TORONTO — Standing beside a three-storey apartment building on Gerrard Street East on Thursday, Olivia Chow told assembled reporters and community members that the 20 homes it contains are now going to be “permanently secured, forever made affordable.”
The supportive-housing building for people living independently with mental illness is operated — and now owned — by St. Jude Community Homes. The program that let the city fund St. Jude’s acquisition of 1845 Gerrard East is slated to receive a significant cash injection when Chow’s budget is passed. The Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition program provides funding for not-for-profit and Indigenous housing providers like community land trusts and co-ops to preserve existing rental stock by purchasing private-market buildings and maintaining the affordability of their units.
The new MURA funding — a total of $100 million over three years drawn from the vacant-home tax as well as from federal and provincial housing funds and the city’s own real-estate development arm, CreateTO — is expected to protect “thousands” of homes, Chow wrote in her budget letter to city council. The program, launched in 2021, has so far disbursed $55.5 million used by non-profits to acquire 300 units of affordable housing. It was previously funded at between $10 million and $20 million annually, an amount which drew criticism given Toronto’s real estate prices.
“This is affordable non-market housing,” Chow said on Thursday. “It means that you feel the power because this is your home, right?”
It’s just one of the funding pieces aimed at renters. At last week’s budget announcement, the Toronto mayor devoted significant time — and cash — to programs intended to hold landlords to account and help renters maintain their homes.
“One in two Torontonians are renters, and they’re feeling less secure by the day,” Chow said during last week’s budget press conference. “So we’re investing in programs that protect and empower renters during these difficult times.”
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Chow’s budget is as yet just a proposal; it won’t become final until after a February 14 council meeting. However, few changes are expected.
“We’ve been pleasantly surprised,” says Geordie Dent, executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations. “I’ve been in this role for almost 15 years. I’ve never had a mayor take the particular approach that they’ve taken here.”
The Rent Bank, the Eviction Prevention in the Community program, and the Tenant Support Program are all slated to receive notable funding boosts. Chow also lived up to a commitment to keep the property-tax increase on multi-unit buildings below a 3.75 per cent threshold, ensuring that landlords can’t apply for an above-guideline rent increase to pass the higher-than-normal tax hike on to tenants.
Dent says her office contacted the FMTA to consult about the tax threshold. “Rob Ford, John Tory — they never contacted our office,” he says.
The mayor and reporters were taken on a tour of the Gerrard East building, visiting one man’s apartment, where Chow posed for photos, and the common area, which included a kitchen and sitting room stocked with VHS tapes, DVDs, and paperback books.
St. Jude’s leased the building from a private landlord starting in 2007, but in 2020 the landlord wanted to sell. It was able to purchase the building in September 2023 with a combination of $4 million in MURA funding and a $1.2 million loan from Vancity Community Investment Bank.
Wayne March (left) and Olivia Chow speak in March’s home. (Kat Eschner)
Renters in Toronto are experiencing an historic affordability crisis. Although Chow has souped up existing programs to aid renters and committed to building an ambitious 65,000 rental units by 2030, there are limits to her power. The province controls a great deal of the legislation affecting rent.
When asked how she was representing Toronto renters to Premier Doug Ford’s government, Chow pointed to the Renters’ Action Committee that she started with a motion in council in October. Her campaign literature said that the committee would “work on anti-renoviction bylaws, advocating for real rent control, reviewing existing policies and programs related to renters, and holding the City accountable to renters.”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Chow said that an update on the Renters’ Action Committee would be coming soon and that its first meeting had been scheduled. The process of assembling the committee takes some time, she said, as it goes through a city nomination process. Her October 2023 motion stipulated that council needs to hear back about committee composition and mandate in the first three months of 2024.
Once assembled, “I’m sure they will do their advocacy,” she said. “Like, for example, can we extend rent control to buildings that were built after 2018?”