Anti-poverty group wants vacant downtown properties turned into affordable housing

A group of anti-poverty activists is urging the city to expropriate a section of land in the Cabbagetown area before it's sold to developers in an effort to combat a lack of affordable housing in Toronto.

At a media conference at city hall Wednesday, the group, including architects, academics and organizers with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), put forth a plan to build up to 260 rent-geared-to-income public housing units at 214-230 Sherbourne St., a series of seven properties currently sitting vacant in the area.

Among the properties is one 1900s-era building long home to rooming houses, now largely empty. The group says the properties' owners put the buildings up for sale in 2018, but later took them off the market after city council considered purchasing them. The city hasn't moved on expropriating the properties since, it says.

Condominiums, the group said in a news release, threaten to make the area even more unaffordable in a neighbourhood "overwhelmingly populated by the poor."

'Displacement amid a deadly housing crisis'

Organizers said their plan responds to a "loss of housing options for poor people in the downtown east because of encroaching gentrification, which is resulting in their displacement amid a deadly housing crisis."

Toronto Mayor John Tory says expropriation is an option available to the city, but that there is a careful process that council has to go through and that it can't select processes just based on the proposal of a single group.

"We have a report that's coming to the city council this fall that actually tries to identify sites where it would be appropriate for us to either acquire the site or otherwise work with private-sector people," he said.

City council report coming this fall

"I'm sure somebody will look at the Sherbourne Street site as one possibility," he said, adding "drawing all this attention to it doesn't help us in terms of getting a reasonable price."

The mayor also added he's hopeful that a proposal for an affordable housing allowance that would help to subsidize the cost of rent will get approval from provincial and federal governments, and will also help with the city's affordable housing challenges. 

The mayor did take issue one of the group's tactics to draw attention to their plan: to bring a wheelbarrow full of soil to his office.

"Certainly, I don't think it really helps for them to dump a load of dirt out front of my office just because they feel this particular site should be picked," Tory said.

OCAP is otherwise following the proposal process by pitching the idea to Toronto's housing committee Wednesday.