Agency overview | |
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Formed | 2002 |
Preceding agency |
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Jurisdiction | Toronto |
Headquarters | 931 Yonge Street, Toronto |
Employees | 1 400 |
Annual budget | $205.9 million (2011) |
Agency executives |
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Parent agency | City of Toronto |
Website | www |
Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) is a public housing agency in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the second-largest housing provider in North America, behind the New York City Housing Authority, with over 58,000 units of housing and an estimated 164,000 tenants. The agency owns more than 2200 buildings including high, mid, and low-rise apartments, townhomes and houses. It is an agency of the City of Toronto, funded by Toronto and the Government of Ontario. Tenants pay rent according to income, with some buildings having a mix of tenants paying market-level rents while others pay subsidized rates.
Through the latter half of the 20th century, prior to the amalgamation of Metropolitan Toronto in 1997, there were three municipally owned and operated affordable housing providers, each operated by differing levels of government under the former municipal federation of Metropolitan Toronto including Metro itself, the former City of Toronto, and the Government of Ontario. Of these included the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Company Ltd. and the City of Toronto Non Profit Housing Corporation, also known then as Cityhome. In 1998, as part of a sweeping re-organization of the provincial government under premier Mike Harris, housing was downloaded to local municipalities to administer. The Metropolitan Toronto Housing Corporation (MTHC) was formed to take over provincial public housing units in the municipality. The existing companies including Cityhome and the Metro municipal housing authorities were merged into the Toronto Housing Company (THC). The forced amalgamation of the federation of municipalities under Metropolitan Toronto including its affordable housing providers was also carried out with the forced downloading of operating and capital expenses for a number of public services including affordable housing. The then provincial government under rule by the Ontario PC Party under Harris promised that the downloading of expenses would be revenue neutral, which turned out to be not true, which contributed a great deal to the existing repair backlog now faced by city housing. In 2002, four years after the forced amalgamation of Toronto, MTHC merged with THC to form the new Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) to administer all public housing units within the merged City of Toronto.
As the dust settled on amalgamation, focus shifted to creating the then newly amalgamated city's first official plan, which included identifying key areas in need of revitalization. These became known as the priority neighbourhoods, leading to among other things the unveiling of the suburban light rail plan Transit City, and the early stages of planning for Toronto Community Housing first new development, the revitalization of Regent Park.