“To improve housing in Toronto, governments need to provide housing affordability in perpetuity and invest more in the quality of life for residents. At the co-op where I grew up, our housing had summer day camps, field trips for Easter, Halloween parties and annual Pride parties. These kinds of housing models were developed and financed throughout the 1970s to 1990s, and show how innovative a model like this is for building mixed-income communities…
…We can look to models like the one used in the city of Amsterdam for inspiration, where the city requires a high percentage of low-income and moderate-income housing to be included in every new development. Not only does this make the city more affordable, but it helps to remove the stigma often associated with affordable housing — it’s just a normal way of life that the government helps facilitate. It underscores the reality that housing is a human right.”