THUNDER BAY — A proposal to redefine affordable for low and medium income housing found a largely positive audience with the mayor’s taskforce on building more homes.
After listening to feedback from the committee, the project manager for the city's housing accelerator fund program, will alter some of the language in her recommendation to change the definition of affordable housing, as it relates to a specific city funding stream.
Summer Stevenson told Newswatch she will tighten the language in her recommendation to make it easier for not-for-profit and Indigenous developers to understand what the funding stream entails.
The city's affordable rental housing fund is available to not-for-profits to create housing for low- to moderate-income households. The proposed change would define 'affordable' for that program to income levels rather than average housing costs.
Committee member Ken Ranta said he would like language in the policy to clarify that they would not require a record of income, because putting the responsibility for rent adjustment on the not-for-profit organization would be a heavy burden.
“We can have an individual who brings a $60,000 notice of assessment from the previous year. This is great and just sign in, the next year that income may drop up to $30,000 or less if something happens. A non-profit developer in that case is still looking at a calculation based on that new income,” said Ranta, executive director of the District of Thunder Bay Social Services Administration Board.
The city “would not require a record of income,” said Stevenson.
For example, if a developer wanted to build 18 one-bedroom units and rent them out for $880 a month, the city would simply record 18 units as available “in the market that is affordable to the 30th percentile,” she explained.
Stevenson also said her recommendation will include the requirement that utilities be included in the rent “since utilities are part of that picture of housing affordability.”
Developers are “willing to charge lower rents (on units) to capture the utilities because having tenants pay for their own utilities provides a sense of ownership over the cost,” said committee member and architect John Stephenson.
“We know that rents have been rising year over year," Stevenson said, adding that from 2023 to 2024, for example, the rent for a three-bedroom apartment in the city went up 13 per cent.
"Wages are not going up the same amount, so this change would allow us to take the average market rent out of the equation and instead look at the average of the income percentiles in Thunder Bay.”
Stevenson said changing the definition will help her team address the current affordable housing deficit.
“We know that we have a deficit of affordable units in the community and we're able to identify at which incomes, and at which apartment size we have that (deficit)," she said.
The committee did not vote on Stevenson’s recommendation at Wednesday's meeting. The committee will take some time to look at the new policy and vote at their April 4 meeting.
If passed by the committee, Stevenson will present the new policy to council in June.
