Settlement agencies say the lack of affordable housing has left clients stuck in crowded units or, in some cases, out on the streets
Sakineh Balouch, a single mother and refugee from Afghanistan by way of Turkey, sits in her basement apartment in Scarborough with her son, Arshia Gholezadeh, 10, on Dec. 19, 2019.Sakineh Balouch and her 10-year-old son, Arshia Gholezadeh, are supposed to be out of their east Toronto apartment by March 31, and they fear their next home will be a shelter.
Before she arrived, Ms. Balouch heard Canada had a reputation as a world leader in providing support and housing for refugees. In 2018, it accepted 28,100 refugees –more than any other country in the world. But if she knew life would be so hard here, she “would’ve stayed in Turkey or gone back to Afghanistan and risked getting killed,” she said through an interpreter.
It used to be that when refugees arrived in the offices of Newcomer Women’s Services, staff would call up one of 10 landlords they routinely worked with to set them up with an apartment in a high rise with reasonable rent and populated by many other immigrants. But demand means landlords don’t need them anymore.
“Well, it’s market, right? We are not trendsetters, right? We can’t go out and ask for a lot of money,” he said. In a July, 2019, housing report, David Macdonald, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, wrote, “In the long term, rental subsidies are no substitute for the construction of new affordable housing, which would increase vacancy rates, cool rental prices and allow more people to live closer to where they work.”
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