Here’s an article about the sale of a heritage rooming house building in a Toronto neighbourhood. The new owner is bucking the trend to gentrification and will continue to offer its existing residents, as well as future ones, extremely affordable housing.
So who is this owner and why can the tenants and the larger community depend on its word?
The Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre (PARC) opened in 1977 as a drop-in community centre to provide support and a community space for discharged hospital patients. In part, PARC’s funding acknowledged that the new residents, who were not accustomed to living in the community, would need some ongoing support.
When PARC opened, many people were being discharged, when the public policy finally came around to the view that people with a mental illness did not need to live out their lives in a hospital dormitory. The Parkdale neighourhood was attractive for the discharged patients because there was a supply of rooming and boarding homes available at relatively low rents. Also, it was close to the hospital where they had been living.
Over the years, some rooming and boarding houses were purchased and refurbished as single family homes. Some were renovated into tiny, illegal flats and rented out at higher prices. Some of the houses that remained were increasingly run down and dangerous. All of these changes profoundly affected the lives of PARC’s members, who were losing their homes. PARC’s staff and members made efforts to hold local landlords to account.
In 1998, a large rooming on PARC’s doorstep was destroyed in a fire. Fortunately, all of the residents escaped, but 40 people with very low incomes lost their homes. PARC provided 24/7 support to the residents as they searched for new homes.
Since it opened, PARC had owned and rented some housing units that were located on its property. The fire strengthened its resolve to expand its housing role.
PARC worked with its members, neighbours, and City Councillors and City staff. Eventually the City expropriated the fire damaged rooming house. PARC went on to earn the right to acquire and renovate the building through a competitive bidding process. The building reopened as a rooming house for tenants with very low incomes in 2011. Other acquisitions followed.1
As the 2020 article below relates, PARC’s purchase of another rooming house is a moment of celebration for the residents. They have a new landlord, and won’t need to move. It also demonstrates a potential for community agencies to build and maintain a permanent supply of housing for people with very low incomes.
Read more at CBC: Parkdale Charity Buys $7.2M Heritage Building To Secure Affordable Housing Units
Footnotes
- PARC is also one of the inspirational forces that led to the founding of the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust. Try: A Land Trust For Rooming Houses
