More than 1,100 households applied for wait-list under this priority in 2022, up from 360 in 2017
VICTORIA GIBSON
AFFORDABLE HOUSING REPORTER
Domestic violence, abuse and human trafficking are pushing an increasing number of Torontonians to apply for refuge in the city’s publicly funded housing, new data shows.
In the past five years, the number of new applicants to Toronto’s subsidized housing wait-list given priority as victims of such violence has jumped by a whopping 208 per cent — with 360 households added to the list with this priority in 2017, rising to 1,109 households in 2022.
While pressure from these priority cases rose gradually at first, numbers spiked faster during COVID-19 — as social service workers told the Star that pandemic-related isolation and job losses intensified already-volatile living situations, and impacted people’s financial abilities to flee. While that growth eased slightly in 2021, it jumped again in 2022.
This year is on track for similar highs, with 570 such households added to the housing queue in the first half of 2023. The list is growing faster than it can be cut down, as city data shows 757 households with this priority accessed housing last year.
“That rate of rise in the need for priority housing access for domestic violence, relatively to the need for housing overall, is staggering and deeply saddening,” said Shezeen Suleman, a longtime midwife at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre who has witnessed a soaring number of her patients living through violence in recent years.
She sees a number of risk factors for violence as getting worse, from financial hardship to substance use. Taken together, she said, “this is often where the path leads, and it’s indeed heartbreaking.”
While both men and women can fall victim to domestic violence, she said women were disproportionately weathering this kind of abuse, with housing one of the biggest hurdles to escaping it.
“Finding a place to land in order to seek safety, where their assailant won’t find out where they are, for fear of retribution, is so vital,” she said, noting emergency housing can be life saving.
“This is most particularly true for those who would otherwise be dependent on their assailants financially.”
The priority queue for survivors of domestic violence, abuse and trafficking is mandated by law, and is one of several priority streams for subsidized housing in Toronto. Applications can also be fast-tracked if someone is terminally ill, chronically homeless, or under 25 years of age, among a number of other priority situations.
Without priority status, the city warns applicants — who must fall under a certain income level — that the average wait for a studio is 10 years, or eight years for seniors, with that average rising to 14 years for a one-bedroom, 13 years for a two-bedroom, and 15 years for anything with three or more bedrooms. As reported by the Star, some buildings see far less turnover, with the expected wait times for one-bedrooms in several buildings hitting 37 years in 2022.
Nina Gorka, who heads up shelters and clinical services for YWCA Toronto, wasn’t shocked by the rising number of priority cases. “It’s exactly as we predicted would happen.”
The YWCA’s two shelters for women fleeing violence were at capacity as she spoke with the Star on Tuesday, as were their emergency sites, she said. Accessing affordable homes was so difficult that people were staying in their shelters longer than ever, some for upwards of a year.
She also pointed to the rising number of women and girls losing their lives to gender-based violence.
This month, the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses raised alarm, saying 30 women and girls provincewide had been killed in the preceding 30 weeks, the youngest being just nine years old and the oldest being 90. Based on news reporting, it said 30 per cent of the accused perpetrators were said to be a current or former intimate partner, 23.3 per cent to be a male family member, and 20 per cent to be otherwise known to the victim.
“These are high numbers for us, and that tells us that, within the week, another person, another woman will be killed through intimate partner violence,” Gorka said.
Creating an exit strategy — especially if someone has children in tow — means not only finding housing far enough from their old home, but also making sure they have access to supports such as child care, she said.
As pressure rises, both Suleman and Gorka see new investments in affordable housing and other supports as critical.
“Housing has become increasingly unaffordable over the years and people’s incomes have not kept pace,” Suleman said. “For people to have the tools to rebuild for themselves and for their children necessitates that we commit ourselves as a city to creative, cross-sectoral thinking and … expanding housing access.”
Though Gorka has seen the rising toll of violence first-hand in Toronto, she remains hopeful about its future — noting she and other community workers stressed the depth of need to then-incoming mayor Olivia Chow during a transition meeting this past week.
But the problem required multiple levels of government to step up with new investments, she said — from more mental health care to better-paying jobs, better access to legal supports and more accessible child care.
“This is an octopus with many legs,” she told the Star. And at the heart of that need, for someone fleeing violence, is simply a place to land.
“We can’t do it without housing.”