“If anyone had told me in the late 80’s or early 90’s that I would look back and see that as somewhat of the heyday of the development of affordable housing, I probably would have ran screaming down the street,” said Sheryl Lindsay. “But unfortunately, twenty years on, there aren’t a great many improvements. In fact, things have gotten worse.”

Back then housing activists spent more time getting together, talking about the issues and mobilizing. “The advocacy front was very strong and united at that time,” she said. “Funders and the powers that be would engage in dialogue with us.”

That rarely, if ever, happens today.

Lindsay has spent the last 20 years working with women living in poverty, experiencing or at risk of homelessness or living in substandard housing. On Friday, she was one of four speakers at an affordable housing forum held in Toronto organized by the Advocacy Centre for Tenants – Ontario.

In the late 1980’s she was working with women experiencing addictions and mental health challenges. When homelessness reached “unprecedented levels” ten years later, then Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman created the Toronto Homelessness Action Task Force which recommended many solutions including the creation of supportive and new affordable housing.

“It was a real pinnacle document at its time,” said Lindsay.

But then the federal Liberal government abandoned its commitment to a national housing program and reduced transfer payments to the provinces for new housing initiatives.

After the Conservatives came to power in 1995, they axed 75 per cent of the affordable housing projects, reduced social assistance rates by 21 per cent and introduced the Tenant Protection Act, which fast tracked tenant evictions and removed the ceiling on rents that landlords could charge new tenants.

Today, Lindsay is the Executive Director at Sistering, a women’s agency serving homeless, marginalized and low income women in Toronto. Their drop-in serves 200 women each day, many of whom spend the night on the streets because the shelters are full.

The wait time for public housing is seven to ten years. So the only other option for low income people is to live in a rooming house. Even though rooming houses aren’t allowed in Scarborough, East York and North York, they exist underground.

And that leads to substandard living conditions and numerous tenant rights violations.

“People are forced to live with mice, mould, no repairs done, harassment and discrimination” said Regi David from Rooming House Tenants Group – Scarborough.

David recalled a single woman who immigrated from South Asia and was living on social assistance because she suffered from depression. She lived in a rooming house set up in the basement of a single family dwelling. There were no windows and the landlord wouldn’t allow her to turn on the lights during the day. She was told not to cook “ethnic food” and had to endure racial jokes about her ethnicity.

“And there is no heat,” said David. “She has to wear a jacket to live in her home.”

Since rooming houses are illegal in Scarborough, the tenant is afraid to take action for fear of losing her accommodation. Unsafe living conditions continue to exist because landlords know there is nothing tenants can do to improve the situation.

Well maintained rooming houses exist too. But they’re not the norm.

In Vancouver, the Downtown Eastside (DTES) is also known for its substandard housing. It’s Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood and owns the dubious title of being the poorest postal code in Canada. Marked mostly by cheap hotels and poorly maintained public housing, it has the single highest rate of HIV infection in the Western world.

“If there’s worse housing than what you see in Vancouver’s DTES, then I think we’re beyond crisis,” said Doug King of Pivot Legal Society. “Most of the single occupancy hotels are in unbelievably poor condition and that comes from a history of neglect.”

Most of the rooms are 100 square feet with approximately 10 rooms to each floor with one shared washroom. They rent out for $375 per month. “Over the years they’ve turned into the only housing option in the private market for anyone on income assistance,” said King.

While the right to universal publicly funded health care is part of our national identity and enshrined in our laws, King said we’ve failed to do the same for housing.

“That’s something we should be trying to change,” he said. “The government dropped out of providing safe and affordable housing in the 70’s and 80’s and it’s going to take a long time (to get back).”

Pivot was formed 11 years ago to provide legal assistance to residents of the Downtown Eastside. During the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, it launched Red Tent, a national campaign to end homelessness.

“We thought that was one of the best opportunities to launch a campaign that talked about national housing issues,” said King. “So much money went into making Vancouver the next Geneva of the world and the local population suffered.”

