Affordable Housing Needs in South Etobicoke

By Esha Rana

For Salomeh Ahmadi, the housing affordability crisis is not an issue of price, but of ideology and imagination.

She likens the crisis to that of a revolving door. Every so often, the door opens and a new demographic—students, seniors, the homeless, couch surfers—becomes visible for the population to see. The government then reacts—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly—with a new policy that does not effectively address the core of the housing problem. And so, the door keeps spinning and people keep suffering.

Salomeh knows that building more units or condos is not the answer, that the communities being affected need to be pulled in when envisioning solutions and that ultimately, housing needs to be viewed as a social good for long-term change to occur.

Her community-driven approach and nuanced understanding of the housing crisis led to her research project, Affordable Housing Needs in South Etobicoke, receiving the College and Community Social Innovation Fund (CCSIF) of $360,000 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Inspiration for conducting social innovation research project

For Salomeh, the project is inspired by her research and academic background, as well as her community and practical experience. She has a background in community development and an MBA in Community Economic Development and has been a part of the South Etobicoke community since she was very young. She was also involved in the LAMP Community Health Centre’s group, Lakeshore Affordable Housing Advocacy & Action Group (LAHAAG), where she learned more about the housing issues, attended meetings and strategic sessions and provided her skills and insights to the group.

When Salomeh came across the CCSIF-NSERC grant via email, she teamed up with LAMP Community Health Centre as her partner and applied for it. She shares, “The inspiration is, without a doubt, the opportunity to work with community—not for them or above them. What’s great about community based participatory research is that we’re able to level that playing field and be genuine listeners, authentic collaborators, build trust in relationships and not be working in silos, which is always a challenge. So, my passion is working with communities to inspire change and give them a voice, a platform and power.”

Project goals

The objectives of the project are:

• To uncover the cost-of-living issues through Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) in South Etobicoke
• To gather input from community members most marginalized
• To inform decision-making on issues across the entire ‘cost of living’ spectrum
• To allow for collaboration and information sharing between community, practitioners and students
• To contribute to the fight against displacement, homelessness and tenant evictions
• To create inclusive and accessible communities
• To advocate for the building of affordable housing through social policy change
• To use the research gathered to develop a strategy to co-develop and disseminate possible solutions

Research team

As the Principal Investigator for this project, Salomeh is responsible for project and research coordination, mentoring students and outreach workers where needed, ensuring the proper management of the budget and working with LAMP CHC to ensure that the project is meeting community needs and building relationships with locals and agencies.

Salomeh is interested in areas related to equity-seeking groups and the interrelations across community, justice, and socioeconomics. She teaches in fields of social services, child and youth care, police foundations and community development. She has also served as a previous Board Member with Lakeshore Arts and Rotary Toronto West. She has spoken at conferences and panels on various topics concerning community development, mental health, and is open to partnerships and creative collaborations that aim to make this world a better and more just place.

Community partner organizations

Strongly driven by the value of community participation, the project has found an aligned partner in LAMP Community Health Centre.

The centre is a full-spectrum family practice where family physicians and nurse practitioners work in a team setting. They place a strong emphasis on health education and prevention and provide a broad spectrum of services including well and sick childcare, prenatal care, minor office procedures, gynecologic care, adult health maintenance and management of chronic disease conditions.

The centre is also involved in advocacy efforts involving a wide range of areas like food security and nutrition, affordable and decent housing, community planning, poverty reduction, environmental issues, civic engagement, accessible recreation, community economic development and lifestyle and behavior change.

Their overall vision is to achieve community health and well-being together through inclusive, integrated community programs and healthcare services.

Participation of students

Salomeh has been assisted in the project by seven research assistants who were students from different programs at Humber College.

Natalie Pilla, a student in the Research Analyst postgraduate certificate program, was responsible for identifying and analyzing secondary data from Statistics Canada about the affordability of housing. This data, combined with what the team collected with the community, was used to mobilize knowledge and action around housing affordability. Reflecting on her experience, she says:

“My biggest learning was around the power of this combined approach—using primary data, secondary data and CBPR—to understand an issue and advocate for solutions. CBPR was a research method I first became interested in during my time as a student in the Research Analyst program at Humber. I’m grateful to have taken part in a real-world application of this method and hope to incorporate it into future research projects.” 
—Natalie Pilla

Vanessa Keall-Vejar was initially hired as a research assistant during her Bachelor of Community Development (Honours) program. She was then subsequently contracted as an outreach worker. Out of the 3-year span of the project, she has been involved in it for 2 years and 3 months. She shares the behind-the-scenes of the project:

“This is truly a community-driven participatory research study and not a one-person driven project. All input has been considered from all community members and advisory members. Some individuals I personally outreached to have formed meaningful and lasting connections from being interviewed and will be valued members of the Humber community long after this study has been completed.

The research outcomes will influence and help form policy that will directly impact lives. It is not the report that people were interested in, but in the impact that this vital data will have on influencing policy makers to include their voices as valued stakeholders. They already knew how serious their precarious housing situation was. It was well past time to recognize housing as a human right, and I am grateful to Humber and NERSC for funding this research to further highlight this fact.” 
—Vanessa Keall-Vejar

Vanessa looks forward to carrying on with advocacy/policy reform and spearheading other community projects and creative social enterprises that will directly benefit all members in the community.

