Three apartment buildings will rise on a townhouse site where the first new public housing in 50 years will be built in London, a city desperate for housing as soaring rents grow unattainable for many.
London and Middlesex Community Housing (LMCH), the city-owned public housing agency, plans to demolish more than a dozen townhouses at a south-end site it already owns to make room for the new project that will include 167 apartments.
“This is the first time in 50 years that we’re building new social housing in the LMCH housing portfolio in the Ccity of londonand that is the most important piece of the whole story. New units are coming,” Ward 2 Coun. Shawn Lewis said.
He previously chaired the LMCH board and continues to serve on it.
“Both as a counselor and as a board member, I’m retherely exthisted by this application and I’m very exthisyou by the plan,” Lewis said. “When we talk about intensiveatiwethat includes on our socithere housing properties.”
Most apartments in the trio of new six-storey buildings will be two- and three-bedroom units, suitable for families already living in the townhome complex or others needing a place to call home, with a few one-bedroom and four-bedroom units in the mix.
“We’re really excited, the team at LMCH, just to sort of finalize the vision for what Southdale will look like in the future,” chief executive Paul Chisholm said.
The rezoning application eventually will land at city council for approval, and Chisholm said the team hopes to have approval in the spring, with plans to start demolition and breaking ground on the first building by the end of 2023.
Eighteen townhouses will be razed, and those tenants will move into apartments, paying the same rent. The first phase – the first of three six-storey buildings – will include 53 units, so an extra 35 homes compared to what’s available on the site now. It’s the same kind of “inward and upward” growth London city hall and council has pushed to curb costly urban sprawl and make better use of city services and tax dollars.
Community rooms and office space will be available on the ground floor for tenants and other London agencies
Chisholm said the second and third buildings will be built within five years, depending on when funding is available. City council earmarked $5.2 million in its multi-year budget to start the redevelopment called Reimagine Southdale.
With nearly 6,000 households on the waiting list for public housing and rents across London up 33 per cent in the last year, the housing crisis is hitting more Londoners than ever before. The wait for public housing can be as long as a decade.
The new units will be a mix of rent-geared-to-income and some at “affordable” rents. That can mean anything from 30 per cent of a person’s income to as much as 70 or 80 per cent of the average market rents across the rest of the city. LMCH tenants currently pay an average of $310 a month, slightly more for townhome units.
About one-fifth will be accessible.
Chisholm said the goal is to include both market rent as well as rent-geared-to-income units in its new buildings.
“There are all kinds of equations that go into what those rents are, but we definitely want to make them affordable,” he said.