We need a liveable city for everyone.

Big-picture thinking

Street nurse Cathy Crowe (Nursing ’85) says we should start with housing as it represents an investment that helps every part of someone’s life: their physical and mental health, employment opportunities and social relationships. We need a national housing program, like the one created in response to veterans returning from the Second World War to make housing affordable, she says. The National Housing Program saw a massive investment in rental units, co-op housing, public housing and housing for students and seniors. Through the program, more than two million Canadians were housed from the 1950s to 1993, when it was dismantled, after decades of funding erosion.

Instead, the federal government has responded to the desperate need for housing during the pandemic with the Rapid Housing Initiative, for cities to purchase buildings that can be converted to supportive housing by the end of this year. “Probably in Toronto, we’ll get one or two buildings. It’s a Band-Aid, and it’s not going to deal with the scope of the need,” says Crowe.

Reimagined housing in the city includes reimagining our shelter system. “We just can’t put everyone back into the existing shelters. There needs to be a new vision so that shelters are one room per person,” says Crowe. “We’ve known for decades there’s a high risk of infection spread in shelters, whether it’s tuberculosis, SARS, H1N1, or other flus and colds.” In addition to the infection risk, people struggling with crises in their life need and deserve a quiet, private place to sleep, which is not possible when you’re “sharing a room with 20 to 100 people,” says Crowe.

As we face only more uncertainty, especially with issues like climate change, it’s time for more innovative and big-picture thinking on how we can better build housing to support community health more generally, says Robinson, who is also interim academic director, City Building Ryerson. “Our post-pandemic recovery can be more than economic, we can directly tackle issues of social exclusion, and ecological justice as well.” For example, the building of new infrastructure, from housing to transit, could employ local businesses and tradespeople. Housing projects can include community kitchens, as well as space for social enterprises and community organizations. We can prioritize projects that are built in such ways that they “lead to greenhouse gas emission reductions and make us more resilient to the uncertain impacts of climate change,” says Robinson.

And we should focus on investing in communities that need it most. The New York City Parks Commission did an audit in 2014 and found that some parks in the city’s low-income neighbourhoods hadn’t received funding for maintenance or revitalization in 20 years, so they prioritized those 67 parks for reinvestment, spending more than $300 million since. We need the same equity-focused targeted funding here, for all city investments, says Robinson.

Defining our values

Wong worries about the overt acts of racism we’ve seen in the pandemic year – from the murder of George Floyd, to the nurses mocking Indigenous patient Joyce Echaquan as she was dying to the vicious attacks on Asian-identified people. Community leaders in diverse cities like Toronto need to reckon with racism in all forms, more boldly than before. “I find racism is such a chameleon that inflicts different forms of violence against different groups. They attacked elderly Asian people, they sexualized Asian women, and the next time it’s another target,” says Wong. “I think it brings pain to people, regardless of your racial background, to witness this type of violence. We all feel so diminished, in a sense, disempowered.”

As we emerge from more than a year of varying degrees of isolation, we need to build more inclusive communities and put forward more inclusive policies, most pressing of which is adequate housing and safe water for Indigenous Peoples, says Wong, who is also the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing research chair in urban health. That means digging deep and better defining our values. “There’s a Chinese saying, ‘If I truly care about my children, I would care about all children, and if I truly care about my elders, I would care about all elders,’” says Wong. “I think that Canadian society also has similar values.” Wong hopes that more people get involved in reviving community connections, like Neighbourhood Houses, Community Hubs, Boys and Girls Clubs and other informal networks to look out for each other.

Already, there are signs Torontonians are doing the kind of “really strong grassroots organizing” that will help us rebuild post-pandemic, says Crowe. Community activists in Parkdale have been protesting – and even standing in the way of – evictions. And the Encampment Support Network worked throughout the pandemic to bring supplies to people forced to sleep in tents because shelters were too high-risk for COVID-19.