ATTAINABLE SINGLES AFFORDABLE HOUSING “AT THE CROSSROADS”

MP Peter Goldring held a meeting in Ottawa of Parliamentarians to examine the proposed Mayfair Village attainable housing project.

“Homeless counts have grown, mostly because 90% of all singles private sector housing has been torn down, and not allowed to be replaced by city planners, let alone increased. Most single people need independent living affordable housing, not social welfare sheltering. We can do much better for less cost for those many in great need,” Mr. Goldring says.

Randy Ferguson of developer ProCura showed his private sector plan to create 700 units of attainable affordable (10% less than market average rents) singles and couples housing – bachelor and one-bedroom apartments. ProCura proposes to build and operate attainable housing for less than half the cost of the social non-profit providers, but have been stalled on funding applications by provincial and municipal shelter-centric funders.

“We are at the crossroads,” Mr. Goldring states. “We must stop the wasteful plans of creating more and more small, inefficient, non-profit social transitional shelter projects. We can do much more with the private sector at half the cost.”

The United States has modeled how to deal with the confusion of social industry vested interest exaggerations of the homelessness issue. They created a national understanding of the issue, defined it as best possible, decided how to most effectively deal with it, and implemented that plan. It is my suggestion that Canada form a comparable agency to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness to begin the process nationally. Such a new agency could really help bring about an end to homelessness confusion that sadly serves to inhibit efforts to help those truly in need.

Now, with encouragement from colleagues, Mr. Goldring will approach the provincial and municipal governments to see what is necessary to make singles housing projects such as this a reality.

What do you think?