United Way Perth-Huron launches new housing awareness campaign

The United Way Perth-Huron has launched a new campaign to bring greater awareness to the growing housing crisis in the region.

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Dubbed “Speak Up for Housing,” the non-profit’s campaign involves sharing stories from residents across the region who are facing challenges with paying for housing. The stories come from the more than 800 responses received by the agency while its SSocial Research and Planning Council conducted a cost-of-housing survey earlier this year.

The campaign is being used to highlight that housing affordability has become a community-wide issue impacting people from all walks of life, said the agency’s director of social research and planning, Kristin Crane.

“It’s not a very small portion of the population that’s being impacted,” she said. “It really is virtually everyone.

“You have young kids in families where there’s just less money for everything else because rent or housing is taking up so much of their household income, all the way to seniors who might be living on a fixed income and can no longer afford things because housing (takes) such a large share of it, or whose plans for retirement continue to be delayed.”

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Some survey respondents included two-income families that still couldn’t afford to stay in their communities and even teachers who were struggling to afford their rent, Crane said. Some residents, she noted, have begun to turn to non-conventional forms of housing.

“We even heard really incredibly challenging stories that people had where they’re essentially experiencing homelessness now – people who are having to live in non-winterized storage-type units or leisure vehicles that have become their home because there’s nothing else that they can afford,” she said.

These stories reflect the stark reality of the housing crisis in the Perth and Huron region, where wages generally have not kept pace with the ever-rising costs of housing. According to statistics provided by the United Way for 2018 to 2022,

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• Housing prices have increased 104 percent;
• Rents have increased 88 percent; aim
• Wages have only increased 19 percent.

United Way officials say 62 per cent of Perth-Huron households cannot afford the benchmark single-family home while one in four households cannot afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment at the 2023 asking prices. The data shows that no single level of government or organization should receive all of the blame for the crisis, Crane added.

“It’s something that we’re all facing together,” she said.

As part of its new campaign, the United Way has also laid out a number of ongoing or potential projects that could help alleviate some of these housing pressures, such as its own United Housing project or Perth County’s new official plan, which the non-profit characterizes as a “is a major opportunity to prioritize housing affordability.”

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However, there is still a gap between what is being worked on and what needs to be done, Crane said. As United Way officials noted, the federal government stopped funding community housing in the 1990s before starting to make significant investments again in 2017 through the National Housing Strategy.

“It’s been a lot of years of not keeping pace with population demand, and it’s kind of just hit us with full force right now, and the magnitude of the problem is really significant,” Crane added.

The campaign is also encouraging residents to get informed on what each level of government is responsible for and to express support for housing projects to their political representatives.

“Oftentimes, it’s the negative voices that are the ones that draw attention, or might be the loudest, but there’s a lot of people who support projects. There’s a lot of people who hadn’t really thought about it before, and now we’re asking them to think about it and think about how they can support us,” Crane said.

More information on the Speak Up for Housing campaign be found at perthhuron.unitedway.ca/speakupforhousing.

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