Doug Ford announces $6.8M housing incentive to cities in Niagara

The Ontario government announced a combined $6.8 million going toward housing in the cities of St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Welland.

The funding comes in the second round of the “Building Faster Fund” created with the aim of encouraging communities to meet at least 80 per cent of their provincially designated housing goal. The three cities broke ground on around 2,000 homes last year.

“We are making record investments to get shovels in the ground faster for new homes. Including a total investment of $62 million in projects across Niagara to enable the construction of nearly 17 thousand new homes,” Ford said at a press conference Wednesday in St. Catharines, alongside Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Rob Flack, Niagara West MPP Sam Oosterhoff, St. Catharines Mayor Mat Siscoe, Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati and Welland Mayor Frank Campion.

St. Catharines will receive $2,501,547 for meeting 85 per cent of their housing target. Their provincial target was 917 new homes.

Niagara Falls will get $2,817,707 for reaching and exceeding their housing goal. The city broke ground on 774 new homes, which is 116 per cent of their target.

The City of Welland will get $1,467,045 for also reaching and exceeding their 408-home target. This is 114 per cent of their 358-home target.

“It’s going to help us build purpose built housing. And in this case it’s going to be in our downtown. We’re going to have a multiplex unit that will have several hundred units – that will involve affordable, attainable, and market rents. And it will be a private-public partnership – that’s what things like this can do,” Diodati said.

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“This is huge for us. Every dollar we can get for infrastructure is important. This plus the $2.3 million last year, we are now at $4.8 million plus that we’re putting towards the infrastructure that we need to get done – the master servicing studies that we need to have done so that we can continue to not just build new housing, but also support the housing that’s here, because, as I said, when you have aging infrastructure, it’s got to be replaced,” said Siscoe.

The mayors know there is an affordable housing shortage in their communities, and this money will help address that.

“We’ve been incentivizing the affordable housing piece, the attainable housing piece. We recognize this is a huge part of this. Our community improvement plan very much targets affordable housing and has commitments built into it that if you qualify and you’re going to get these grants, then you have to be building those affordable units for a period of time,” said Siscoe.

“You need to build more to bring the prices down, make it more affordable. I have got three kids, I don’t know how they’ll ever afford anything without some help from mom and dad. And I think we gotta build more to help bring that number down and make it reasonable that they could hope one day to own a house,” said Diodati.

The Building Faster Fund is a three year program, and the three Niagara area mayors say they are already well on their way to meeting their goals this year and are looking forward to three more big cheques.

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