Toboggan Flats has been getting noticed by Toronto media recently! After sitting down with the CBC Morning Show last month, we talked to CP24’s Codi Wilson and NewsTalk Radio’s Walter Sendzik about the profound impact of housing challenges on young people in Canada and what Toboggan Flats is doing to help.
Take a peek at the excerpts below.
CP24 & CTV News Toronto: A downtown apartment for $1,200 a month? Here is one group’s plan on how Toronto can rethink its vacant office space
Written by: Codi Wilson
“Downtowns are starting to hollow out because people aren’t coming back to work,” Robert Barnard, co-founder of Youthful Cities, told CP24.com. “We’ve got these vacant office spaces that really could be housing.”
Barnard said the current state of Toronto’s housing market means it is nearly impossible for young people to afford to live downtown.
“Years ago, we built condos for young people to get downtown and with the intention they’re going to buy those condos. Now, young people can’t even afford to rent the condos that were built for the last generation of young people,” he said. “So the challenges are mounting.”
He said while cities around the world have begun to build co-living spaces for young adults, it is a relatively new concept in Canada.
“We’ve got students in residences. We’ve got seniors in seniors’ homes. We’ve got people sharing homes and sharing bathrooms and kitchens and laundry all the time. So it’s all around us,” Barnard said.
“This conversion of office space to co-living is kind of the ingenuity that Toboggan Flats is bringing and it’s been done in other places around the world, particularly in Paris, France, but it’s the first time in Canada and we’re excited to be doing it.”
Barnard said while converting office spaces into residential units can be costly, co-living models are more cost-effective and can be constructed more
quickly.
NewsTalk 610 Radio: Searching for Solutions with Walter Sendzik
“What we’re seeing is the acceleration of the [housing crisis], especially when it comes to young people. And this is as we came into last fall, when we were doing a new study at Youthful Cities looking at the future of work and the effect of COVID on young generations. And wow, the housing numbers just leaped off the page. The crisis there for young people and how far they have to go to get affordable housing. It’s pushing them away from learning opportunities, job opportunities. And I think the really frustrating part is that it’s pushing them away from downtowns. And if we don’t have young people downtown, that vitality is lost and those downtowns slowly die.”
