Jan. 18, 2025
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Lori-Anne Gagne, chief executive officer of Victoria Park Community Homes, signs an agreement for city funding toward the non-profit’s 261-unit affordable housing project at 60 Caldeon Ave. on the Mountain. Mayor Andrea Horwath and Mike Zegarac, general manager of finance and corporate services, look on during a Friday ceremony that saw agencies sign funding agreements for 11 projects.
Teviah Moro The Hamilton Spectator
The city has firmed up $8.2 million in municipal funding agreements to help Hamilton non-profits build more than 800 affordable-housing units in coming years.
The agreements mark the first allocations to flow through a co-ordinated process under the auspices of Hamilton’s housing secretariat.
“It’s great to celebrate this significant milestone in our ongoing commitment to address the most urgent challenge facing our city, which is the housing crisis,” Mayor Andrea Horwath said at city hall Friday.
The agreements represent “concrete steps” toward the construction of affordable and supportive housing, but “much more is desperately needed,” she said.
“It could be built with greater contributions from our other partners, the federal and provincial governments.”
Hamilton, like elsewhere in Canada, finds itself in the grips of a housing affordability crunch and related crisis of roughly 1,600 experiencing homelessness in the city.
With about 6,100 households in the queue for social housing, the wait for units can be many years for some applicants.
Municipal financial commitment to projects is a key factor for non-profits as they chase more significant funding from upper levels of government, an overriding factor that underpins the secretariat’s work.
“It’s really challenging for us providers to be able to get all levels of government aligned, which is what’s mandatory to move these projects ahead,” Lori-Anne Gagne, CEO of Victoria Park Community Homes, told The Spectator.
So far, the secretariat has received 41 eligible submissions representing roughly 2,500 potential units of affordable and supportive housing through an online “portal” launched in December 2023.
A municipal office solely dedicated to stickhandling the housing file has made a difference, said Brian Sibley, executive director of Hamilton East Kiwanis Non-Profit Homes.
Likewise, the formation of a coalition of non-profits called Hamilton is Home to consolidate efforts has also been positive, Sibley said.
“If you talked to most of the housing providers five years ago, none of us could tell what each other was doing. We were all going in our own direction.”
Victoria Park Community Homes photo
Kiwanis is a partner with Victoria Park in a 261-unit project at 60 Caledon Ave., a former school site near Upper James and Mohawk on the Mountain that’s expected to break ground next month.
“The site is cleared. We’re going full steam ahead,” said Gagne, who signed an agreement for $1 million in funding toward the project, which has an overall budget of $135 million.
The non-profit, which has already received city support for the project, including in the form of land and waived fees, is relying on federal dollars and contributing a significant amount of its own equity to advance the development, Gagne noted.
A new 55-unit CityHousing building on Bay Street North has started welcoming tenants.
Teviah Moro The Hamilton Spectator
The 11 projects that are the focus of Friday’s funding agreements are expected to welcome residents between now and 2027:
CityHousing Hamilton: $1.6 million, 106 Bay St. N., 55 deeply affordable units at a former parking lot;
St. Matthew’s House: $435,000, 412 Barton S. E., 15 supportive units for Indigenous and Black seniors;
Indwell: $143,611, 311 Robert St., 23 units for families in emergency shelters and hotels;
Indwell: $1.87 million, 174 Ottawa St. N., 32 supportive units with a minimum of 20 per cent for Indigenous residents;
Indwell: $350,000, 120 Wentworth St. N., 50 supportive units for older adults facing housing precarity;
Sacajawea Non-Profit Housing Inc.: $200,000, 204 Gage Ave. N., 40 supportive units for Indigenous residents;
Sacajawea: $250,000, 95 Dundurn St. S., 30 supportive units for Indigenous residents studying at Hamilton post-secondary institutions;
Kiwanis: $1.4 million, 1540 Upper Wentworth St., 124 affordable units for low- and moderate-income families with children, seniors, domestic violence victims and people with intellectual disabilities;
YWCA Hamilton: $450,000, 1067 Barton St. E., 90 supportive units for women and children fleeing domestic violence;
Good Shepherd: $500,000, 135 Mary St., 155 supportive units through the redevelopment of its men’s shelter, which is to be demolished;
Victoria Park Community Homes: $1 million, 60 Caledon Ave., 261 units with support services for victims of domestic violence and people with disabilities.
The city’s housing strategy, known as its “road map,” draws on various funding envelopes, including $93.5 million over four years from the federal Housing Accelerator Fund.
YWCA Hamilton aims to build 90 supportive housing units for women and children fleeing domestic violence at 1067 Barton St. E.
As the secretariat does its work, a potential change in government with a federal election on the horizon has injected uncertainty into funding questions.
“Usually, for anyone, there’s a lot of hesitancy or concern when that happens and if a new government comes into power,” secretariat director Justin Lewis said.
The loss of the federal Liberals’ Housing Accelerator Fund, for instance, would be significant, Lewis acknowledged.
A federal election is “absolutely” on housing providers’ minds, said Indwell CEO Jeff Neven, noting Ottawa can’t enter into funding agreements once the writ drops.
“So we’re working with the federal government to ensure that everything we need from the federal government is signed off by at least March.”