Many municipalities across the country are facing affordable housing challenges. In Hamilton, this has been described as an “acute housing crisis” that requires a “whole of Hamilton” approach. A crucial player in this effort in Hamilton is CityHousing Hamilton, , the municipality’s housing provider which manages housing for more than 15,000 tenants and is the largest provider of affordable units in the city. 

In this episode of Vital Signs, guest host Sarah Matsushita welcomes Adam Sweedman (CEO) and Sean Botham (Chief Portfolio Officer) from CityHousing Hamilton to talk about new housing developments and how it has shifted to meet the challenge of today’s affordability crunch. 

Key quotes 

“We’ve focused on growth on existing stock but also strengthening our stock so that its sustainable.”  

“We’ve launched four buildings in the last two years, 264 units brought online, and we’ve done this across the city. Two of the sites were unutilized parking sites. Another site was an infamous motel that the city expropriated, and we’ve built two affordable housing buildings there.” 

“[Clearing the backlog] is something I’m really proud of. It’s much less expensive units to put existing units back online than to build new units…What we’ve heard in terms of feedback has been fantastic.” 

“At any given time CityHousingHamilton tries not to have more than 2% of units that are in a vacancy turnover process. Every month, 40-50 units become vacant because people move out or pass away.  If we can keep this ‘attritional vacancy’ to 2%, which is about 150 units, this is a more acceptable number, in line with the sector.” 

“The new strategy has a 20-year horizon but it has a near- and mid-term action plan and focuses on tangible actions for the next decade. We’ve built seven buildings over seven years, but the reality is we could be building a building every week. This plan raises the framework for how we actually scale. What we’re targeting first is 900 units over the next decade but with more supports, it could be multiples of that.” 

“The Tenant First team engages tenants from across the organization and different demographics, gives us feedback and helps us co-develop policies and procedures, identify priorities.” 

“The property manager role in our buildings was becoming stale and was increasingly asked to do a lot more with the same amount of resources. Our revamp divides the responsibilities across new refreshed roles… It deploys resources back to the front line. Tenants are going to see that there are more staff in their communities.”