HOUSINGAGAIN-L Housing Again Bulletin #4

[Catherine Nasmith <cnasmith@istar.ca>]

HOUSING AGAIN // e-bulletin
December 13, 1999 // Number 4

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A twice-monthly electronic bulletin published in on what people are
doing to Put Housing Back on the Public Agenda in Ontario, across Canada
and around the world.

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In this bulletin:

1 - Edgar: New home for First Nations people
2 - Ontario: Municipal chaos and downloading
3 - Canada: Finance Committee says wait and see
4 - Quebec: BQ calls for national housing funds
5 - On our site: Join in the great debate
6 - Upcoming event: 10th anniversary of the Rupert fire

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1 - Edgar: New home for First Nations people

As many as 600 First Nations people in Toronto will find a good home,
training and jobs at the Edgar project. The project is being developed
by Nishnawbe Homes, an urban Aboriginal housing agency, with support
from the Home Aid Housing Corporation.

The Ontario Reality Agency has accepted an offer of $2.95 million from
Nishnawbe Homes to buy the former Edgar Adult Occupational Centre,
located northeast of Barrie. The offer closes early in the new year,
following a structural and environmental assessment. Then Nishnawbe will
start work on the new project.

The site, which has been vacant since April, currently has 84 family
residential units in 54 houses, an apartment building, two office
buildings, a recreation centre (with a gym, pool bowling alley and
90-seat theatre), a food services complex that can feed 700 people, a
hospital, a church, several vocational training buildings and workshops.

The residents of the Edgar project will be Aboriginal families living in
Toronto's welfare motels and hotels. "Urban First Nations people are
disenfranchised," says John Andras, chairman of Home Aid. "This project
gives them an opportunity to build some of the lost pride, the lost
traditions."

The Edgar project has drawn local opposition. "It's sort of like the
city of
Toronto shipping its garbage out someplace," said Oro-Medonte Mayor Ian
Beard in a media interview. "I'm not saying they're garbage because I
don't believe that. . . [but] what's the point of bringing people out of
the city of Toronto and putting them in the middle of nowhere?"

Frances Saunderson, head of Nishnawbe, counters by saying: "We'd be able
to help them, give them hope, give them dignity. Give them a place to
live and raise their family, give them roots."

Home Aid Housing Corporation is a group of developers, business people
and members of the philanthropic community. Its mandate is to work with
others to build low-income housing by assisting in securing financing.
In addition to the Edgar project, Home Aid is working with Eva's Phoenix
to secure the last pieces of funding for this innovative, low-income
housing project for street youth.

Andras, the chair of Home Aid, is a successful Bay Street businessman
whose concern for homelessness led him to start Project Warmth, the
campaign to distribute sleeping bags to homessless people. His contact
with street people has led him to work actively on long-term solutions,
such as low-income housing. Working with Andras on Home Aid are Peter
Freed (president); Shaila Gotlieb and Ron Smith (directors), and Charles
Rosenburg, Mike Labbe, Larry Chilton, Richard Seligman and Dayle
Rakowsky (members).

To contact Home Aid, send an e-mail message to: 
<john.andras@researchcap.com >.

On-reserve Aboriginal housing in many parts of Canada has often been
compared to the most desperate housing conditions in Third World
countries. Aboriginal people living off-reserve face equally grim
conditions. There are large numbers of Aboriginal people among the
homeless in most parts of Canada.

Across Canada, there are about 10,000 off-reserve Aboriginal housing
units providing homes to about 35,000 people. A 1991 study estimated
that there were about 63,000 urban Aboriginal households in deep poverty
- about one in every three families.

Urban Aboriginal housing providers have been hard hit by governments in
recent years. While a few co-op and non-profit housing projects escaped
the axe when the Harris government cancelled 17,000 social housing units
after its election in 1995, not one urban Aboriginal housing project was
spared. 

More recently, the federal government announced in 1996 that it was
transferring all federally-administered social housing projects to the
provinces and territories. The National Aboriginal Housing Association
has launched a legal challenge, claiming that the
federal-provincial-territorial transfer violates treaty and other
rights.

For more information on urban Aboriginal housing issues, log onto the
Housing Again website at http://www.housingagain.web.net, go to the
Resources section, and use the search to find the presentation by the
National Aboriginal Housing Association to the Federation of Canadian
Municipalities. 

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2 - Ontario: Municipal chaos and downloading

The Ontario government has created political chaos in four of the
province's largest municipalities at the same time that it is expecting
those
municipalities to take on the critically important role of administering
social housing.

The Harris government started billing municipalities for the cost of
provincial social housing (including public housing, co-ops and
non-profits) in January of 1998. With the signing of the
federal-provincial social housing transfer deal in November of this
year, the path is now clear for the province to complete its social
housing download by forcing the municipalities to take on administration
of the projects. Under the current timetable, the province will:
- start billing municipalities on April 1, 2000, for the costs that the
Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH) now pays for
administration of social housing programs. The amount is estimated at
about $6 million.
- introduce legislation in the spring of 2000 to download administration
of
social housing.
- complete the download by the winter of 2001.

