‘We’re getting absolutely nowhere’; Region of Peel’s housing plan continues to fail residents

In 2023, there were 258 known encampments reported in the Region of Peel, more than double the previous year. 

In Peel, it is now estimated that approximately 97,000 households (up from 91,000 reported last summer) are living in core housing need — a classification used to identify families or individuals living in homes that do not meet their needs or are unaffordable. This translates to approximately 1 in 5 households that require assistance to meet their basic housing requirements.

Years of insufficient investments and a lack of adequate policy at all levels of government, alongside record-high inflation and stagnant wages, have manifested a housing and affordability crisis Ontario has not seen since the Great Depression. 

The latest numbers from the Region reveal Peel is only meeting three percent of the local supportive housing need, eight percent of the transitional housing need and 34 percent of the affordable housing need. Emergency shelter operations are meeting 75 percent of the need—even the last line of defence against living on the street has been underfunded for years. 

“It's reflecting the fact that there is a large number of individuals in our shelter system, there's a large number of individuals who don't have the income to pay for market housing,” Michelle Bilek, founder of Peel Alliance to End Homelessness, told The Pointer. “We literally are going to need billions in order to solve this issue. And so the question remains, what do we do about it? What is our game plan moving forward?” 

“Advocacy has obviously gotten us nowhere. This is echoing every community saying the same thing to our Province, the same thing to our federal government. The number of people living in encampments, our opioid crisis — these are things that are happening in every community, small and large.”

Data from the Region shows Peel is falling alarmingly short of meeting the current need in the community.

(Region of Peel) 

On Thursday, Aileen Baird, director of housing services, provided an update to council on the Region’s housing development as part of Peel’s 10-year Housing and Homelessness Plan. While the accompanying report outlined how the Region plans to increase supply to address the lack of affordable and supportive housing for people with low incomes, it revealed that only 2,100 new beds/units—contingent on funding—will be added to Peel’s community and supportive housing stock over the next 10 years. Baird laid out that Peel has committed $475 million in capital funding and $8.9 million in annual operating funding to date, but $260 million in capital funding is still needed to reach the Region’s target.

It represents a fraction of the number that was proposed by the Region less than a decade ago and fails to meet the current demand.

For years the Region of Peel has been scaling back its community and supportive housing targets, despite rapidly increasing need.

(Alexis Wright/The Pointer files) 

Baird outlined there are two housing crises happening congruently: “One involves high market housing prices impacting middle income households, and the other involves the lack of deeply affordable and supportive housing for members of our community who are the most vulnerable.” The programs the Region funds and oversees are primarily focused on the second crisis, she highlighted.

Elected officials have failed to make hard decisions as the crisis worsened before their eyes, choosing instead to blame Ottawa, and to a lesser extent Queen’s Park. They were once again largely silent during Thursday’s meeting. Mississauga Councillor Dipika Damerla, apparently unaware of the policy failures that have been repeatedly reported to her, instead commended the Region for its progress to date, even after the numbers that had just been presented to her clearly highlighted the latest alarming figures.

The crickets in the room were emblematic of how Peel’s elected officials have handled the housing crisis for years.

When it was endorsed by council prior to 2018, Peel’s Home For All plan was set to add 75,000 new units over a decade including 20,000 that would meet affordability criteria for low to middle-income earners and 55,000 more that would meet the needs of middle-income earners and above. 

Last year, the regional councillors voted to scale back Peel’s Housing Master Plan, which replaced the Region’s ambitious Home For All strategy (above) in 2019.

(Region of Peel) 

Less than three years after Peel’s regional councillors patted themselves on the back for approving the plan, and following their own subsequent apathy toward properly funding it, a glaring staff report was presented to them in June of 2020, capturing the frustration senior officials in charge of housing at the Region felt about the latest failed strategy, as the crisis was getting worse. 

Titled “Improving Housing Outcomes - Advocacy in a Time of Pandemic”, the report provided stunning statistics that illustrated the extent of council’s failure.

