By Natalie Johnson
nally made possible by a joint effort in government grants, one of the last remaining lots earmarked for affordable housing in Centretown will soon be the site of 195 new homes for families with modest incomes.
The non-profit housing organization Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation will construct four buildings on the vacant corner of Metcalfe Street and Argyle Avenue, a plan that comes in the wake of last month’s receipt of $7 million through the Canada-Ontario Affordable Housing Program Agreement.
The development has also been made possible through contributions from the City of Ottawa, which has pledged $3 million under its Action Ottawa program and offered the land for $1. The municipality has also promised to waive development charges, planning fees, and parkland levies.
The construction could begin as early as next summer, says Dennis Carr, the CCOC development coordinator.
A four-and-a-half storey building will face Argyle Avenue, while another, eight storeys high, will sit at the corner of Metcalfe and Catherine Streets. Two stacked townhouses will form an inner courtyard.
The accommodations will range from bachelor apartments to three-bedroom units, according to current design plans.
Despite the $10 million pledged by government grants, the CCOC recognizes that it will be responsible for a large portion of the financing.
“The capital grabs available to us are finite. If our costs go up, we don’t get any more funding from the various levels of government,” says Carr. “We appreciate that there may be some money that the CCOC will have to put into it.”
Carr says the remainder of the project will be financed privately, and the corporation will take advantage of Ontario’s arrangements for special terms with certain lenders.
Catherine Boucher, the CCOC’s executive coordinator, estimates that the project will cost $20 million, leaving the corporation responsible for a $10 million mortgage.
“It’s encouraging to see both senior levels of government coming back to the table,” she acknowledges. “But I still say they’re dipping their toes in, so we need now for them to actually jump in and get it back on track.”
The site, says Boucher, is one her corporation has been eyeing for years – even before the make-shift Beaver Barracks building, erected to support the war effort during the 1940’s, was demolished in the early 1990’s.
A provincial funding allocation for the city-owned site had been in place as early as the beginning of 1995, but the program responsible for it was cancelled after the Harris Tories won that year’s election.
Now, the lot is probably the last one downtown that will be developed for affordable housing, she says. The project is only possible, she adds, because the city has offered the land virtually free of cost.
“CCOC started as a downtown developer, but because of the inflation of land prices downtown we were pretty much shut out of the area,” she says. “There’s no way we could pay to develop affordable housing on land at the price people want to sell it downtown.”
The Beaver Barracks site is ideal, she says, because Centretown real-estate is in high demand.
“It’s the part of the city that has the highest rents,” she explains. “If you’re looking for affordable housing and you have a low or modest income it will be very difficult to access it.”
Centretown is also “unquestionably” sought-after, says Ron Larkin, CEO of the Ottawa Community Housing Corporation, because tenants prefer to live in close proximity to centres of employment.
According to Trudy Sutton, executive director of Housing Help, there are currently 10,000 names on the affordable housing wait list in Ottawa and households will wait up to seven years before being offered a unit. That’s an increase from 1995, when the maximum wait time was three years.
“We had a period of time where nothing was happening in terms of new developments,” says Sutton. “Lots of the current social housing was built through funding under both federal programs and provincial programs, which over the past several years were cancelled. But in the past three years there’s started to be a glimmer of hope.”
The term affordable housing, specifies Boucher, is vague enough to constitute anything that is within a given person’s price range. But the CCOC largely targets households at or below the 35th income percentile.
“It depends what you need,” says Boucher. “If you’re a single person making $25,000, you might be in a low income percentile, but you can afford to pay more of your income in rent than if you’re a family of eight people making the same amount.”
Eighty per cent of the names on the wait list are households with incomes at or below the 20th income percentile, she adds. According to the Housing Continuum established for Ottawa in 2006, that’s equivalent to a household income at or below $31,987.
Unlike typical social housing schemes, in which households pay a rent equivalent to 30 per cent of their income, the CCOC will rent out most of the units at or below 70 per cent of the average market rate.
As a result, the development will alleviate a subsidiary “below-market” wait list.
“It won’t be targeting, say, people on social assistance,” she says. “But it will make a difference to people with incomes that are quite modest – people working minimum wage.”
This type of ancillary list, she adds, will likely persist because it appears that governments will continue to fund housing projects with grants that don’t include subsidies.
The development, while considerably impacting the 195 households awarded the units, will also benefit the larger community, says Boucher.