Rendering of ELEV8 by YSM. Image credit: Yonge Street Mission
For more than 130 years, Yonge Street Mission (YSM) has worked alongside people experiencing poverty in Toronto. As community needs have changed, so has its work. Today, YSM provides supports including food, health and mental health care, employment and housing. But its work is rooted in a belief that responding to an immediate need is only part of the solution.
“We really do believe in the potential, promise and purpose that exists in each person that walks through our doors,” said Angela Solomos, VP of Philanthropy at Yonge Street Mission.
That belief has led YSM to look beyond the symptoms of poverty to the individual to systemic barriers that can prevent people from moving forward. Through years of working alongside community members, one barrier became increasingly clear: even when people who are living in supportive or deeply affordable housing increase their income, Toronto’s rental market can leave them with nowhere affordable to go.
YSM’s first-hand experience helping community members with that gap, has helped shape ELEV8 by YSM, a planned mixed-income housing development designed to give residents room to improve their financial circumstances without putting their housing stability at risk. The project will create 228 new rental homes alongside support spaces for employment, learning, community programming and other supports, bringing housing and YSM’s social services together in one place.
At the heart of ELEV8 is YSM’s Progress in Place model, which is intended to allow residents to move between levels of affordability as their financial circumstances change while remaining in the same unit, connected to their community and supports.
When progress creates an impossible choice
The vision for ELEV8 by YSM grew in part from what the organization was seeing at Genesis Place, its 26-unit transitional housing building established in 1991 in Toronto.
Residents were accessing supports through care managers, finding employment and becoming ready for independent living, only to discover that Toronto’s competitive rental market makes that next step financially out of reach.
“They’ve got a job, they’re earning an income, but guess what, they’re still low income,” said Solomos. “They’re doing everything right, they’re living a more dignified life. But leaving supportive housing and joining the rental market is a giant monumental leap.”
The experience of “Dave” illustrates the dilemma. After experiencing unemployment, Dave connected with YSM’s Workforce Development team and accessed its food bank, mental health supports and life-skills workshops. While living at Genesis Place, he found a construction job and began moving toward independent living.
Dave at Genesis Place. Image credit: Yonge Street Mission
But the progress that should have brought greater stability presented a difficult choice. His income could not comfortably absorb Toronto’s rising rents and living costs, meaning leaving subsidized housing could put the stability he had worked toward at risk.
For YSM, experiences like Dave’s exposed a gap in the housing continuum: people can make too much to remain in deeply affordable housing while still making too little to afford market rent. And with a 0% vacancy rate for affordable rental units in Toronto, there is simply no place to place to safely grow.
Progress without losing your home
ELEV8 is designed so that greater financial stability does not have to come at the expense of housing stability. As residents build greater financial independence, YSM devised an innovative model they call Progress in Place, intended to facilitate them adjusting to a different level of affordability without having to leave their home, community or supports.
“You are able to shift from one rental type to the next seamlessly while staying in the building, continuing to utilize the needed supports and without the risk of losing that roof over your head,” said Solomos.
For someone who lands a better job, earns a raise or receives a promotion, that flexibility could provide the bridge that is often missing from the traditional housing continuum.
“All the in-house services don’t create that bridge,” Solomos explained. “The in-house services and the stable roof over your head get you to the point where you’re ready to take that next step. But there needs to be a bridge or else it’s too big a leap.” ELEV8’s Progress in Place model is that bridge.
Testing a model with potential beyond ELEV8
YSM hopes the impact of Progress in Place will eventually extend beyond ELEV8. The organization has partnered with the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Housing Justice Lab to study the model once the development is operational, to understand how well it works and whether it could be replicated elsewhere.
For Solomos, demonstrating that the model works could help build a case for broader changes to how affordable housing supports economic mobility.
“Changing systems is hard work,” she said. “But we’re going to do that heavy lifting. We will take this model, prove it out, build the case and then have something tangible and real to show policymakers.”
The potential impact goes beyond the residents of ELEV8. YSM hopes Toronto Community Housing residents who are ready for greater independence could move into affordable homes at ELEV8, freeing deeply affordable units for people who need them most.
Progress in Place is also built around a different assumption: that people should not be penalized for improving their circumstances. Our social system, while initially helpful, is now unintentionally doing just that. ELEV8 by YSM challenges the misconception that this has created: people receiving social assistance or living in deeply affordable housing lack the desire to improve their economic circumstances.
“There are many motivated people trying to move forward, but the system is designed to trap them rather than empower them,” said Solomos.
YSM’s experience suggests the issue is not a lack of ambition, but the growing barriers people encounter as they try to build greater stability. For Solomos, creating that kind of long-term change also requires participation beyond the social services sector.
“If we really want to see people’s lives change and long-term stability become a reality, it can’t be concentrated in the social service sector,” she said. “We all need to step in and play a role.”
Image credit: Yonge Street Mission
Philanthropy can help unlock the next stage
YSM is raising $20 million in philanthropic capital for its equity contribution to ELEV8 by YSM. Reaching that target is an important step toward unlocking the substantially larger government funding and financing needed to move the 228-home development toward construction.
That gives philanthropy an outsized role at this stage of the project. Donor capital can help move ELEV8 closer to construction while creating the conditions for significantly more capital to follow.
The need, Solomos emphasized, is immediate. “The lack of affordable housing in Toronto is urgent,” she said. “We needed it yesterday.”
For someone facing the circumstances Dave encountered, ELEV8 by YSM could make progress feel less like a risk. A new job could remain a reason to celebrate. A raise could be an opportunity rather than a threat to housing stability. And moving forward could mean exactly that: moving forward, without first having to leave home.
Explore ELEV8 by YSM on Front Door
ELEV8 by YSM is one of the affordable housing projects featured on Front Door, Canada’s first and only affordable housing project directory, connecting community-led affordable housing projects with philanthropic capital and cross-sector partners.
Explore ELEV8 by YSM on Front Door to learn more about the 228-unit development, the Progress in Place model and opportunities to help move the project toward construction.