By Damali Nabagereka
Local housing activists say $3 million in federal money to fight homelessness may not be enough.
“We’ll take what we’ll get. But in terms of the need out there, this is a small drop in the bucket,” says Rob Boyd, YMCA-YWCA manager of housing and support services.
Boyd says he welcomes the additional money because it will help accelerate renovation projects.
But he says he’s concerned about how far the money will go towards reducing homelessness because it won’t significantly increase the amount of affordable housing available.
The YMCA-YWCA operates a rooming house with 131 long-term residents including an emergency shelter for women, families and youth.
Boyd says he hopes to use the new funds for three urgent projects, including renovating the bathrooms, which haven’t been improved in 30 years, putting full kitchen facilities on the youth floors and creating three wheelchair-accessible bathrooms.
The money is part of $50 million for renovation programs announced last December by Public Works minister Alfonso Gagliano.
The funds will be offered as “forgivable loans” of up to $12,000 for a rooming house and $18,000 for a self-contained unit.
The Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program, operated by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, provides loans and grants to low-income homeowners and to landlords of affordable housing for repairs on their properties.
Funding is available to homeless shelters, non-profit social service agencies not receiving government aid and developers who own residential or run-down buildings that could be turned into affordable rooming houses.
Although these groups welcome the announcement, Catherine Boucher of the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation, which provides affordable housing to 200 people, says it won’t necessarily create more housing for the homeless.
She says few non-profit agencies and shelters can afford to own vacant buildings that can be converted into rooming houses.
“It’s helpful if you can find the money to buy the buildings,” says Boucher. “The big piece missing is how to get the money before applying for the funds to convert the buildings into rooming houses.”
Most financial institutions aren’t eager to finance mortgages for these non-profit groups because of the high risk.
“If the federal government is really interested in the homeless, it has to pay more attention to the financing,” Boucher says.
Somerset Regional Coun. Diane Holmes agrees the government should come up with a more permanent solution.
“This is certainly better than nothing,” she says. “But the government needs to get back into a national housing policy.”
She says there is a huge need for rooming houses because people coming from shelters need stable housing to keep stable jobs.
Jamey Burr, manager of the Canadian Centre for Public/Private Partnerships in Housing, the organization responsible for administering the money, shares Holmes’ concerns.
However, he says the funding is only an immediate response to the homelessness problem.
“It’s just one piece of the puzzle, one initiative,” he says. “We can’t do everything. We have to start from somewhere.”
The federal government will then evaluate the results of the new initiative and release an additional $50 million in April.