The
Year in Review

Social Planning Toronto

As we come to the end of 2021, our team wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on our work this past year. Through this “year in review,” we reflect back to you some major collective wins that we have worked with many of you to achieve and note the significant work that still lies ahead.

I joined SPT as the new Executive Director at the end of May, but my colleagues and many of you — our co-conspirators in the fight for social and economic justice — have done a tremendous job shining a light on inequities since the beginning of this full-on pandemic year. We have shared just-in-time, accessible, and community-centred research and analysis to better enable all of us to make the case for stronger, more equitable policies and decisions. We have helped increase skills and capacity across the city amongst those who are continuing to build stronger, healthier, more caring, resilient, and safer local communities. And we have helped create pathways for greater dialogue, engagement, and a more democratic city. Below, we provide some details on some of these pieces of work SPT has been a part of.

We are entering 2022 weary, isolated, and overwhelmed by the ongoing pandemic and the enormity of the task of recovery, reimagining, and reconciliation ahead of us. What can I say to you about the road ahead and the work of Social Planning Toronto?

With great humility and a desire to continue to learn and grow with all of you, this is what I have to offer: We cannot stop here and be complacent with small tweaks and changes here and there. This is the time to break open all that we believed was possible and push the boundaries of what we can achieve together to realize a better Toronto, a better world. The city and its residents deserve better, and SPT is ready to rise to the challenge of this very unique moment in time when crisis is the norm and the opportunity for real change is in reach.

In the coming year, as our staff, board, and partners get clear on our strategic priorities, we hope to make significant gains on a number of fronts, including but not limited to:

  • Enabling the space for cross-stakeholder collaborative dialogue and action to advance a just and equitable recovery plan for Toronto — partnering with United Way Greater Toronto, the partners in the Community Coordination Plan, and many others
  • Finding ways to further advance new and better solutions and alternatives to unjust economic and social systems — enabling more equal distribution of wealth, resources, power, and social capital
  • Furthering the democracy of our city, enabling historically/currently excluded residents and stakeholders across the city to have greater say in shaping a better Toronto, building upon the tremendous strengths and assets in communities
  • Continuing to use research and data to shed light on how poverty and inequality are experienced across the city across intersections of gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, status, religion, and geography, and connecting that to meaningful and measurable actions and outcomes
  • Embedding truth, reconciliation, and Indigenous rights to self-determination into every aspect of our work, including being guided by Indigenous wisdom and voices, and
  • Working in coalition with others to get concrete and specific about the investments and funding needed to create the Toronto we know we need and deserve, and to organize ourselves to ensure they are in place for communities, community organizations/groups, the City of Toronto, and other key institutions.

In solidarity,

Jin Huh, Executive Director

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We were proud this year to unveil our new vision, mission, and values. The Board of Directors and staff worked on these for months, trying to capture in writing our essence and why we exist.

Vision

An equitable, inclusive, and accessible Toronto — shaped by the diversity of its residents and rooted in social and economic justice.

Mission

Social Planning Toronto challenges inequity in our city — through knowledge generation, debate, civic engagement, advocacy, and collaboration — to spark social and policy change.

Values

  • We are committed to equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism.
  • We respect the rights, knowledge, protocols, and traditions of Indigenous peoples.
  • We are independent and non-partisan.
  • We are stronger through our work with partners.
  • We are accountable to the community.
  • We ground our work in the lived experiences and expertise of local communities.
  • We are persistent and proactive, recognizing change is often a long process.
  • We value evidence-based decision making.

These words must of course be translated into action. We will be using this new mission and vision to guide important decisions and will hold ourselves accountable to each of our eight values. As part of the membership renewal process this year, we asked our organizational members to indicate their support of our mission and vision and to commit to our values.

We hope these words resonate with you too.


