Building affordable housing in Toronto requires a heroic effort. Just ask Valerie Elliot-Hyman, former co-chair of the Trellis Housing Initiative and chair of the social action committee at Darchei Noam, a Toronto Reconstructionist synagogue.

Her group's project, the 24-unit Trellis Gardens affordable-housing project, was the first built in conjunction with the City of Toronto's Let's Build initiative, a program that assists non-profit organizations and private developers in building affordable housing around the city.

"It was pretty awful," says Elliot-Hyman, whose project took approximately three years to complete. "Since we were the first project - the guinea pig - there were numerous difficulties. At the time, we had to raise our own matching funds, which is incredibly difficult for a non-profit, and we had to spend $60,000 in legal fees.

"While we had these frustrations, the Let's Build staff were tremendously helpful and supportive," she says.

Photo courtesy of Shelter, Support & Housing Administration
Trellis Gardens was built in conjunction with the City of Toronto's Let's Build initiative, a program that helps non-profit organizations and private developers build affordable housing.

Rents for most of the units at the three-storey, 27,000-sq.-ft. building on Lawrence Avenue West are no greater than the shelter component of welfare, while the remainder are below market rates.

To assist projects such as Trellis Gardens, Let's Build administers a complex framework of federal and provincial funds. In addition to the federal Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative (SCPI), which provides funding for transitional housing projects, and the Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program (RRAP), which helps repair and convert existing buildings for housing, Let's Build also administers federal grants under its affordable housing program.

It also delivers municipal incentives, including the city's $11-million capital revolving fund, which issues below'-market loans to affordable housing projects. In addition, the program can waive property taxes, refund development and related fees and, in some cases, contribute surplus city land.

"Added together, those exemptions add up to quite a bit," says Lorne Cappe, a housing development officer for Let's Build.

"Altogether, between the federal, provincial and the city's contributions, there can be up to $50,000 per unit for affordable housing, plus city-owned land in some instances," he says.

As of April 2005, Let's Build has helped create 24 projects for a total of 648 affordable housing units around the city and has an additional 1,957 units at various stages of approval or construction.

Unfortunately, says Michael Shapcott, co-chair of the National Housing and Homelessness Network, that number is painfully short of what is needed.

He says Let's Build's efforts have failed to meet the target of 2,000 affordable housing units a year recommended by the 1999 report published by then mayor Mel Lastman's Homelessness Action Task Force.

"People who are desperate for good-quality, affordable housing are the first victims of that failure most directly, but the city itself is also suffering," Shapcott says, pointing to the approximately 64,000 people on the affordable-housing waiting list and thousands more crowding Toronto's homeless shelters and city streets.

According to Mark Guslits, the original manager of Let's Build, the slow pace of new projects was largely unavoidable. It took a year - while the program was staffed, structured and organized - before it could begin to evaluate project proposals and another two years for those projects to be completed. Once the program was up and running, he says, Let's Build's limitations were largely financial.

"The real challenge for the Let's Build group, right at the outset, was to do a lot with very little," says Guslits, who is now the chief development officer for the Toronto Community Housing Corp. "You can look for all the magic bullets in the world but, at the end of the day, it all really comes down to money."

Affordable housing in Toronto has not always suffered from financial woes. From 1986 to the mid-1990s, thousands of non-profit housing units were built under federal and provincial programs.

In 1993, however, the federal government downloaded responsibility for affordable housing to the provinces. Two years later, the then Harris government shifted affordable housing to municipalities and completely cut off provincial funding.

"That was a disaster of the highest magnitude," says Guslits, who was working for The Daniels Group, the biggest developer of non-profit housing at the time.

He adds that after 1995, very few rental units were developed in the city until Trellis Gardens' completion.

"The Harris government's naive approach cut funding so completely that it not only killed off projects being built at the time, but it took years to reassemble the industry," Guslits says.

There was no new federal funding for affordable housing until former prime minister Jean Chrétien signed a five-year, $1.4-billion agreement with the provinces in 2001 and added an additional $320 million in 2003. The framework required provinces put up matching funds, which Ontario refused to do.

In 2002, the province did begin a small pilot program that matched federal funding by forgiving provincial sales tax on affordable-housing construction costs.

This framework of federal and provincial funding allocated $366 million in total for Ontario, but only $65 million of that has been used due to the province's matching funds limitations.

In May, federal Minister of Labour and Housing Joe Fontana and provincial Minister of Public Infrastructure David Caplan announced the signing of a Canada-Ontario affordable housing agreement. The new partnership will allocate $301 million from each level of government.

Details of how the $602 million will be spent will be developed over the summer, but Let's Build's Cappe says the new infusion of provincial dollars will give the program a much-needed boost.

"The federal-provincial deal bodes well for the future," he says. "The only concern is it may take quite a while, close to a year, for that money to actually come down to us."

While affordable housing advocates welcome the new funding, lack of money is not the only roadblock, they say.

According to Shapcott, affordable housing suffers from intense NIMBY (not in my backyard) opposition, not only within communities but also on Toronto city council itself.

"The dirty little secret at City Hall is that many of the councillors consider themselves masters of their domains, kind of like medieval fiefdoms," he says. "They forge backroom deals that delay or ultimately kill projects in their wards."

Cappe says the problem stems from the fact that, unlike private developments that only have to deal with the zoning and permitting committees, affordable housing projects must traverse a gruelling obstacle course to get approval.

In total, Cappe says a Let's Build project typically has to be approved by as many as five different committees and is referred back and forth between committees before it is voted on by the full city council.

"Once it gets to the city council, we very often get bumped back to a previous committee and get into that loop again," Cappe says.

"For example, we have one really good project that has been in the process for eight years because there are one or two councillors who don't want it in their area."

Shapcott and Cappe are not alone in their frustration.

In April, Ward 7 Coun. Giorgio Mammoliti of York West put forward a plan that - in addition to limiting speaking time and granting the mayor new powers - proposed the creation of one special committee to fast-track new affordable-housing projects.

A final vote on the plan, however, was delayed until early May, at which time it was sent back by council for further review.

Even with the challenges affordable-housing projects face, Trellis Housing Initiative's Elliot-Hyman says her group plans to put forward another project in the near future.

It's organizations such as hers and their efforts, says Cappe, that are the real hope for Toronto's affordable-housing future.

"These groups have to be extremely dedicated to the work they do," he says. "The difficulties they face really speak to the heroics of the projects that have actually been through this process."

(Mike McLeod can be reached at mcleod@businessedge.ca)