The Fight for Social Housing

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tenants for social housing by FTGU

On October 21, 2011, Toronto Community Housing approved the sale of 706 homes. The Tenants for Social Housing has been organizing to stop the sale and have taken their fight to city hall. On January 24th, they and tenants across the city will be deputing at the City Executive Committee to oppose the sale. There’s still hope after the 24th as the vote goes to City Council in February. I interviewed Susan Gapka of Tenants for Social Housing about their campaign and what can still be done.


Q: Can you tell me about Tenants for Social Housing?

SG: Tenant for social housing is a group of volunteers. We’re not staff. We’re tenants in Toronto Community Housing (TCH). We formed about 11 months ago. It was early in the new Mayor Ford administration. It was around February, there was an audit that came out from TCH that reported overspending and improper contracts.

The mayor set out to disgrace and fire the board of TCH. They met in early March and the mayor fired the board, and bullied the appointed board members who then resigned. It was done without a report to City Council.

There were a number of us tenants who lived in social housing who are organizers. In 2005 and 2006, we had organized a meeting with members of provincial parliament. There’s definitely a problem with housing, the housing is falling apart all around us.

We needed the money for capital repairs. We were able to get commitments from all three levels of government. It wasn’t only the tenants, there were a lot of people involved, there was a lot of goodwill, but we were part of that and we got $380 M in commitments from the federal, provincial government. We had some experience organizing.

When the mayor publicly fired the board of TCH, we organized –that’s where Tenants for Social Housing –We Are Not for Sale came out of.

Q: Can you tell me about the board? I understand there are only two tenants on the board.

SG: That was a really important thing. The tenants and the alternates were removed by City Council without a report. We thought that was inappropriate. The tenants are certainly not living on any gravy train that we know of. Many of us don’t even know what a gravy train looks like. We had elected tenants to the board, so we thought it was wrong for City Council to remove democratically elected tenants.

We weren’t able to stop that. But we were able to re-elect one of them. Catherine Wilkinson was re-elected to the board and Munira Abukar, a Ryerson student, a woman of colour, a young person was elected. We saw that as a victory. When everyone was being fired, we managed to get our elected representatives to the board.

Unfortunately, what happened during the appointment process is that city councillors (Frances Nunziata and Cesar Palacio) favourable to the mayor were appointed. The other citizen appointments, are real estate people. In the very first meeting, instead of looking at a judicial framework, a housing network, they moved a report that approved the sale of 706 homes. We tried to fight that, but we’re unsuccessful. They voted as a block.



Q: What's happening on January 24th?

On Jan. 24th at 1:30. We’re organizing on that. We’re doing a media event before. We’re trying to put a human face to it.

We may or may not be experts in policy or media. What we do know very well is how to engage in our neighbourhoods. These are our homes. These are our communities. We have some ideas of how to improve our buildings. So we want to be engaged in the process. But it is also the idea that they are going to be evicting over 1000 tenants with this report. We think that’s the wrong way to build a city. We think that’s the wrong way to treat tenants.

When the report went to the board, the corporation didn’t even have the decency to inform tenants. So as volunteers, we hand delivered notices to all 706 doors to let tenants know that their houses were up for sale. We’re going to city hall on Tuesday and we’re going to tell them that we’re Tenants for Social Housing and we’re not for sale.

Q: What are some of your ideas for improving social housing?

SG: They’re trying to run a social housing portfolio like a business. There’s no plan. Actually, their only plan is to sell off social housing. They’re not building any new affordable housing and that’s a problem. We have an 80,000 long waiting list. We have a demand for social housing, we should be increasing the supply. By selling these homes, we are decreasing supply. It feels like a blatant attempt to privatize and sell-off social housing.

We need a national housing strategy with a funding envelope and we need the province. Just before the election they bought in an affordable housing strategy but there’s no funding in that envelope. It’s a strategy, but it’s not a funding strategy. So we need to get the province and the federal government to pay their share in the building of affordable housing. There were some ideas people have like rent-to-own or turn them into cooperatives. We just need to have a conversation about those ideas and how do we include tenants in the decision making process.

Q: What has been the response from the middle of the road councillors?

SG: It’s been a long difficult year, there’s been a lot of new rookie councillors who originally were voting with the mayor on many of the items.

As a number of things have happened, we got Ferris Wheels, cell phones and driving, and we got calls to 911, the mayor has been losing a lot of credibility. We’ve been trying to educate the councillors who are new on how important it is to have social housing. We have tenants in every constituency and every ward across the city. So we meet with them and educate them on how important it is to put that human face to the numbers. We’ve seen some encouraging signs with the vote on the budget.

The other really exciting this is there was a letter from three former mayors, John Sewell, David Crombie, and Art Eggleton who said this is a really bad idea. That’s been really encouraging. A few days later another former mayor Barbara Hall not only spoke out against the sale of housing, but in their study clearly said there’s probably some human rights violations. We’re really encouraged by the way things are going. We’re in a fight for peoples lives and we’re in a fight for people’s homes.

We’re definitely encouraged by the developments of the past 6 to 8 weeks than we were a year ago.

Q: What can people do?

SG: You can send an email to your local city councillor and tell them that you support Tenants for Social Housing. You can come and support us on Tuesday, January 24th at 1:30. You can call us at 416-604-5900 – website tenantsforsocialhousing.com. We’re gearing up for Tuesday. We don’t think we can change the vote as those are the mayor’s supporters. But we really want to talk to the residents of Toronto and to the city councillors who will be voting on February 6th at City Council.


Q: What is the province’s involvement?

SG: A lot of this crisis over lack of money for capital repairs goes back to 2001, when the Mike Harris government downloaded housing to the city. When they downloaded, they didn’t give us the money for capital repairs. This is why the houses have fallen apart. A lot of homes have fallen into disrepair and we don’t have the money.

For the houses to be sold off it requires provincial approval. Even if this pass at city council in February, we hope not, but if it gets through there, it can be stopped, We’ve been meeting with MPPs in the Toronto area and Kathleen Wynne, Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs. The sale of housing has to be approved by the province. So we still can get veto power there even if we lose it at the city level.