Affordable housing for seniors was brought up as a focus point by an audience member.
Chris Olmstead said he’d been ‘working with a private group’ to try and provide a solution to the housing for older residents.
“We lost a lot of farmers in our region who wanted to stay, but just couldn’t afford to.” he said.
Neil Nicholson said that this “was one of the most raised issues from the Seniors Task Force”, which he organized.
“We’ve been working behind the scenes to make this work.” he said. “There are a lot of moving pieces.”
Mayor Moore brought up the main issue with building the housing.
“It’s always kind of misleading to offer us free hand to do what we need.” he said. “Where is the money? There’s no way we can build affordable housing, we just can’t.”
“Someone in Toronto took our low-income seniors house as unwanted, so they gave it to the county and they turned it into low-rental housing for everyone, and people took it.” he said.
“As a very, very small developer, the process is so onerous and time-consuming.” Joe Kowalski said. “Development has become something only large companies can do.”
“I think when we have our own Official Plan, we can do this.”
