I’m not sure I’ve put in the requisite 10,000 hours that would formalize my status as an expert on Guelph city council, but I can imagine that for 95 per cent of the people reading this I’ve sat through more city council meetings than you.
So believe me when I say, I’m not entirely sure what council did on the subject of tiny homes this week.
Let’s look at the motions one by one. The first approved the idea of a structured encampment pilot in principle and respectfully asked the County of Wellington to look at how the model might fit into their housing continuum. Fine, but the reaction from county staff and councillors to this proposal has so far been lukewarm at best.
Skipping over the second recommendation for a minute, which was almost as long as the other four combined, they also approved sending a copy of the report to the Joint Social Services Committee, requested that the committee refer any estimated costs for homelessness this winter to Guelph council, and requested that the federal government cough up some of that federal money for homelessness promised in March.
As for that second recommendation, it directed staff to “continue working to identify the potential for city owned lands to be used for the development of temporary or permanent housing, or to review other non-owned city lands that come forward for consideration, and report back as required by Q1 2025 as part of the planned city-wide land inventory evaluation, while taking under consideration the upcoming County of Wellington Homelessness Winter Response Plan, the opening of the Delhi Street Supportive Housing units, and additional shelter and transitional housing units contained within the Gordon Street Stepping Stone renovations.”
So what happens now? Your guess is as good as mine, and theirs by the looks of it.
Let’s take it piece by piece. Staff will continue looking for land for housing, both land owned by the city and land not owned by the city, which is a project that was already underway as part of a different Strong Mayor directive. No where is staff directed to find a site specifically for tiny homes, but you’ve got to think that if we’re splitting off parkland for permanent housing, it’s not going to be any easier to find somewhere for tiny homes.
There’s also a crazy amount of co-ordination that’s needed given the motion. We don’t know what’s in the winter response plan, the Delhi development will make some impact but not a lot, and the extra space in Stepping Stone is more emergency shelter space, which we know isn’t a permanent solution.
What’s assured is that there’s not going to be a tiny home encampment by this winter. Part of that is a matter of logistics, the Guelph Tiny Home Coalition is looking for a site that can check all their boxes and not just some of them, but another part of this is the relative meekness of the endorsement. I could have sworn that somebody said this is a crisis.
And so much of the back-and-forth, at both this meeting and previous ones, has been about how to classify this project, or whether or not it’s meant to be temporary or permanent or some point in-between. It’s strange, isn’t it, how we can shut down entire streets and re-write bylaws lickety-split in order to set up a dining district without having to see all the angles in advance.
On top of that, the great paradox of this meeting was how the decision makers themselves seemed like secondary characters. Most of the discussion was led by delegates, all of whom spoke out in favour of proceeding with the project, and many of them were frontline workers who will be working with the people living at the tiny homes talking about how they will manage.
Meanwhile, there was no presentation from City of Guelph staff about what they’ve been working on, no delegation or participation from the County of Wellington, and no follow-up questions from council to staff about the delta between community enthusiasm and city hall inaction.
Instead of a lead foot on the issue, council spent the meeting wallowing in the corporate speak of modern governance about how to scope the project and developing the metrics to determine success. If housing is a human right, then the metrics are obvious: fewer people will have to freeze this winter in the wet and the cold, and the city’s tents could be reserved for actual camping.
And that brings us to another ongoing issue with council process on this matter. We had a couple of hours of delegations and then a nearly hour-long in-camera session where council emerged with a lengthy five-part motion that was almost completely different from the one included on both the original and revised council meeting agendas.
Where did this motion come from? How was it developed? When was it developed? Plus, this is all on top of the fact that this ball got rolling from Mayor Guthrie’s controversial use of Strong Mayor Powers.
Out of those original three directives, we’ve seen the disposition of city-owned land go nowhere fast, now two different tiny homes projects seem stalled in neutral, which leaves the direction to cut next year’s budget down to four per cent, and as we’ve seen repeatedly, that’s easier said than done without inflicting harm on services.
In retrospect, perhaps we overreacted when the mayor announced that he was using those powers as they been deployed so messily.
So now we enter the typically-slow political times of midsummer and as we look back at seven months of frantic attempts at real and decisive action on homelessness, we’ve seen a lot of reports and a lot of long hours at meetings, and not much else.
This is a shame because Guelph has done a lot in the last few years working with limited resources; all the social housing built in the city in the last three decades has been completed in the last few years. A lot of that is luck, but so much more of it was about the guile and passion of our community members, who had the support of our local government as they chased every lead and every opportunity.
So has our luck run out, or has the capacity of our government to act? Looking at this week’s meeting, it’s hard to say.
