Currently we depend on two streams of funding for the acquisition of rental housing. One is municipal grants. One initial project was undertaken through section 37, which was funding received by the municipality through development bonusing. Now the City of Toronto has created the MURA program, which provides access to grant funding from the city, so we apply to that program now through a formal application.
In addition, last year in the absence of either a municipal, provincial or federal program, we raised investment from nine foundations—impact investors—who provided us short-term financing to acquire a building and get it off the market to ensure that we could preserve that affordable rental. Nonetheless, that impact investment really provides gap financing, not long-term funding or financing, so we need a government solution—a government program—to provide that support.
The other thing I'll say is that we did seek to put projects together through the RHI program and we had three unsuccessful applications partially due to the fact that RHI excluded the acquisition of rental housing unless that rental housing was fully vacant or dilapidated, which in our mind was really an ineffective qualification because in fact we want to buy the better buildings—the buildings that are tenantable, that are in good condition and that can provide good housing.
One of the things we hear a lot from naysayers of acquisition programs is that we need to produce housing that is vacant so that we can move people out of shelter into that home. What we find is that, because of the natural turnover in rental housing, we actually have access to a lot of housing. So in the time it would take to build a building—two to three years—we can actually have enough vacancy to produce that flow and bring people into housing at a rate similar to that for new construction projects. In fact, because those buildings are non-profit owned and linked to access plans from the City of Toronto's affordable housing wait-list, we provide ongoing access to housing, moving forward, as well for those in need.