When the Toronto Community Housing Corporation board of directors met last week, it wasn’t hard to achieve quorum. The chair called the meeting to order and the members took their seats, except that the chair is now the only member, and he was already sitting. The one-man board of directors consisting of former city councillor and Rob Ford appointee Case Ootes, made a substantial decision at the meeting: to sell off a portfolio of about 22 single-family homes. It’s estimated the city would earn about $15 million from the deal. Some commentators have already joked about the absurdity of a meeting with just one person. At Open File, Steve Kupferman took a Zen approach and compared the meeting to the sound of one hand clapping. Jokes aside, the board’s – that is, Ootes’ – decision ultimately affects the very nature of how the city provides housing to lower-income Torontonians. On the surface, there is much to support the decision. The city is desperately short of money and over the next year needs to re-examine every service it provides, consider the prospect of user fees and possibly selling still more assets to keep Toronto running. So, an easy $15 million makes sense from a strictly economic point of view, especially since the TCHC itself needs cash to address a lengthy backlog of repairs and renovations in the housing it owns now, and to build new housing. TCHC tenants add that maintaining single-family dwellings – sometimes far away from the main projects that are a TCHC staple – adds disproportionately to the costs. The issue of selling the homes, however, presents important questions for Toronto. Should the city focus only on large-scale housing projects that separate low-rental housing tenants from the rest of their neighbourhoods? Should the city encourage TCHC to build and integrate low-cost housing with market-price homes as it’s now doing in Regent Park and elsewhere? Or should it build in existing neighbourhoods where housing is all already privately-owned? The questions are important enough that more than one man should be answering them. We’ll see how much debate the mayor allows over TCHC decisions when it next shows up on council’s agenda, probably in May.