“Current ownership and rental housing prices are out of reach for 80 per cent of Peel households,” it stated.

But the real proof of the extent to which the crisis was being ignored was in a figure that reached out from the page and slapped readers across the face: “The 10-year Peel Housing and Homelessness Plan (2018-2028) identified that more than one in 10 new homes that are built must be affordable to low-income households to keep up with forecasted growth – since 2018, less than one in 2,600 new ownership homes built have met that threshold.” 

It was an ambitious strategy to meet the rising need that ultimately failed due to inadequate funding from the councillors who had approved the new approach. Instead, the vision to create 7,500 new units annually, including 2,000 each year to meet the needs of low to middle-income earners from 2018 to 2028, was abandoned.

It left Carolyn Parrish, now Mississauga’s Mayor, to pursue affordable housing projects on her own, as a councillor, an approach she had begun years earlier out of frustration with the inability to get affordable units built. 

A recent Brampton protest organized by Peel ACORN highlighted the city’s disgraceful affordable housing track record.

(Peel ACORN) 

The Region then pivoted to a dramatically scaled back goal in 2019 through its Housing Master Plan (HMP), which laid out a target of building 5,700 affordable units by 2034.

In July 2023, the Region of Peel switched gears again to pursue a new affordable housing program, after the last two council-approved strategies were left unfunded and unable to address the ongoing crisis. It marked the third time in roughly six years that regional officials had revised their approach to address the housing crisis. The new plan, while more realistic, presented a substantial reduction in the number of affordable units that would be added to the Region’s housing stock over the next decade. Meanwhile, staff were reporting that only 19 percent of core housing needs were being met.  

But accompanied by all of these revisions in the Region’s housing program is a caveat: their success is contingent on funding from upper levels of government. 

Community housing, which includes emergency, affordable subsidized, transitional and supportive housing, is built by the Region of Peel, not the private sector. The responsibility was downloaded onto municipalities by Ottawa and Queen’s Park in the ‘90s without providing the necessary revenue to fund the costs — marking a significant failure by upper levels of government that has exacerbated the level of the current crisis.

Recognizing that all levels of government have a part to play, Bilek said “there really is no form of will or financial means to address the deeply affordable and the Region can only do so much with the assets and the finances that they have.”

Last July, when staff revealed that less than one-fifth of the affordable housing need in Peel was being met, council approved a recommendation to move away from existing the model of each level of government contributing a third of funding and increased regional funding for community and supportive housing projects. But municipalities do not have the tools to generate the revenue needed to raise the billions of dollars required to address the crisis on their own without it falling entirely on the tax base. They have repeatedly called on Queen’s Park and Ottawa to dramatically expand programs to combat homelessness. But those calls have often fallen on deaf ears.

“There's no doubt that our regional council has been advocating, when they have the opportunity, to the province and the federal government around the desperate need,” Bilek acknowledged. “But if you talk to service providers, they're the first ones who will say they're not building for our clients, period. From the definition of affordable to the fact that we heavily rely on the private sector to build, we're getting absolutely nowhere.”

Bilek said while there are investments being made, they are largely focused on Peel’s shelter systems, which she categorized as a “reactionary movement” to an emergency measure that creates a pathway into more permanent housing. Rather than investing money into shelters as a temporary fix, Bilek stressed the Region should be focusing on building something that is affordable for people.

“We're just going to get nowhere,” she reiterated. “We're just siphoning money into a reactionary emergency, temporary support, really, for people.”

Under staff’s recommendation last July, council replaced its master plan with the Peel Community Housing Development Program. Thursday’s report states the number of projects to be completed under the revised program has been reduced from the 18 laid out under the HMP, to 13, due to a lack of funding commitment from the Province. Once completed, they will add an estimated 1,684 new beds/units to Peel’s community housing stock — an increase from the 1,444 new units/beds over ten years that was outlined upon the program’s revision in 2023.

