“This is no place to raise children, is it?
This was Dawn Obokata’s first thought upon visiting the downtown Toronto construction site where the St. Nicholas Housing Co-operative was being built. It was 1986, and Obokata, who worked in a co-operative theatre company with her husband, was expecting her first child.
“We were living on the third floor of a house near Broadview and Danforth, and it became apparent we needed a bit more room for us to have this growing family. A friend of mine who worked for the Co-op Housing Federation of Toronto said ‘Dawn, they’re building a new co-op in the Bloor and Yonge area — you should apply.”
It was only after moving in that she realized it was the perfect place to raise children.
“At the time, there were other people with babies and young kids moving in. We have a courtyard where the kids would, as they grew up, start playing. They would knock on each other’s doors, and everybody would be safe out in the courtyard. It ended up developing into this wonderful, very mixed community.”
Originally skeptical, Obokata went on to become a tireless advocate for the co-operative housing model, serving as president of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto from 2017 to 2019. She currently sits on its national board as director-at-large.
In principle, the co-operative housing model functions as a small democracy unto itself. As opposed to a traditional market-rental model, which sees landlords manage the property and set the price of rent, co-operative buildings are stewarded by their membership. An elected board of directors (made up of co-op members, who are not referred to as “tenants”) manages the property’s finances and administers day-to-day operations; they often create subcommittees to assist with everything from gardening to waste management and general maintenance.
Dawn Obokata servied as the president of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto from 2017 to 2019. (Courtesy of Dawn Obokata)
In St. Nicholas, says Obokata, “we had an office-help committee, a membership committee, a maintenance committee, and so on.”
The monthly cost of living in the co-op (not referred to as rent, but as a housing charge) is also set by the membership. As such, most co-ops see only modest price increases over the span of decades. Executed correctly, housing co-operatives can be a model for perpetually affordable housing, even in places like Toronto, where the rising cost of market rentals have long outstripped wage increases.
Toward the end of the last century, the construction of co-operative housing — and social housing more broadly — garnered substantial federal and provincial investments: thousands of co-operative units were built every year for a span of nearly three decades. But a nexus of political, economic, and social factors in the late 1990s ground the breakneck pace of construction to a crawl. Today, units in co-operative buildings are coveted by those looking for affordable-housing options in an increasingly unaffordable market. And many of those, like Obokata, who managed to land one in the heyday of co-op construction have found themselves staying long into their retirements, both to retain a measure of affordability and to stay in the communities they have built up over years.
“We have 18 units in our building, and a third of them have the original members still here, 37 years later,” she says. “Now we’re all aging in place.”
The emergence of a movement
The history of the co-operative-housing model in Ontario stretches back over a century. Initially, it began as a way of serving the needs of students. The campus co-op at Guelph University was established in 1913, followed by the Campus Co-operative Residences Incorporated at the University of Toronto in 1936.
Portion of an article from the December 14, 1940, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
The latter went on to establish co-operative housing at universities across the province. The most significant of these was built in 1964: the Waterloo Co-operative Residences, which would go on to expand to 10 properties and become the biggest student-housing co-op in North America.
According to Greg Suttor, the author of Still Renovating: A History of Canadian Social Housing Policy, changes to the National Housing Act and the creation of the Ontario Housing Corporation in the 1960s created financial conditions that allowed for a tenfold increase in the province’s production of social housing — spurring the emergence of a co-operative-housing movement.
Greg Suttor is the author of Still Renovating: A History of Canadian Social Housing Policy. (Courtesy of Greg Suttor)
“More than a sector, the emerging co-operative housing-movement was a social movement rooted in the ’60s generation,” Suttor says. “There were a lot of young adults who had the somewhat idealistic notion that this could change the world for the better.”
Initially, much of the social housing developed at this time was public housing exclusively for low-income tenants. But with the turn into the 1970s came a move toward mixed-income housing, spurred by shifting social attitudes toward public housing, political interest in non-profit housing models such as co-operatives, and increased demand for affordable-housing options across the rental market.
“There was a big reaction against all the low-income public housing,” Suttor says. “People didn’t like the tearing down of older, perhaps deteriorated homes in exchange for new towers and townhouse complexes. They didn’t like the perceived ghettos that [public housing] created. And there was interest in European models of mixed-income housing that could provide affordable rents for low-income tenants while meeting rental-supply and production needs. Then, as now, there were huge pressures of demand for affordable housing that were not being met by the private rental-production system.”
