Mayor Chow looking to extend deadline for new housing waitlist system

With the City facing a backlash, Toronto’s mayor is making last-minute moves to ensure people already waiting years for subsidized housing aren’t booted off the waitlist.

They were required to move their applications online by this coming Saturday — a deadline that is fast approaching and had advocates sounding the alarm about the possibility of thousands losing their spot in the queue.

Although two years have passed since the launch of the new online system, outreach worker Lorraine Lam said this weekend’s cut-off date was announced out of the blue.

“This is a community that has no access to phones or emails,” said Lam, who has been trying to help notify applicants and transfer them. “My sense is that this is [the City’s] attempt to try and remove inactive applications but this was a very ablest and classicist way of going about it.”

There are still about 33,600 households on the rent-geared-to-income housing waiting list who have not registered online. A statement from the City’s housing secretariat said those households “have not been in contact with [staff] in two to four years.”

It added efforts to reach the current pool of unregistered applicants have included five letter campaigns, registration clinics and workshops, multi-lingual robocalls, 100 bus shelter ads across the city, and community newspaper and social media ads.

Lam believes a lot of the work has been offloaded to workers in under-resourced spaces.

“On the website for instance it says that if you need help go to a library,” she said. “Librarians are not tasked to be housing workers and I think we also need to acknowledge a lot of the housing programs were defunded recently.”

The City said most vulnerable applicants will not be bound by the September 30 deadline, including survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, people experiencing homelessness and newcomers who have been in Canada less than 12 months.

Applicants will also have the opportunity to request re-instatement on the waitlist within 24 months of having their application cancelled.

As the City tries to modernize how it runs the program, Lam told CityNews the burden of the work shouldn’t be on individuals in the first place.

“The City says people will be notified they’ve been removed off the list. But how are people being notified? Because they said people were notified about this deadline and a lot of people didn’t.”

Mayor Olivia Chow tweeted Wednesday she’s aware of the concerns and is working on a motion for Thursday’s Planning and Housing committee that includes extending the deadline altogether.