Housing was a big newsmaker this year, and an area of great concern and focus for us. There were some big windows of opportunity for the City of Toronto to significantly advance affordable housing and meet its own commitments to treat housing as a human right. While some gains were made, we fell short in many ways. From encampment clearings led by police using excessive force to a generation-long wait for affordable housing to the lack of political will to legalize rooming houses across the city, our City Council has shown a lack of leadership and commitment to centering residents in addressing the immense housing crisis facing our City.

After the City of Toronto undertook forced evictions of homeless people from two encampments — clearing part of Lamport Stadium park on May 19,  and Trinity Bellwoods Park on June 22 — the Toronto Drop-In Network drafted “A Path Forward,” a letter demanding a compassionate, human rights–compliant approach to unhoused people and encampments. We were among more than 200 organizations and community/creative leaders who signed it.

Calling the letter “unwelcome,” Mayor John Tory refused to add A Path Forward to the agenda for the July 14 Council meeting so that its recommendations could be adopted. The City cleared  Alexandra Park on July 20. The next day  they went back to Lamport Stadium park to fully clear the encampment there, where things got completely out of hand. But the violence generated a huge groundswell of outrage and pressure  to end the clearings.

A Toronto Police Service investigation found one officer used unnecessary force while arresting a Lamport Stadium protester. Toronto’s ombudsman has launched an investigation into the clearings. The City spent nearly $2 million on them. And data from the City itself showed that only 9% of encampment occupants who accepted shelter spaces during the pandemic moved into either temporary or permanent homes.

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Meanwhile, an analysis of a City housing portal by The Toronto Star found social housing waits as long as 36 years for some buildings. Is it any wonder people pitch tents in parks?


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Toronto City Council also deferred — at both its July and October meetings — a vote on a new city-wide framework to regulate multi-tenant houses (a.k.a. rooming houses) to make them legal in residential neighbourhoods across the city and ensure that they are licensed and safe. Bylaws governing this deeply affordable housing have not been updated since amalgamation in 1998.

Senior community planner Israt Ahmed has been working on the rooming house issue with partners across the city and in particular in Scarborough (Power In Community, Open Policy, Voices Of Scarborough) for a decade and a half. Their efforts — bringing rooming house operators and owners into City consultations, enabling rooming house tenants to depute, writing Op-Eds and convening media events, advocating with Councillors and training community groups and residents to do the same, writing to decision-makers, and petitioning — created the momentum to push the City to develop its new framework.

Although Mayor Tory supports the framework, he did not or could not push Council to pass the new bylaw. Despite the fact that Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Ena Chadha reminded Council that “Municipal regulation must not directly or indirectly keep certain groups of people out of neighbourhoods,” some members of Tory’s Executive Committee and even some progressive councillors opposed it. Knowing he didn’t have the votes to win, Tory moved to defer the item.

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Fortunately it was not all doom and gloom on the housing front.

In November, thanks to the collective efforts of residents, community groups, and supportive City Council members, Toronto became the first city in Ontario to implement inclusionary zoning (IZ).

Despite its boring name and its limitations, IZ has the potential, as our Opportunity Knocks research report showed, to create thousands of new affordable rental units in our city every year by requiring a percentage of most new residential high-rise developments be set aside for affordable housing.

Social Planning Toronto joined ACORN, Progress Toronto, Parkdale People’s Economy, and advocates across the city to call for an IZ policy that required 20–30% affordable housing. Cities including New York, London, and Montreal already have IZ requirements ranging from 25–50% depending on neighbourhood.

But we were up against a powerful development lobby. Council adopted very low set aside rates: 5–10% for affordable rental and 7-10% for affordable ownership. The rates start rising in 2025, but even the fully phased-in rates, to be implemented in 2030 (8-16% affordable rental and 11-22% affordable ownership), are still much lower than the City’s own commissioned studies showed are feasible now.