Milestones

For the research team, this project is not just about producing an academic report in the end. The team has been in conversation with South Etobicoke community members, agencies, the municipal councillors, provincial members of Parliament and city staff to tackle the issue of affordability in the Lakeshore area from the ground up. They have facilitated capacity-building workshops with a few housing rights organizations in Toronto to help build and elevate the skills, knowledge and tools that community members have. In an inspired move, churches have created their own capacity-building workshops around homelessness since plenty of people reach out to them regarding housing issues.

The team also organized a housing conference in March as the headline event of the project. The three days of the conference included community talks, interactive activities, keynote workshops, music and a hackathon. They also hosted the National Housing Day events which have acted as a meeting point for sharing stories, having conversations and connecting with relevant stakeholders.

As a result of Salomeh’s direct network and previous work with Toronto Community Benefits Network (TCBN), a South Etobicoke chapter for community benefit agreements (CBAs)—led by Vanessa—has been established in order to pursue social procurement, including affordable housing, through community development charges. There are over 17,000 units currently slated, and over 36,000 more projected in South Etobicoke alone.
 
Challenges

No matter how rewarding or impactful a project is, the journey to its end is always challenging. For a project that staunchly advocates an affordable world for all and whose core value and approach are grounded in community participation, the challenges arise from multiple fronts. Salomeh explains:

“The issues are complex when we’re talking about the housing crisis. It is a crisis but for whom? That is where we can start in defining the solutions. Right now, the solutions are very sporadic and sparse. They are not actually addressing the root issue which requires policy change.

For example, building more homes is not going to increase affordability. It might, but it depends on what units are being built. So, the cost of building might be brought down, but the rent is still going to be the same because we don’t have any rent policies, no vacancy control policies and there’s no rent cap. This is not only a supply issue as it is being defined in the news.”

Recognizing the discrepancy was what led Salomeh and her team to their first step—defining affordability. But the definition of affordability was completely unclear from the municipal to the provincial to the federal level. Developers had their own concept of it and as did the tenants. The final definitions, though, were most often dictated top-down, but that was not working for anybody.

The team realized that the root of the conflict was how these groups viewed housing. Salomeh highlights the difference:

“One of the issues that our respondents, surveys and focus groups brought up numerous times was corporate greed, financialization of housing and corporations and landlords doing whatever they want to maximize their profits and maintain their profit margins. This is not in alignment with viewing housing as a social good. Consequently, different interests lead to different outcomes.”

The implementation of the project had its own set of challenges that reflected the real-time and strenuous effects that housing and living conditions have had on people. Salomeh shares, “Like many people who’ve done primary research or any type of community work, outreach has been a challenge for us. During COVID-19, we went outside in-person to collect primary data. People followed masking regulations and were kind. But now, the people we outreach to are tired, overworked and beaten down by issues. They feel powerless or even hopeless. So, it’s hard to get them to be inspired and motivated. At the end of our surveys, we asked them if they had any additional comments. A lot of them said that they really hoped something would happen with this research and the solutions would be implemented.” 

Potential impact

Grounded in the methods of Community Based Participatory Research, this social innovation project focuses on the development of affordable housing solutions after gathering input from the marginalized groups of Etobicoke-Lakeshore area, namely seniors, students, those on the brink of homelessness and those with a low income.

By sharing resources locally, publicly and academically, the project aims to advance a Community of Practice (CoP) on housing affordability and housing as a human right. Partners will connect leaders with other community leaders to spread the mission and objectives of a just and equitable society.

The end goal is to protect affordability, improve housing conditions for tenants and advance social policy changes.

Get to know more about Salomeh

What are your favourite books?
Salomeh: I love poetry, so Rumi is someone I love to read. I also love Janet Rogers and Warsan Shire. Bell Hooks and Jorge Luis Borges are my other go-to authors.
 
What do you do outside of work?
Salomeh: I love helping my friends and creating spaces. So, sometimes I’ve done smaller events and women’s events. I also like sports, so I fence and try to stay physically active.

Is there anything that keeps you up at night? 
Salomeh: I have moments where I overthink. I also wonder a lot about how we can create non-profits and community spaces that are more loving and caring to one another. Don’t get me wrong, I have tremendously kind and loving individuals around me, but within institutions there is an individualist, survival mentality. We don’t always have the best role models, as many are under resourced and overworked and many of us are learning and creating as we go—re-imagining and disrupting the status quo, so I want to work on this vision of how I can be that role model with what I say and do, and what that might look like in community spaces. I’m very interested in radical liberation and what it could mean and look like.

What does social innovation mean to you?
Salomeh: Social innovation means to (re)imagine with people what it is we want to address, resolve, treat, create or reconcile. Perhaps it’s a new solution to an old problem, or maybe a simple solution to an old problem. To be innovative is to really get into the root of things and do things differently in a way that hasn’t been done before. We have to rupture our reality. There are many realities and we’re often living in one predetermined silo. Sometimes that means going against the grain. Not everyone’s going to agree with that.