Kingston Social Housing department discovers Frontenac County

Jeff Green | May 24, 2012

On May 16, Lanie Hurdle, Commissioner of Community Services for the City of Kingston, and Housing Department Director Sheldon Laidman, gave a presentation to Frontenac County on social housing programs offered by the city, which is the consolidated service manager for housing programs for Frontenac County as well.

Hurdle described a continuum of housing needs, ranging from the extreme situation faced by people who make use of emergency shelters, to rent supplemented and affordable housing, up to the affordable home ownership program that has been recently launched.

Sheldon Laidman, who has only been working for the City for six months, has been involved in the development of a municipal housing strategy. Of the 40 recommendations for implementation of the strategy, Laidman said, “Thirteen are specific to the county.”

Some of those recommendations deal with improved co-ordination and communication between the city and the county, and others deal with streamlining planning to make it easier to improve the social housing stock in the county.

While the recommendations don’t carry any commitment for new money to county-based housing initiatives, they at least demonstrate that the county may be getting more attention from the city as far as housing and homelessness is concerned.

Unlike other services that the City of Kingston has been providing to residents of Frontenac County ever since municipal amalgamation took place in 1998, such as Ontario Works and Childcare, the housing needs of Frontenac County residents have not been high on the city’s agenda

It took several interventions by Frontenac County Council and staff to secure a county component to a recently completed homelessness study that the city undertook. Securing a position for a member of Frontenac County Council on the Kingston Housing and Homelessness sub-committee also required some lobbying of Kingston City Council, and only members of Kingston City Council and appointees who are Kingston residents are permitted to sit on the Board of Directors of the Kingston and Frontenac Housing Corporation.

John McDougall is the county council representative to the Housing and Homelessness Committee.

“I find that it is a lonely task sitting on the housing and homelessness committee. I wish another resident of the county was on the committee,” he said at last week’s meeting of Frontenac County Council.

The presentation by Hurdle and Laidman, who both are relatively new to their positions, demonstrated on at least one instance that the city is not completely up to speed on the realities of public housing and housing supports in Frontenac County.

As was pointed out by county council member John Purdon, the presentation included an inventory of social housing units in Frontenac County, coming up with a total of 161. However, 60 of those are at Country Pines in Glenburnie, which is located in the City of Kingston, and they are managed by Town Homes Kingston.

Within Frontenac County, there are 28 units at McMullen Manor in Verona; 55 units of seniors housing run by the Loughborough Housing Corporation in Sydenham (Maple Ridge and Meadowbrook); and 18 units in and around Sharbot Lake that are managed by the North Frontenac Not For Profit Housing Corporation, for a total of 101 units.

As to services in the county, Southern Frontenac Community Services manages both a rent bank and utility bank program to which all county residents may apply for emergency support.

While most of the proposed initiatives in the upcoming Investment in Affordable Housing Program are geared to new construction in the city, the Ontario Renovates program is going to be geared to low-income rural homeowners, and Sheldon Laidman said he anticipated that the majority of Ontario Renovated projects would be in the county.

In response to the presentation, Frontenac Islands Mayor Dennis Doyle asked why no projects have ever been located on Wolfe or Howe Island.

“I don’t think we’ve communicated very well to the general public,” said Laidman. “Construction for units is often done by individuals or community groups, not necessarily municipalities.”

Warden Janet Gutowski said that, “with a number of recommendations in the new housing strategy referencing the county, we are now on the right track going forward but we still have communication challenges.”