Furthermore, without much higher percentage requirements on affordable ownership units, developers may prioritize creating affordable ownership units over affordable rental units. Under provincial law, developers can fulfill their IZ requirements by creating either affordable ownership or affordable rental housing. Over the past decade, for every 9 condo units completed, only 1 purpose-built rental unit was completed.

Although the policy as passed is weaker than community advocated for, it’s a start, and it will be reviewed in a year. The final policy includes a deeper definition of affordable housing based on a percentage of the income of renter households and a requirement to maintain affordability for 99 years. And despite strong lobbying from the development industry, developers will not receive public funds to build this affordable housing.

The one-year review will provide an opportunity to organize and advocate for a stronger policy, i.e., one that has higher percentage requirements, prioritizes the creation of affordable rental housing, and expands IZ to other areas of the city. The Province restricted IZ to Protected Major Transit Station Areas (most subway, LRT, and GO stations) and the City further restricted it to areas where market conditions were sufficient to support IZ requirements. This leaves many low-income communities behind, including Little Jamaica, where a new LRT line promises to bring considerable new development.

The development lobby will no doubt redouble their efforts to weaken the policy to benefit financially from it. Amidst a decades-long housing crisis, we must fight for public policy that prioritizes people over developer profits.

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More good housing news came out of our November 2020 report, Spaces and Places of Exclusion: Mapping Rental Housing Disparities for Toronto’s Racialized and Immigrant Communities, which detailed Toronto’s significant problem of overcrowding in rental housing and its deep racial, social, and spatial inequities.

In January, York South–Weston MPP Faisal Hassan was motivated by our report to introduce Bill 252, Housing is a Human Right Act. If passed, this private Member’s bill would have created mechanisms to hold the Province accountable to its 2018 commitment to recognize housing as a human right.

Unfortunately, Bill 252 was struck down at its second reading at Queen’s Park. 

In June, in response to a City Planning report called Right-Sizing Housing and Generational Turnover, we and our research partners Dr. Luann Good Gingrich (York University) and Dr. Naomi Lightman (University of Calgary) drew on the findings of the Spaces and Places of Exclusion report to call on the City to address the problem.

After our deputation at the June Planning and Housing Committee, Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam moved a motion that was unanimously supported by the committee (and did not require a Council vote). Watch for a staff report in the first quarter of 2022 on existing policies and policy options to:

  • address overcrowding in rental housing;
  • create affordable rental housing stock of 3 bedrooms or more to accommodate larger families and households; and
  • address underhousing in Indigenous and racialized individuals as well as women and single-parent led, immigrant and refugee households.

The staff report will also include a jurisdictional scan to understand how the issue is being addressed by other municipalities, including with equity-seeking populations, and data on instances of underhousing and overhousing in Indigenous and racialized individuals as well as women and single-parent led, immigrant and refugee households.

We’ll keep you up to date on this and other housing policy news, with details on how you can advocate for housing as a human right.

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We made clear during budget season that while the City should continue to advocate for more support from higher levels of government to address pandemic-fuelled shortfalls, we continued to shed light on the fact that our city has had longstanding funding issues. It relies too heavily on status quo property taxes and user fees. Years of chronic under-investment in community infrastructure and social supports have left gaping needs — in crisis services, child care, and more. We’ve been advocating for a long time — and will continue to — that the City should expand its revenue sources.

In December 2020 Council approved a Vacant Home Tax, to come into effect January 1, 2022. A staff report submitted to Mayor Tory’s Executive Committee estimated 9,000 to 27,000 vacant houses in the city — enough to house every person in a shelter and encampment.

A year later, the Executive Committee has recommended that Council allocate tax revenues towards affordable housing initiatives (Council will consider the item at its December 15 meeting).