All this is happening at the same time that the provincial government
has
launched a radical restructuring of municipal governments in Hamilton,
Sudbury and Ottawa, along with large cuts to Toronto City Council. At a
time when municipal political leadership is needed on social housing
issues, those communities will be caught up in the political chaos of
amalgamation and council-cutting; not to mention the November municipal
elections.

The administration of social housing programs is tremendously complex
and the download will be exceedingly difficult. For instance, there are
a number of co-op, non-profit and public housing funding programs, all
with different operating agreements. The province has said it wants to
"harmonize" the various agreements to make administration easier for the
municipalities. Social housing providers are concerned that existing
protections for social housing providers will be "harmonized down" or
"harmonized out". The MMAH is proposing a fast-track reform process, but
no details have been released.

There are plenty of other difficulties in the provincial-municipal
download. For instance, even the process of transferring MMAH computer
files to municipalities is complicated by the fact that the province and
most municipalities use different computer systems. The province has
hired consultants Deloitte Touche to provide technical support for the
download. 

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3 - Canada: Finance Committee backs spending

The House of Commons Finance Committee report on the next federal budget
is long on sentiment, but refuses to make any specific spending
recommendations on a desperately-needed new national housing program. 

The report, which was released on December 10, follows a month of
hearings across Canada. Many housing and homelessness groups delivered
detailed briefs to the committee calling for a massive federal
reinvestment in housing programs.

The committee's report quotes from a number of submissions, including
some powerful words from the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, but then
refuses to make any specific recommendations. This stands in sharp
contrast to the many recommendations that the committee makes for tax
cuts and other areas of government spending.

Instead, the committee says that Canadians will have to wait and see
what recommendations Claudette Bradshaw, the federal co-ordinator for
homelessness, has in her long-awaited announcement on a national
homelessness and housing strategy. There is no date set for Minister
Bradshaw's announcement.

Housing and homelessness groups across the country are re-doubling their
efforts to increase pressure on MPs and cabinet ministers. "Our partners
are meeting with MPs in Vancouver, Edmonton, London, Toronto, Ottawa,
Montreal and St. John's," says Kira Heineck of the National Housing and
Homelessness Network. "We've got a national petition campaign and we're
about to launch a national postcard effort. A growing number of
politicians say that they want to see a major reinvestment in housing in
the next federal budget. We're urging them to speak out for housing."

Check out the Alerts section in the Housing Again web site at
http://www.housingagain.web.net for more information.

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4 - Quebec: BQ calls for national housing funds

The Bloc Quebecois is calling on the federal government to reinvest in
social housing in the next federal budget. The statement from the Bloc,
which represents sovereigntists in Quebec, is significant since many
government officials have argued that any new national housing spending
would be impossible as it would raise the ire of Quebec separatists.

"In a 1990 report on the situation of housing in Canada, Liberals spoke
openly of a crisis.  Since then, things have only gotten worse.  The
federal government should understand the urgency of reinvesting in
social housing," said Christiane Gagnon, MP, the Bloc Québécois
spokeperson for poverty, childhood, family and social housing.

The full text of the Bloc media release is posted in the Alerts section
of the
Housing Again web site at http://housingagain.web.net.

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5 - On our site: Join in the great debate

If you haven't already logged into the Discussions Area of the Housing
Again web site, do it now and join in the great Canadian housing debate.
Point your browser to http://housingagain.web.net then click on
"Discussion Area". If this is your first time, you'll be asked for your
name (real names only, please!) and you pick your own password. Once you
are approved, then you log into the discussion area using your name and
password. There are already a number of "threads" of discussion on
housing issues. You can join in any of the existing threads, or start
your own on a new topic.

6 - Upcoming event: 10th anniversary of the Rupert fire

In December of 1989, just days before Christmas, a fire roared through
the
Rupert Hotel, a licensed rooming house in downtown Toronto. It took
hours to put out the blaze, and several days to dig through the frozen
rubble to recover the bodies. Ten people died in what was one of the
worst fires in the history of Toronto.

Out of the ashes of that fire grew the Rupert pilot project, which was
funded by the Ontario government (with support from the City of Toronto
and the federal government) to work with "hardest-to-house" tenants and
build or renovate 525 rooming house units. The project was judged to be
a success, but the province refused to renew funding.

The tenth anniversary memorial for the victims of the Rupert Hotel fire
will take place on Monday, December 21, at 11 a.m. at Queen and
Parliament Streets in downtown Toronto.

For other upcoming events, check out the Events section of the Housing
Again website at http://www.housingagain.web.net.