Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be back.
My name is Michael Braithwaite, and I'm the CEO of Blue Door, an organization up in York Region that's been serving our community for about 40 years.
For the first 35 of those years, we were primarily focused on emergency housing, and over the last five, although we are still the largest provider of emergency housing in York Region, we have switched to providing some secondary housing, transitional housing and housing for specific groups like 2SLGBTQ+ youth. There was a need, and we filled that need through housing in the community.
We have switched our thinking. We've gone to more innovative thinking and have leveraged private donor funds to create sustainable, affordable rental housing for seniors, families and youth. We repurposed a vacant Parks Canada home. There are 44 of them in Rouge National Urban Park. We took one of the homes that was empty and in bad shape and turned it into a duplex, which will provide affordable housing for 30 years for two families.
With the funds from Reaching Home, we were able to buy a fourplex in Newmarket and work with partners to create long-term truly affordable housing for indigenous men, for women fleeing violence, for families at Blue Door and for single men and women looking for affordable housing.
We and our entire sector applaud the implementation of the housing accelerator fund and would make the following recommendations moving forward.
First, invest in and encourage community land trusts across the country. Purchasing land for land trusts and providing incentives for municipalities or developers to donate housing or property to land trusts can create truly affordable housing for years to come in many communities. We're in the process of doing that now, expanding an existing land trust from Toronto into York Region, with the help of the mayor of Newmarket, to create a land trust with funds from CMHC.
Second, provide funds to non-profits or charities with a focus on housing and homelessness to purchase existing rental housing. Mr. Pomeroy just presented to the group, and you know the statistic that for every purpose-built rental, we're losing 15 to the private sector. We need to get them into the hands of non-profits and charities like Blue Door. Recently, a nineplex in Aurora was up for sale, and it had very affordable rents that were way below market. There was a fear that it would go to the private sector and renovations would take place and we'd lose it to that sector because the funds weren't there.
Third, invest in programs like Blue Door's Construct program, a social enterprise that not only can help build the goal of hundreds of thousands of homes but will prevent homelessness by providing a living wage and meaningful work to youth, new Canadians and others across the country in the trades. Currently, there are over a dozen of these social enterprises operating across the country, with opportunities to create more moving forward.
Last, provide municipalities with the supports they need to create new zoning bylaws that might speed up the development of buildings and properties owned by faith communities willing to step up to create new affordable housing in this crisis. Right now in York Region, there are all sorts of faith communities with land and a willingness to do this, but some of the zoning pieces are a bit of a barrier getting in the way, so that could help create new housing quickly.
Thank you so much for listening, and thank you for your hard work and passion on this fund. We look forward to seeing it in action and look forward to your questions.