Anyone who can afford to leave a home vacant while thousands are unhoused should pay a hefty price for that privilege. But despite pressure from community for a 3% tax — proven effective in Vancouver — Council approved only 1% of Current Value Assessment when it set the rate for the new tax at its July 2021 meeting. No one moved to increase the tax to a higher rate. Councillor Ana Bailão moved that staff report by the end of 2023 on how the tax is working and whether it should be increased. If 1% proves too low to pressure speculators to put vacant properties on the rental market — as was the case in Vancouver — let’s hope that Council can be convinced to triple it to 3% by 2024.

But a Vacant Home Tax is just one tool in a toolbox of taxation powers defined in the City of Toronto Act (2006). In the lead-up to the 2021 budget, we continued to push for more City revenue opportunities — including a commercial parking levy that could earn the City of Toronto nearly $500 million per year, increasing property tax rates above the rate of inflation, restoring the vehicle registration Tax, and increasing the Municipal Land Transfer Tax (MLTT) on luxury homes.

Torontonians were depending on Council for investment in services, programs, and infrastructure to not only address their immediate health and survival needs during the pandemic, but also to begin our city’s recovery from it.

The draft 2021 budget failed to respond to the dire emergency impacting communities across our city as the pandemic ground on and threatened to set the city back a decade by gutting an already under-resourced capital budget to address shortfalls. In response, we organized 50+ community organizations to submit an open letter to Mayor John Tory and Council urging them to focus the budget on inequality, move resources to where they were most needed, and develop a budget that addressed the urgent, unmet needs of residents.

We reminded Council of the 10 principles for a bold, green, and just recovery that we submitted in April 2020, and of the vision articulated by thousands of residents and organizations who took part in the 2020 Toronto Office of Recovery and Rebuild’s consultation process. The 2021 budget summary all but ignored both.

When Council passed the 2021 City budget, it had made few changes to the original staff-recommended (draft) budget.

Besides our usual budget advocacy — including working with communities to increase understanding of the budget and publishing our City Budget Watch blog — we also tried something new for this first COVID budget: a People’s Budget Platform.

During the pandemic, the City’s deputation process only allowed residents to make verbal deputations using a digital device or phone. Council members couldn’t even see the speakers.

As an alternative, we piloted a People’s Budget Platform on Zoom so residents could share their ideas and hopes for a bolder, more equitable 2021 City Budget face-to-face with each other.

We were thrilled that all but one of the participants made their first-ever deputations to the Budget Committee. A summary of participants’ budget requests was also shared with the Budget Committee and Mayor John Tory’s office.

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Sparked by the Toronto Transit Commission’s development of a 5-Year Fare Policy and 10-Year Fare Collection Outlook in partnership with York Region Transit (YRT), SPT examined one of the fare options under consideration — distance-based transit fares within the city of Toronto.

Our equity analysis showed that implementing distance-based fares within Toronto would negatively impact working-age people in the inner suburbs, who are largely racialized and immigrant residents. We recommended that the TTC Board eliminate the fare-by-distance option from consideration and ensure that, if any regional zone system is implemented, only one fare is required to travel within the City of Toronto.

The TTC Board’s debate on a staff report on fare options has been delayed until its February 2022 meeting. This is a great opportunity for residents and groups to speak up in support of building a more equitable transit system. We’ll be deputing based on our analysis.

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In February our senior researcher, Beth Wilson, and community planner Saroja Ponnambalam spoke to Global News about  the city’s affordable housing crisis and fear of eviction among racialized communities.

Racialized communities disproportionately experience overcrowded housing, compared to non-racialized communities. That combined with fear of losing jobs and housing — both already precarious — has made these communities disproportionately vulnerable to COVID-19.

Also in February, our 2018 report Talking Access & Equity: A Profile of City of Toronto Residents Who Speak Neither Official Language was used to call for greater language supports in Toronto’s vaccine rollout. CTV news picked up on a tweet from University Health Network’s Tai Huyhn about this, giving us a chance to advocate for more accessible and inclusive communication in order to increase vaccine trust in vulnerable communities.

