Exec. committee approves mayor’s affordable housing task force proposal
Posted February 17, 2012 9:17 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The city’s executive committee has approved Mayor Rob Ford’s proposal to sell off 56 Toronto Community Housing Corp. (TCHC) properties, and to hold off on making a decision on whether to sell hundreds of other units until a new task force reports back on the plan.
Deputy mayor Doug Holyday was the only person to vote against the proposal.
The city had been debating what to do with 675 TCHC standalone properties and how it should tackle an overwhelming repair backlog.
At a special executive committee meeting on Friday, councillors approved a motion that calls for the sell-off of 56 unoccupied TCHC properties — they’ve been vacant for about two years and will remain so because the funds don’t exist to repair them.
Council centrist Ana Bailao will head up a new affordable housing group that would be tasked with studying what the city should do with the remaining 619 properties.
“We’re going to work with the task force. We’re in full support of that,” TCHC CEO Len Koroneos said after Friday’s vote. Koroneos had called for all 675 homes to be sold off.
“If they come back with better ideas, terrific. If they don’t come back with better ideas, I would think we’d proceed with what we’d proposed.”
Bailao, also who chairs the city’s affordable housing committee, and four other task-force members will submit a report to the city’s affordable housing committee in September. It will then go to the executive committee in October.
More than 100 people signed up to speak at Friday’s meeting, which ended around 3:30 p.m.
During the meeting, Holyday said Ford’s proposal was politically savvy, but didn’t make business sense.
Ford lost a TTC showdown at city hall earlier this month, and in January, councillors voted down extensive cuts to the city budget.
The 675 properties would have fetched at least $222 million on the market, and the original plan suggested that $222 million be used to chip away at the $751-million backlog in repairs at TCHC. That backlog is expected to hit $1.7 billion by 2020.
City manager Joe Pennachetti said there could be serious repercussions if the backlog repair problem isn’t tackled immediately.
“Our housing conditions could fall from fair to critical with real health and safety issues to our tenants,” he said.
