THUNDER BAY – Council has voted to make more funding available sooner to the Affordable Rental Housing Funding Program(ARHF) to create 130 new affordable units and 114 new market units throughout the city.
Currently, the city's ARHF funding envelope sits at $1,520,000, but council has approved a proposal to draw more than $4 million from the Renew Thunder Bay Reserve Fund, to top up this year's ARHF funding to $5,580,000.
The ARHF Program allows not-for-profit developers to access grant funding to build multi-unit affordable rental housing.
Without this approval, only two of the six eligible projects would have been funded this year, totalling 34 new affordable housing units. With it, they can can fund all six, getting hundreds more units approved right away.
According to Summer Stevenson, Project Manager for Development Services, the high uptake of applications prompted administration to ask council for the additional $4,060,000 to build more affordable homes faster.
She explained that with the Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) and Building Faster Fund (BFF) yearly contributions, the city could use the reserve fund temporarily, and replenish it with HAF and BFF as it comes in.
Councillor Dominic Pasqualino asked whether the city might need to raise taxes if the HAF and BFF funding didn't come through as expected. "It's really important to be aware of risks that would happen. So, what I'm asking is let's say the government was elected in the next few months that wasn’t going to pay for all this and you can’t really move. Maybe you can take me through the worst-case scenario of that.”
In that worst-case scenario, Stevenson said, “we would have to cover the 4.06 million shortfall.”
“There are two ways that we would start with that. So, we would apply the 2025 expected building faster funding to that amount. We are expecting to receive building faster funds this year. Our target is 183 housing starts and we are at 129 with a significant building in process right now.”
“We're expecting to receive that, which was just shy of $900,000, that we looked at last year. So, that would be the first amount. We would also to receive signals that there may be an issue with the Housing Accelerator Fund money. We would end the grant application intakes for the other programs and work through what we have and in reality, all of the remaining amount that total account significant.”
Council voted unanimously to approve the increased funding.
