Peterborough surpasses housing target — if you count long-term care beds

You’re reading the March 14, 2024 edition of the Peterborough Currents email newsletter. To receive our email newsletters straight to your inbox, sign up here.

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Good morning and welcome to the Peterborough Currents newsletter.

The City of Peterborough is claiming success for its modular housing initiative on Wolfe Street, garnering media attention from CBC and other outlets. 

Six months into the project, 47 people are currently living at the site. It cost $2.4 million to construct the modular housing community and annual operating costs are about $2 million per year, the city shared. 

As I was learning about the impacts of the initiative this week, there was one statistic that really jumped out at me. Jessica Penner, who manages the program for the city, told councillors on Monday that police calls to the site are down 90 percent since the tent encampment was replaced with the modular houses. Over the first ten weeks of the modular housing initiative, there were four police calls to the site, Penner said. She contrasted that with the year before, when there were 38 police calls to the tent encampment during the same 10-week period.

Now, onto our newsletter for this week. We’ll cover: 

• City exceeds housing target — if you count long-term care beds
• Downtown Peterborough’s new donut-carrying outreach team
• $58 million for a new police station
• What’s up with Parkhill Road?
• Food Not Bombs defies city by serving food without a permit 

Let’s get to it.

Peterborough gets $1.9 m for exceeding housing target. Half of the new units are actually long-term care beds

By Brett Throop

The Ontario government has provided Peterborough with $1.88 million as a reward for exceeding the housing target the province set for the city.

Peterborough broke ground on 506 new housing units in 2023, according to a government press release – surpassing the target by 46 percent.

But long-term care beds accounted for 256 – or 50.6 percent – of those new units, according to figures the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing provided to Currents.

The Ford government has faced criticism for counting long-term care beds toward its housing targets. “Honestly, I’m not sure why they didn’t just set a less ambitious target, rather than trying to convince folks that an LTC bed is a house,” economist and housing researcher Mike Moffatt of the University of Ottawa’s Smart Prosperity Institute, posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday.

The 256 beds are part of a new Extendicare Peterborough facility currently under construction in the city’s north end. However, the project will actually only result in 84 net additional long-term care beds, since it will replace Extendicare’s existing, smaller facility on Alexander Court, a spokesperson for the company confirmed by email.

Peterborough would have fallen far short of its housing target of 345 new units last year if long-term care beds were not counted toward the city’s total. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation data show that Peterborough counted only 173 housing starts in 2023.

But the city’s housing progress was bolstered somewhat by people adding basement apartments and other secondary suites to their homes – Peterborough added 77 such units last year, according to the housing ministry.

Cities that meet their housing targets are rewarded with extra funding for infrastructure projects through the province’s Building Faster Fund. The money Peterborough received will go toward “housing-enabling and community-enabling” infrastructure, the province’s press release stated.

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Other stories to watch

WHAT’S UP WITH PARKHILL ROAD?

Motorists have noticed Parkhill Road between George and Reid Streets is now freshly paved and passable after months of construction, and they’re using it as a thoroughfare, navigating around barriers and signs that state the road remains closed. The city’s communications director Brendan Wedley stated the road is still “closed to through traffic but access must remain open for local traffic and residents.” Wedley stated that the major underground works of the project are complete, but construction crews will return this spring to complete “finishing works,” including the installation of a centre median at Parkhill’s intersection with Aylmer Street. He said the project will be done by this summer.

$58 MILLION FOR SECOND POLICE STATION

The city expects it to cost $40 million to renovate the Lansdowne Street building it acquired last year for use as a second police station, plus renovate the current Water Street station for continued use. The city already spent $15 million to purchase the Lansdowne property and contracting services for the renovations are expected to cost an additional $3.6 million, bringing the total project cost to over $58 million. The renovation money will eat into Peterborough’s upcoming capital budgets, potentially starting in 2025. Capital spending is also used to fund infrastructure such as roads, sewers, parks, and community centres. The total capital budget for 2024 was set at about $128 million.

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