Canada Needs More Private Affordable Rooming House Rooms

There is a desperate need in our major cities for clean,affordable housing for singles. Today,while practically no private enterprise rooming house housing for singles is being built, the government is pouring millions into emergency shelters. In Edmonton not one new independent-living rooming house room has been built  in over five years, while hundreds of rooms have been torn down and not replaced. Nationally,thousands of singles are forced to live in emergency shelters,simply due to stortages in the first rung of affordable housing ladder" for the indendent person---a clean, affordrdable rooming house room. The number of rooming house rooms nationwide has declined to one third of the level found 20 years ago. At the same time,emergency shelters are now a "growth industry". A shortage of $ 300-per month, tenant-paid rooming house rooms has been balanced" by an increase in the number of $ 1000-to $ 2000-per-month,taxpayers paid  emergency shelter mat and bed spaces. One half of those in Edmonton's Herb Jamieson emergency shelter and Toronto's Seaton House emergency shelter are there simply because ther are not any $300-per-month rooms available and the homeless funders with $780 million of taxpayer money will not help.

Non-profits,with multiple government grants and tax-free staus, compete unfairly through costly, so-called transitional,fully self-contained bachelor apartments at less than private rooming house rental rates. This distorts the market and creates unrealistic expectations with line-ups for the very few bargain-pricedsocial apartments.

With $50 million for homeless housing, the Edmonton Housing Trust Fund refuses  assistance to new rooming house providers because the owners are not non-profit agencies.

  This infomation is by Peter Goldring MP