And throughout the year, we coordinated a series of trainings and peer-to-peer support sessions for a few hundred Toronto Community Ambassadors conducting vaccination outreach in diverse neighbourhoods across Toronto as part of the City-supported Vaccine Engagement Teams initiative. The resident ambassadors played a critical role in supporting other residents to overcome barriers to getting vaccinated and in addressing vaccine hesitancy and have become an important element of our city’s public health infrastructure.

Each training session was attended by more than 100 ambassadors. As one participant stated about the trainings,

Watch the video below to hear more Community Ambassadors share why they got involved in this crucial part of the City of Toronto’s vaccination outreach strategy.

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SPT has helped hundreds of residents strengthen their communities by hosting trainings and development workshops for recipients of Neighbourhood Grants. This City of Toronto program allows resident leaders, grassroots groups, and resident-led groups to make changes they want to see in their communities by planning events and taking action with their neighbours.

Obviously, the pandemic meant that grant recipients had to cancel events planned for 2020. But since September 2020 and over the past several months, we’ve been working with grantees to support them in turning their in-real-life ideas into online events, and offering specialized training (e.g., Zoom, planning online events, and making online spaces engaging) to ensure their success.

In 2021 we offered 28 trainings to Neighbourhood Grants recipients on topics including rapid response to mental health crises, Zoom, anti-Black racism, City Hall, Indigenous cultural competency, and more. In the film below, participants talk about the impact the trainings had on their community work.

We also partnered this year with the City of Toronto’s Community Crisis Response Program (CCRP) on a pilot to work with local safety networks to enhance supports for vulnerable Torontonians impacted by violent and traumatic incidents related to shootings, stabbings, community conflict, gun/gang related activity, and raids in their communities.

The Safety Network Development Pilot is focused on enhancing community capacity to support local leadership and mobilization around community violence. SPT’s role has been to help build the capacity of CCRP-supported safety networks through a trauma-informed, culturally appropriate lens. These community-based networks — each comprising local agencies, residents, youth, and other stakeholders — not only support communities to heal after violent incidents but also proactively identify local safety and wellness priorities and develop responses to them.

Over the summer and fall of 2021, SPT delivered a series of workshops covering 10 topics, including resident leadership, media communications, conflict resolution and mediation, anti-oppression, and network sustainability. The pilot has engaged over 380 participants in the workshops and has provided funds for safety networks to develop local safety projects and support resident leadership roles.

The pilot wrapped up with a year-end event on December 8 that brought safety networks across the city together to collectively reflect on strengths, opportunities, and aspirations in building strong and sustainable safety networks.

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The pandemic has highlighted how critical public spaces are to community wellbeing and should be available for use by residents. In Ontario, our schools are one of the most abundant sources of public space.

As school boards gradually allow communities use of their facilities again (while following provincial and local public health unit requirements), it is critical that we prioritize community use of schools in the re-opening and re-building process. In mid-November the SPACE Coalition released a briefing note and recommendations. SPT is an active member of the coalition and enthusiastically endorsed Maximizing Community Use of School Space: Preparing for A New Normal, along with partners at YMCA Ontario, GBC Canada, and the Community Sports Councils of Ontario.

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In a complex environment like the Downtown East, communication between different sectors and stakeholders is vital to ensuring a common understanding of trends and community needs, and to enabling coordinated action. Through the Downtown East 2023 Action Plan, the City of Toronto set out to intentionally foster collaboration amongst diverse partners, including City Divisions, local service providers, institutions, businesses, residents, and other community members.

Throughout 2021, Social Planning Toronto worked with the City’s Social Development, Finance & Administration division to assess current levels of trust and collaboration and to identify how the Downtown East Action Plan can better support trust and collaboration going forward. This evaluation research, which will inform the City’s future work in this area, emphasized the time, resources, and commitment needed to build and maintain trusted relationships — a helpful reminder for all of us working in the nonprofit sector.

