How Rob Ford Can Fix Social Housing

I have an opinion piece in today’s Toronto Star regarding Toronto’s Mayor, Rob Ford, and the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC).

Mr. Ford would like to see a considerable number of units from TCHC’s existing stock sold off.  For background on the issue, please my blog post of April 13, which can be found here.

In today’s piece, I argue that it is more cost effective to fix already-existing public housing units than it is to build new ones from scratch.  I also argue that the Mayor should use his political clout to lobby both the Prime Minister and Premier of Ontario to reinvest in already-existing housing stock, especially in light of the fact that funding agreements for those units (which were signed several decades ago) are now starting to expire, leaving TCHC with insufficient capacity to undertake important repairs to its housing stock.