Yesterday, Executive Committee received three major reports on affordable housing. The first was on the Social Housing Regeneration Advisory Group’s recommendations on prioritizing and aligning it with the Edmonton’s Affordable Housing Strategy. The second was the draft Affordable Housing Strategy itself, a document that will guide our City’s journey of involvement in affordable housing for the next ten years (2016-2025). Lastly, the final report dealt with the principles to guide the development of the 2,400 affordable housing units at Blatchford, which was referred back to Administration for further consultation with the community and will be back at committee in early 2016.
At Executive Committee, Mayor Iveson provided these thoughts on the Affordable Housing Strategy and the role that Edmonton plays:
“We are stepping up, as I have often said, with Northern Alberta’s homelessness problem.
There is a reason Medicine Hat got to the finish line easier than us and it is that their really, really hard-to-house cases didn’t stay in Medicine Hat. They probably came for treatment in Edmonton, maybe at the Royal Alex Hospital, and if they fell through the cracks there, as they often do, they didn’t go back to Medicine Hat. They are in our River Valley; they are in our business districts, they are in our downtown.
And to expect Edmontonians to single-handedly, through property taxes, pick up the pieces for a Northern Alberta mental health, addictions and poverty problem is the whole reason why we need a City Charter. With tools in it and money attached to it and jurisdiction assigned. Which I would be happy to take, because we have the brainpower here, we have the partners here, social enterprise space and a private sector willing to work with us. We have a public, I think, I would rather spend our energy working [on] successful projects that are good for families and good for our city.
And to the extent that this is beyond simply a provincial issue, we know that the clientele, especially for subsidized housing, but also for non-subsidized affordable housing, is disproportionately immigrants and refugees, and new Canadians whose settlement is the concern of the federal government. If that isn’t enough, the other large group, and largest, that depends on this housing is First Nations, Metis and Inuit Canadians who are fleeing abysmal conditions on their reserves because of underfunding by the federal government and who are winding up in our big cities as such that half or more of the Indigenous population in this country lives in our cities. So there is a federal responsibility around this.
Now I firmly believe that local governments, particularly big cities, are in the best position to coordinate strategies like this, rally the community, work with neighbourhoods, to deliver the units and make the change that will save us tens of millions of dollars in policing, save the province hundreds of millions of dollars on jails, save the Feds billions of dollars on jails and save the province billions on health care.
We just need a few tens of millions of bucks transferred into the big cities to leverage and activate through the kind of partnerships that we are hopefully going to try over in Londonderry. Multiply that by many times and we can still do this. We may miss our ten-year plan to end homelessness goal by a couple of years, but if we all hustle and if we have a provincial government that is ready to double-down on this, and we will find that out this afternoon, or within the coming months and years of their budget cycles and the City Charter discussions and if we have a federal government, which I believe now we do, that is prepared to work with the nation’s largest cities to achieve solutions in these areas, we can still get on top of this. I have to believe that, otherwise – in a sense – all is lost.
We are a better city than that, and we are a better province and a better country than that.”
Find out more on this strategy and how Edmonton is addressing affordable housing using this link: http://www.edmonton.ca/…/u…/affordable-housing-strategy.aspx