It’s reached a point where minimum wage earners and social assistance recipients can’t afford to living in large metropolitan areas, not just certain neighbourhoods within those cities.

“That’s clearly a violation of your individual rights and where you can move and live in a country,” said King. “That’s why it’s so important that we start talking about housing as a charter right and something that we can hold the government responsible for doing.”

In Vancouver, King said all levels of government have abandoned their responsibility to provide social housing. A national housing strategy would force municipal, provincial and federal government to work together on the issue with housing providers and residents.

“I’m so happy Toronto didn’t get the Olympics,” said Cathy Crowe from the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee. In 1998, TDRC along with other social service agencies declared homelessness a national disaster.

Today, the situation is almost as grim in Toronto as it is in Vancouver. The Ford administration plans to cut family shelter beds. One in five homeless people die within a year of being diagnosed with tuberculosis. The coroner’s office won’t track or respond to an epidemic of homeless deaths.

And the city relies too heavily on the Out of the Cold Program, a faith based, volunteer initiative that has provided emergency shelter to the homeless community for over 20 years.

“A program where the people who eat there, sleep there and if they’re lucky toilet there use facilities that do not meet the United Nations standards for refugee camps in most cases,” said Crowe. “Unfortunately, other cities look to Toronto thinking that we’re the best practice.”

To make matters worse, Toronto won’t allow city funded outreach agencies or groups to provide survival supplies, like hot food and sleeping bags, to the homeless.

“This is all the more reason we should be organizing with them (the homeless) and bring them along with us in this work,” she said.

Crowe reminded those attending Friday’s forum about WWII veterans who fought for the right to housing when they returned from overseas. In Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver, women’s groups also joined the veterans in their protests.

“They actually took over empty buildings for emergency shelter,” said Crowe. “But their direct action led to empty military buildings being freed up for housing.”

A federal agency called the Wartime Housing was created, later renamed the Canadian Mortgage Housing Corporation. Over 30,000 houses were built across Canada, many of which were located in Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough.

When the federal government cancelled the national housing program, Crowe said there were no protests or a movement that fought back. “And once you lose something, it’s very hard to get it back,” she said.

Crowe believes that marches, rallies, protests and other action based strategies that opened up the armouries and other buildings for emergency shelter ten years ago are still the key to a successful social housing movement.

A shelter inspection team, including homeless people, documented inhumane, unsafe conditions in Toronto shelters. Three to four people were crammed into a space that should have been reserved for one person only. That led to new shelter standards for the city of Toronto.

(Unfortunately, they don’t apply to the Out of the Cold program.)

A coalition of groups, years ago, fought for a public inquiry and inquest into three freezing deaths and one TB death. Out of that, a managed alcohol program was established at Seaton House and advanced TB screening was introduced for the homeless population.

After the Tent City residents were “evicted” in the fall of 2002, a rent supplement program was created that housed almost 150 homeless people.

“That history is long forgotten,” said Crowe. As a result many anti poverty activists, she said, are abandoning those strategies in favour of supporting government poverty reduction programs. “The whole focus on poverty reduction in the province over the last few years has not led to any poverty reduction strategies.”

No new money for housing. No increase to minimum wage in 2011. Maybe a 1 per cent increase to social assistance rates, if anything. Cutbacks to the special diet allowance.

“Today housing policy is shaped by an emphasis on the American ‘housing first’ model,” said Crowe.

The ‘housing first’ model moves homeless people living in shelters or on the streets immediately into their own apartments. Other models operate under the premise that the individual’s issues (that probably led to homelessness) must be dealt with first prior to moving into their own home.

“The way it translates across the country is the closure of shelter beds, new by-laws that criminalize homelessness and a re-emphasis on private and charitable solutions.” 

John Bonnar

John Bonnar is an independent journalist producing print, photo, video and audio stories about social justice issues in and around Toronto.