At last Thursday’s Candidates meet Town Manager Andra Kauffeldt asked the candidates to speak on how they would tackle housing and cost of living, giving personal examples of the challenges faced by the younger generation and families in our area.
“I ask this question as daughter, a mother, a grandmother, and a caregiver for my family members, I have 3 adult sons, the youngest is 23, the oldest is 30. None of them believe they will ever be able to own a home in the communities that they live in. My middle son is married with a 2 year old grandson and I love him to death. They both have what 10 years ago would have been considered really good paying jobs. … They can barely pay their $2000.00 of rent on their home because a tank of oil is over $1000 to heat that home.
“The insurance is crazy. The hydro is hundreds of dollars a month. Food costs are through the roof. They can’t save any money for a down payment on a home that they can’t afford to buy anyway because home prices are so bad and inflation is so terrible.
“And the pending tariffs have made that seem like an even more out of reach dream.
“What are you going to do for the young people of our communities who are going to look after all of us, who are getting lots of gray hair in a few years, to make sure that they can live here and be healthy and well and sustainable contributing members of our community?
In their responses the candidates shared how they would work for affordable housing and address cost of living issues. The Green Party and NDP both suggested that building affordable homes should not be something left only to the private sector as there is a lack of financial incentive to build less profitable affordable housing. New Blue Candidate Glenn Tyrell suggested his party might address this by only giving building permits to developers if they also committed to building affordable housing.
You can read the full responses below.
NDP’s Jessica Zielke: ‘Build deeply affordable homes’
“I think that everybody in our riding deserves that (a warm safe house they love). And also because housing isn’t just about shelter, right?
“Housing is also about well-being. It’s very much tied to health and economic security. So it’s important that we do get this right and that we deal with it now rather than relying almost entirely on the private sector, which we have tried for quite some time now and clearly it isn’t working based on the fact that housing starts are down and prices are up.
“For the NDP, it’s going to be important for us to get back into the business. Building homes again, so that means both affordable, deeply affordable housing and supportive housing, which isn’t to say that we’re trying to replace the private sector in any way, of course, that that’s part of the solution too.
“And again, it’s not just about the cost of housing, but you alluded to the sort of cost of living and, as part of our solution for that, we’re also going to be introducing a monthly grocery rebate that’s tied to your income and the number of people that live in your household. That would be a maximum of $120.00 a month depending on those things as one of the ways that we can help to bring down the cost of living.
Green Party Mike Holbrook: ‘There’s less profit in lower end homes so its been ignored’
“Housing costs in Ontario or some of the highest actually in in the world and there are a number of reasons that that’s happened. It’s actually occurred over quite a long period of time….we haven’t been building deeply affordable housing for a long time. In fact, most of the stock of that housing in the province was built before 1995. And then we stopped and we just turned the whole thing over to private enterprise and ‘surely they’ll take care of it.’ And you can make good profit on the custom homes and high-end homes and I’ve worked on lots of them, but there’s less profit at the lower end of the market. And so it’s been ignored. So I’m going to go back to the toolbox. And again, there are a bunch of ways that we can attack that. I think government should be directly involved, as it once was…I think we should be looking at cutting the red tape so that we can do more smaller Co-op type units. Nonprofit housing is a possibility. I spent quite a bit of time working with Habitat for Humanity in Toronto, both as a volunteer and as a staff member. And so I know that model. That’s another one that that that works. We’re gonna have to do things like, you know, direct supports for young people as well because this problem has been building for a long time. It’s going to take a while to fix. And in the meantime, we have to make sure that they have good access to financing if we can. Development costs in certain cases, if we can really encourage and support the purchase of starter type homes, perhaps we can use some of the emerging technologies like you know, prebuilt, pre designed.
There are various things we can do to cut the cost. I think we should do everything we can to rebalance the system and then maybe we’ll do better in the future.
New Blue Party Glenn Tyrell ‘In order for developers to get permits they would have to build affordable homes as well’
“Good question. It’s a difficult one, but it’s again, one that comes down to having the funds in order to support those kind of things and we currently have a situation where we’re earning extreme debt, the total of 38 million within a month. I mean we can do a lot of projects within a short amount of time if we get that under control. We also have pressure from immigration… It’s a supply and demand market up there and the demand through immigration is just higher than the supply. So we do need to build new homes and the New Blue would also provide incentives for developers. Not to just build the big homes (but) also within that, in order to get the permits to build, you would have to build affordable homes as well as the bigger homes.
“Also look at other opportunities for rental properties or rental homes. Maybe converting some of the vacant properties that are in Belleville and in this area so they can get into those homes and then also putting money back in their pockets in order to afford those.
“And I’ve touched on that earlier as far as the tip of the iceberg stuff that we’ve earmarked for being cut to the tune of $80 million. So all these things that we can do within government to close on the funds to support that kind of thing is.
Apparently not easy and it’s going to take time, but it can be done.”
You can check out some more of our Candidates Meet coverage at MyBancroftNow.