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A new planning process is underway to develop hundreds of acres of lands in the Downsview area over the next 30 years. Led by the Canada Lands Company, Northcrest Developments, and CreateTO, the development project will see the Downsview Parklands transformed into a 520-acre, mixed-use neighbourhood featuring new housing, retail, commercial, institutional, and community uses (including a Netflix film studio). This massive development — roughly the size of Toronto’s downtown core — is likely the largest in North America.

The Toronto Community Benefits Network (TCBN) is leading a campaign for community benefits agreements (CBAs) in the development, ensuring the community benefits from these new infrastructure projects.

SPT is working with TCBN to host community information and engagement sessions to keep the people of Downsview Park and surrounding communities informed and to create a shared vision for a community benefits framework. We are also part of a Community Resource Group that is advising developers on equity considerations.

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We were saddened to learn of the passing on June 6 of Liane Regendanz, former Executive Director of St. Stephen’s Community House and 2012 Frances Lankin Award recipient.

Ten years ago, John Campey, SPT’s Executive Director at the time, founded the annual Frances Lankin Award to honour Frances Lankin on her retirement from United Way Toronto. Over the past decade the Award has recognized nonprofit leaders, both long-time and emerging.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Frances Lankin Award, we created a website looking back at all of the remarkable recipients and recognized new award recipients for 2021.

On October 5, we supported the Toronto Nonprofit Network in celebrating our sector’s critical role in responding to the pandemic on Toronto’s second Not-for-Profit Recognition Day.

While many nonprofit organizations have provided necessary and life-saving support to residents across our city throughout the pandemic, this year’s Not-for-Profit Recognition Day included special recognition of grassroots (volunteer-led) organizations, collectives, and community groups, who have been at the forefront, serving their communities and supporting clients.

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Early in the year we joined Toronto Neighbourhood Centres, Black Lives Matter Toronto, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and 19 other anti-racist and civil liberty groups to call for a better response model for 911 calls dealing with homelessness, mental health, gender-based violence, and youth crime.

In a report titled “Rethinking Community Safety: A way forward for Toronto,” our coalition suggested that community-driven interventions in such cases would lead to better outcomes for marginalized communities and reduce police spending by 25%.

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We also released a statement condemning anti-Asian hate, gender-based violence, and the marginalization of migrant sex workers after the Atlanta, Georgia, spa murders on March 26, 2021. Sadly, Anti-Asian hate crimes have surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, and our own city accounted for about a quarter of the more than 600 incidents reported nationally between March 10 and December 31, 2020.

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We all know that many of the people most at risk of COVID-19 are working in jobs without paid sick leave and basic employment supports. As part of the Faith in the City coalition, SPT helped prepare a letter to the Premier demanding paid sick leave for Ontario workers and gathered signatures from 120 multi-faith leaders. Although the Province introduced a three-day paid sick leave program in late April, the program is set to expire on Dec. 31.

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The Canadian House of Commons by Scazon, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. 

Although our focus is the City of Toronto, Federal and Provincial decisions have very local implications.

In April, we analyzed the 2021 federal budget to break down what its investments in nine issue areas (childcare, seniors and long-term care, affordable housing, wages, income supports, nonprofits and charities, Black and Indigenous communities, and youth) meant for local residents and community organizations.

Canada’s 44th Federal Election took place in September. To support voters’ decision-making we took a look at parties’ commitments around affordable housing, child care, income security and decent work, truth and reconciliation, and racial justice.

We also joined the Canadian Vote Coalition, the only non-partisan voter engagement campaign in Canadian history, and endorsed the Vote Housing campaign, a national non-partisan campaign to end homelessness and make housing safe and affordable in Canada.

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In a pre-budget submission we called on the Province to address the disparities exacerbated by the pandemic and to prioritize communities and nonprofits. When the Province released its 2021 budget in March, we took a look at the good news and the bad for Toronto residents, communities, and nonprofits from this second provincial pandemic budget.

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