According to Suttor, Ontario saw the construction of between 4,000 and 6,000 units of social housing every year at this time; approximately a quarter were held by new housing co-operatives. This rate of construction continued essentially unabated until the 1990s, when a series of economic crises and a corresponding sea change in social and political commitments brought it to a near standstill.
Introduction to WCRI
A “crumbling” political consensus
The decline in social-housing construction, including co-ops, began in the 1980s.
“For one thing, the political consensus about social housing crumbled,” says Suttor. “Governments around the world were embracing market-oriented policies. There was an idea that governments had grown too big, that they were a drag on overall economic performance. The idea of spending a lot of public money on social housing was increasingly challenged on the centre-right and conservative side of the political spectrum.”
Then came the recession of 1990-1993.
“It was the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, and that created huge fiscal pressures,” says Suttor. “In other words, because the economy was soft, governments weren’t getting as much tax revenue as they once were. They tried to cut spending, and some spending is easier to cut than others.”
During the recession, home prices plummeted and interest rates declined, making housing more accessible for the middle and upper-middle classes.
“Homeownership had been quite unaffordable for a lot of people in the ’70s and ’80s, but then suddenly homeownership rates went up. The rental sector actually shrank,” says Suttor. “The people who were renting weren’t the children of baby boomers and those with good jobs and political voices. Instead, it was new immigrants and urban Indigenous people. This sidelined non-market housing as a political priority.”
Portion of an article from the August 11, 1995, edition of the Toronto Star.
This fractious political climate and economic instability paved the way, in 1995, for Mike Harris’s provincial Tory government to carry out cuts across the public sector, including for social housing, as part of the so-called the Common Sense Revolution.
“Their mantra was ‘let’s get the government out of the housing business,’” says Suttor.
Within days of being elected, the Tories terminated funding for new social housing, scrapping the provincial programs that funded it. They also embraced a policy of “devolution,” Suttor says.
“In other words, they handed responsibility to fund and operate programs down to the next level of government. The feds were doing some of that, handing things off to the provinces, and Ontario decided to hand [the responsibility for social housing] down to municipalities.”
A new era
These cuts to provincial funding programs, as well as reduced federal investment, decimated the construction of social housing and new housing co-operatives in Ontario.
“Some of these projects were even cancelled mid-construction,” says Amina Dibe, senior manager of government relations at the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada. “In Ontario, 17,000 units of non-profit and co-op housing were cancelled in the ’90s. It was a tough decade.”
Amina Dibe is senior manager of government relations at the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada. (Courtesy of Amina Dibe)
Nominal efforts to restore this funding over the following two decades saw the construction of approximately 20,000 units of affordable housing in Ontario, a fraction of the development seen in previous years. A 2017 auditor’s general report found that 93 per cent of the province’s “existing supply of below-market rentals was built by not-for-profit organizations between the 1960s and 1996.”
“When the economy is in a downturn, it’s really felt from top to bottom, especially people who need those affordable-housing options the most,” says Dibe. “But we’re really encouraged by the recent reinvestment in co-operative housing with the launch of the Co-operative Housing Development Program and the $1.5 billion investment associated with it.”
That program, announced earlier this year, marks the largest dedicated investment by the federal government in the development of co-operative housing in more than 30 years, says Dibe.
That investment could have a significant economic impact. A Deloitte report commissioned by the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association last year found that bringing Canada’s community-housing stock in line with the OECD average by 2030 would boost economic productivity by up to 9.3 per cent, increasing GDP by an estimated $67 billion to $136 billion.
Dibe is also encouraged by Toronto’s Housing Now program, which uses surplus city-owned land to develop affordable housing.
“It’s part of the reason we’re going to see the largest affordable-housing developments in Ontario in 25 years,” she says. “If more municipalities had similar programs and if the province had a program that provided provincially owned land and chips in with the government and developers, we could get this housing built.”
Dawn Obokata welcomes the news of new co-op housing, crediting her own with providing a stable home for her and her family through uncertain economic times.
“At the peak of things, me and my husband raised our two kids here,” she said. “He passed away last year, and I’m here alone now. But it’s still affordable: I can walk and ride my bike anywhere. It just ended up being the perfect solution for someone with, you know, at times very unstable income. It was always here for us.”
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