Sudbury city council wants to create new housing supply strategy to tackle affordability, availability

Sudbury city council voted unanimously on Tuesday to develop a new housing supply strategy to tackle the city's housing availability and affordability problem. 

Council directed staff to return by the end of the year with recommendations ranging from the feasibility of converting city-owned land to create more housing, to establishing more affordable rental opportunities and rent-to-own models, to increasing the availability of student housing. 

The city is experiencing historic low vacancy rates, which has greatly affected low-income families, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's (CMHC) 2023 annual report. 

In Greater Sudbury, the vacancy rate is holding at its 10-year low of 2.3 per cent. That's as an average two-bedroom unit in the city costs $1,254 per month.

If you have no beds then you can't stop people from trying to put a roof over themselves.— Sudbury Mayor Paul Lefebvre

The new strategy also comes on the heels of a recent court decision out of southern Ontario that could change how municipalities address homeless encampments. An Ontario judge recently blocked the Waterloo Region from evicting those living in an encampment in downtown Kitchener, because local shelters didn't have room for everyone. 

It's a decision that many experts, including Carol Kauppi, director of the Centre for Research in Social Justice and Policy at Laurentian University, say could set a precedent. 

"I think that's very important and relevant to Sudbury because it's my opinion that Sudbury doesn't have enough accommodations for people living with homelessness," Kauppi told CBC News. 

"It is a very important ruling," she said. 

Sudbury Mayor Paul Lefebvre says the decision in Waterloo Region underscores a city's responsibility to provide enough shelter for its unhoused population.

"It's incumbent upon us to to make sure that there is a shelter, that there is a space, that there is a bed available," Lefebvre said, "that's what the decision is saying."

"We have to have an option B, or C, or D, so if that [shelter] is full ... we never get to a spot where encampments are O.K.," said Lefebvre. 

"If you have no beds then you can't stop people from trying to put a roof over themselves," he said. 

Kauppi, along with city councillors from cities like Sault Ste. Marie and North Bay have pointed to housing affordability and availability as the crux of the encampment issue. 

Lefebvre said so far, this winter the city's shelters have had enough capacity to provide accommodations to all who have sought shelter. 

He said the city is working to complete a 40-unit transitional housing complex by the end of the summer to help address the city's homelessness issue.