Press Hits

Prime Minister Mark Carney and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow announced $2.7 billion on Wednesday towards building 18 housing projects over the next three years in a move aimed at adding thousands of new rental units to the market.

The breakdown of the funding includes $310 million that will go towards building roughly 1,900 homes on city-owned land through the Build Canada Homes federal agency — 700 of those will be supportive and affordable homes, while about 1,100 will be rent-controlled homes.

But it’s where the rest of the money is going that tenant advocacy groups are taking issue with.

Roughly $1.8 billion will be paid out in low-interest loans to private developers through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Apartment Construction Loan Program (ACLP), which can create roughly 3,700 rental homes in Toronto.

Residents of a Kipps Lane apartment complex say they’re growing frustrated over the lack of hot water in their building.

“Wake up in the morning, start boiling water to have your morning wash. You’re washing dishes, you need to boil your water, so it is time consuming,” explained Richard Gillespie, a tenant at 756 Kipps Lane.

And when it comes to showers, “Well let’s just say I haven’t had one in a bit,” he said.

Gillespie says the hot water in his mid-rise apartment building has been out for about three weeks, with the exception of one day in the middle when it was fixed temporarily.

On July 27, property owner SIREG Management Inc issued a written notice apologizing for the hot water interruption. The notice, posted throughout the building, went on to say, “Our Maintenance Team and specialized technicians have been working continuously to address the issue. However, due to the complexity of the repair, additional time is required to ensure the system is fully restored and operating safely.”

Residents of a London, Ont., apartment building say they have been without hot water for 12 days straight, with no timeline from property management about when it might be fixed.

The hot water at 756 Kipps Lane worked for a single day nearly two weeks ago, but quickly fell back into disrepair, having already been out for roughly five days, according to Richard Gillespie, who has been living in the building since June.

“It’s just frustrating,” he said. “You wake up, you start day, you’d love to have a shower before you go to work.”

“You can hop into an ice shower if you’re feeling up for it, but sometimes it’s not the most comfortable thing.”

The City of Toronto will see $2.7 billion in funding from the federal government to build 18 housing projects over the next three years, as the city’s construction market continues to suffer from a condo crash.

It’s the latest move aimed at injecting life in the housing sector, along with the recent HST rebate on new homes, and the reduction of development charges in Toronto.

“Every home in this portfolio will be a rental. And together they span the entire continuum, from supportive housing to affordable homes,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking at a construction site in Scarborough for new co-op housing, Wednesday.

“For decades, Toronto simply did not build enough homes, and too much of what was built was unaffordable for most Torontonians,” he added.

The funding will create more than 5,600 new rental homes, and more than 1,800 of them will be deeply affordable, supportive or rent controlled, Carney said.

A Saint John man says he’s out as much as $4,000 after discovering what he believes was mould in his new apartment, and New Brunswick’s Tenant and Landlord Relations Office said it couldn’t look into his formal complaint immediately or give a future date when it would.

The two-bedroom unit in an older building in the city’s north end seemed fine to Abdulbari Alhallak when he first looked at it. He said he detected a damp smell, but was told it was fresh paint, not something like mould that would impact the air quality.

When you think of extreme weather in Canada, thigh-high snow drifts may no longer be the first image that comes to mind. Instead, heat waves and wildfires are steadily emerging as a threat to our health and the environment.

Despite this, most residential bylaws only account for cold weather, requiring buildings to have heat in each unit and adequate insulation.

But as temperatures and deaths connected to heat keep climbing, more tenants, politicians and climate advocates are calling for comparable cooling rules. During municipal debates — from councils in British Columbia to Newfoundland — the same question keeps coming up: who should pay for the upgrades?