Our Comments on the City’s 2024 Budget
It’s budget season in the City of Toronto! We sent a letter to the Budget Committee, Mayor Chow and our local City Councillors with our comments and suggestions for the 2024 budget. We believe the City should increase funding to programs that help tenants – Eviction Prevention in the Community (EPIC), Rent Bank, the Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition (MURA) Program, and RentSafeTO. We also hope to see continued work on a renovictions bylaw.
You can learn more about the City’s budget at www.toronto.ca/budget.
Read our letter below:
January 23, 2024
To: City of Toronto Budget Committee
Re: Comments on the City’s 2024 Budget
Don Valley Community Legal Services is a community legal clinic funded by Legal Aid Ontario. Our catchment area includes Wards 14, 15, 16 and 19, and sections of Wards 11 and 12. We serve many diverse communities and our clients are lower-income, racialized, and primarily renters.
We provide services in four areas of law: housing law, employment law, immigration law, and income supports. The number of calls to our intake line have been increasing each year and the number of housing law cases continues to grow. In 2023, 37% of our cases were related to housing, and 20% were for eviction.
The housing crisis continues to worsen and we see this through the cases at our legal clinic. Building more affordable housing is extremely important, but so is protecting the affordable housing we already have. We need protections and programs in place to help tenants stay in their homes, which will prevent evictions and homelessness.
With so many tenants in Toronto struggling to afford the increased costs of living, Eviction Prevention in the Community (EPIC) and Rent Bank are two indispensable programs funded by the City. Last year, more than half of all applications filed at the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) pertained to arrears of rent, a stat reflected in our clinic’s own case count. With so many of these tenants residing in rent-controlled units, the risk of them becoming homeless is a serious consequence of their eviction.
We therefore applaud the City’s plan to increase funding for EPIC and Rent Bank, programs our clinic often relies on to save and sustain our clients’ tenancies. The immediate assistance these programs provide to tenants facing eviction at the LTB cannot be devalued or understated, especially when we are in the midst of a housing crisis. With newly built units exempt from rent control and without any vacancy control measures forthcoming from the Province, Toronto simply cannot afford to lose its current supply of rent-controlled units.
While we applaud this increase, these are band-aid solutions in a worsening housing crisis. Protecting existing affordable units is a key part of the solution. This is why we are very supportive of the Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition (MURA) Program.
We need to increase funding to the program so that more buildings can be acquired by the City and non-profit agencies. We see too many buildings and apartments being sold, renovated, or demolished, leading to the displacement of tenants and the loss of affordable units. If more buildings can be purchased by the City for affordable housing, we can protect these units as well as the tenants, and prevent unnecessary evictions.
We would also like to see larger buildings (more than 60 units) added to the MURA Program. Again, we applaud the initiative to protect affordable units in low-rise buildings and multi-tenant homes. However, there are many high-rise apartment buildings that need to be preserved across Toronto. The number of buildings facing demoviction and renoviction will continue to increase, especially in neighbourhoods impacted by development and transit projects, such as the Ontario Line. We are starting to see this within our catchment area as there are currently over 12 buildings and over 850 units facing demoviction.
We were pleased to see the Housing Secretariat budget note mention the development of a new Housing at Risk Table and the implementation of a renovictions bylaw. We have been advocating for a renovictions bylaw since 2018 when we began to see a rise in the number of renovictions in our catchment area. We are now starting to see an increase in demovictions and more tenants being displaced from their communities. We hope to see any work on renovictions also include demovictions.
Many of our clients are also facing maintenance issues in their buildings. The RentSafeTO program is an effective, long-term solution that delivers significant value to tenants. In 2022, the communities in our catchment area had some of the highest service request numbers across the city. Ward 19 had 765 complaints to RentSafeTO, the third highest of all the wards. Wards 14, 15, and 16 also had very high numbers of complaints. We routinely see positive results flowing from the work of RentSafeTO and applaud the increased funding directed towards it in this year’s budget.
We encourage the City to direct its funds not just to the expansion of RentSafeTO’s man-power, but to support its enforcement of the Apartment Buildings By-law through remedial action as well. Chapter 354 of the Municipal Code, at section 7.4, enables the City to address the issues in a Property Standards Order if a landlord fails to comply with it. This gives the City the power to make lasting, positive changes for tenants and preserve affordable rental housing, but we rarely see it happen.
Even in the case of a landlord facing prosecution from the City due to a failure to correct issues or pay fines, the City has not stepped in to complete the repairs to ensure tenants have a safe and clean place to live. As a result, even while a landlord faces legal consequences, the tenants are given no reprieve from deplorable living conditions. When directing increased funds to the RentSafeTO program this year, we ask that the City improve its enforcement of this by-law and use all of the remedies available to make a difference for renters.
We appreciate this opportunity to share our feedback on the City’s 2024 budget and hope you will consider increasing funding and resources to these programs. Further enhancements and funding could significantly protect Toronto’s affordable housing.
Sincerely,
Karly Wilson, Staff Lawyer and Housing Law Team Lead
Laura Anonen, Community Development Worker
Don Valley Community Legal Services