Dufferin are social assistance recipients. The theoretical existence of social housing does nothing to meet the immediate needs of people unable to afford rent.
Putting all of this together, I’m skeptical that a strong focus on increasing private market housing supply is going to create new housing that meets the standard of “deep affordability” – units at 50% or less AMRs – necessary for people surviving on low and/or fixed incomes. Much new development is focused on would-be-home-owners, and newly built rental buildings do not offer rents that are affordable for people with low and/or fixed incomes. Even the federal government’s Rental Construction Financing Initiative focused on creating affordable rental housing through new private-market developments is not creating affordable units Some might suggest that creating new supply at the higher-end of the market might ease pressures on lower-priced rentals. This type of trickle-down housing argument relies on some truly magical thinking, where suddenly owners of rental buildings- increasingly investor driven REITs – will suddenly abandon a focus on profit maximization, where decisions about household formation are unaffected the availability of units, where residential vacancy rates remain unchanged, where modest increases in supply will have impacts on prices in the short-term, the list goes on. Realistically, even dramatically increasing housing supply is not going to decrease market rents by what is required to reach the deep affordability levels necessary to chip away at the housing crisis for people on low and/or fixed incomes.
The delinking of conversations about housing affordability from conversations about social assistance, as well as the emphasis on homeownership, betrays a middle-class bias in conversations about housing. If we take housing as a human right seriously, as we should based on international and domestic human rights commitments, during this election in Ontario, all parties need to commit to two measures, one immediate and one longer term. To address the problem, social assistance rates must be raised. Currently the Ontario PCs are proposing an increase of 5%, the Liberals 20% and the NDP and Greens by 100%. At a minimum, the shelter allowance portion of OW and ODSP should be equivalent to the AMR in a region, something that could be done using existing data from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Second, the conversation about housing supply needs to shift to focus on growing the supply of non-market housing. The private market has never been able to meet the need for affordable housing in the province. As others have argued, substantial new investment in non-market housing is critical to ensuring the right to adequate, safe and appropriate housing is met for all people in this province. That’s the election promise I’d like to see.