Six of these projects will open this year, providing shelter and/or affordable homes to 381 low-income residents/households in Peel.

Out of the 13 projects laid out, seven projects have received sufficient funding through regional and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) funding. Thursday’s report requested council’s approval to continue negotiations to amend the Region’s agreement with CMHC to increase the number of projects funded up to nine. The additions would include funding for the Wilkinson Road Shelter expansion in Brampton and the Brookvalley affordable rental site in Caledon — both in the design process. A request for $1.2 million is included in the 2025 proposed capital budget for housing support to complete the planning approvals for three sites: Falconer, an affordable rental site in Mississauga; phase one of the Mayfield West affordable rental site in Caledon; and an affordable rental site at Emil Kolb Parkway and King West in Caledon.  

The staff report explained that reducing the number of projects in the CMHC deal from 16 — the number identified in the initial agreement when the HMP was approved by council in 2019 — to nine will result in an initial loss of $98.6 million in a repayable loan and $43.7 million in a forgivable loan in the existing CMHC agreement. Staff will be working with the corporation to revise the existing agreement and “will seek to enter into new funding agreements as opportunities emerge.”
 

While the Region has been increasing investments in recent years, the demand continues to outpace the resources available to the upper-tier municipality.

(The Pointer files) 

Bilek said she was not shocked by the latest numbers from the Region, adding “I'm not surprised that they're having to scale down their ambitious plan, because the money isn't there.”

“It's just not there, and it just seems that other levels of government are focusing on the wrong thing. They're not focusing on the catalyst to homelessness, which is the inability to seek out and find and situate people in housing that they can afford.”

Her comments reflected similar sentiments made by Baird to council on Thursday, who acknowledged that more work needs to be done.

“There is a large and growing gap between our current service levels and the need in our community for emergency, transitional, affordable and supportive housing,” she told councillors. “While this council has increased regional investment in affordable housing this term in a substantial way, the same cannot be said of our federal and provincial counterparts. So needless to say, ongoing advocacy remains critical to this file.”

In 2024, the Region budgeted $190.6 million in capital investments for housing support, an increase from $169.1 million budgeted in 2023. Peel’s operating budget also increased in 2024 to $180.7 million, up from $155.2 million the previous year. Baird has previously stressed that reducing homelessness requires more investment into prevention and permanent housing solutions. On Thursday, she pointed out “for profit, market housing alone will not solve the affordable housing crisis,” and emphasized the need to increase community and supportive housing.

“While the Region funds and operates several programs to increase the supply of affordable rental, community and supportive housing in Peel, the need for affordable housing — particularly amongst our community’s most vulnerable — far exceeds available resources. Staff have previously reported to Council that available resources from all levels of government meet just 34 percent of our community’s need for affordable housing,” the report acknowledged. It added that increasing the supply at a scale that fully addresses the need in Peel “cannot be funded through the property tax alone” and that “focusing on market supply alone will not help to end homelessness and help our community’s most vulnerable to become affordably housed.”

The Region stresses an “all of government approach” is required to meet the demand.

When it comes to the blame game behind the crisis, Bilek explained “everybody likes to find a scapegoat. A scapegoat can be other levels of government who have punted down the responsibility on the affordable side of housing to the municipalities, but also the municipalities are relying highly on the private sector to build.” She added, “Really, we could be pointing our fingers at ourselves, because we elect people, right? Or the other levels of government and the lack of any sort of foresight when it comes to housing affordability. It's decades in the making.

“I think it's really all levels of government. It's come to this catastrophic, decades of crummy policy, and not having the foresight on these basic necessities that people need.”

Council approved the revised Peel Community Housing Development Program, which will allow staff to realign the capital funding to meet the amended strategy. The reduced number of projects funded through the existing agreement with CMHC from 16 to nine projects, which will decrease funding received through the agreement by $142.3 million, was also approved.

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Twitter: @mcpaigepeacock

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