Habitat for Humanity plans to acquire affordable units in one of the city's newest, shiniest condo developments - a 443-unit condominium tower nestled up against the ambitious Toronto International Film Festival Centre.
It will sell them at a small fraction of the price of the building's other condos. That's the new model for affordable housing - a partnership of private and not-for-profit when government-funded programs aren't cutting it and Toronto's backlog of people waiting for affordable housing is stretching into the tens of thousands.
But projects like these are officially ineligible for a city policy requiring developers to give back to the public realm, because the condos wouldn't be publicly owned.
The Widmer Street initiative is in its nascent stage, emphasizes Neil Pattison, manager of development for Daniels Corp., the developer spearheading the project.
It still hasn't been determined how many units Habitat will get, or how big they will be, and the details won't be hammered out until well after excavation begins in July. It will be on a tiny scale - just one or two units out of several hundred.
The arrangement is one the city is trying to clone: Habitat will take out a second mortgage on the units in question, which Daniels is providing at cost, at about 80 per cent of market rate. That brings the price for residents down to about $120,000, which they pay back over 25 years. As they pay off their mortgage (which comes equipped with an "anti-flip" clause to prevent anyone from selling the unit for massive profit), Habitat puts that money into buying more, Mr. Hetherington said, "and it just keeps on going.
"It means we can have folks who are serving coffee at Tim Hortons be able to live close to their work.… When you change that financing, you remove the interest. You bring about hope and dignity."
As utopian as it seems, Mr. Hetherington says, it's vital that projects making homes financially accessible take place in the pricey downtown core. "Affordable housing can't be pushed out to the outskirts of the city," he said.
Daniels' Mr. Pattison said they originally tried to have the initiative count towards its obligations under Section 37, a provincial statute that requires developers to provide cash for community benefits in exchange for extra density or zoning changes from the city.
This usually translates to about $8 or $9 per square foot, and traditionally ranges from sidewalk improvements to parks and public squares. In the case of large-scale projects like these, it can total upwards of $1-million. But initiatives like what Habitat for Humanity is proposing don't qualify because the city doesn't own the properties in question.
"I can understand why the policy's there, but when you're trying to do some good on the ground, it's difficult," Mr. Pattison said.
Councillor Adam Vaughan, who hopes the Widmer Street development will be the centre of a "cultural corridor" in his Trinity-Spadina ward, said that red tape has to change. It was originally put in place to prevent a diminishing rental-housing stock from being converted into far more lucrative condominiums.
But it has the unintended opposite effect: It prevents developers from getting credit from the city for trying to make their condos accessible to those outside the ultra-elite.
"At some point you run out of sidewalks to build and parks to fix.… When [a site goes]from being a six-storey building to a 30-storey building, we need to find ways to take a slice of that and turn it into affordable housing," he said, adding that he hopes to change the city's policies to make it easier for third parties to facilitate cheaper places to live.