You need somewhere to live now, not in 2031

The situation

Your rent went up faster than your pay. Your landlord hasn't fixed the thing you reported in the spring. You're on a waitlist that hasn't moved in two years. Or you own your home and can't heat all of it, and the tax bill keeps climbing.

Or you're sleeping in a tent or a car in District 11 — facing active trauma, unmanaged mental health crises, and the heaviest edges of the overdose epidemic.

Everyone at City Hall agrees Kingston needs more housing. They're right. It's also going to take a decade, and people need somewhere to live before that. And for a lot of people in this district, a co-housing list or a private rental waitlist is miles away from their daily reality.

Three clocks, not one

That's the part most housing plans get wrong. They pick one timeline and call it a strategy. Different people are on different clocks, and a plan that only runs one of them leaves somebody outside.

Tonight: keeping people alive

For someone sleeping outside, housing has to come with no barriers — no demands for sobriety, no rigid compliance rules, no discrimination. That's Housing First, and it isn't the soft position. It's the one that works, because you cannot treat an addiction, hold down a job, or make an appointment from a tent. Outreach, harm reduction and emergency survival care are public safety infrastructure, and Kingston should fund them that way. Keeping people alive is the prerequisite for everything else on this page.

This year: matching people to homes that already exist

Right now, in this city: a widow in a four-bedroom house she can't afford to heat. A senior on CPP with two empty rooms. A single parent paying $1,800 for a one-bedroom that isn't big enough. Put those three people together — matched properly, with agreements that protect everyone, with someone responsible when it goes wrong — and they're housed. Today. No construction schedule, no rezoning fight, no years of waiting for an approval. Housing first with supports.

This decade: building, and who actually builds it

Here's the part nobody at City Hall says plainly: for-profit development will never build homes for people with no income. That isn't a criticism of developers — it's arithmetic. Which is why the housing that housed the poorest Canadians was publicly funded, publicly owned and built on public land, right up until Ottawa stepped away in the mid-1990s. It worked. We should be asking for it back, and Kingston should have serviced municipal land ready when it comes.

This isn't theory

The proof: one shared household — carefully matched across mixed incomes, including residents on ODSP and CPP — has been running for over six years.

The working model: HomeMADE, home-sharing for senior women — a legally incorporated nonprofit, already operating in Ontario, extending into Kingston.

What's forming now: Good Neighbours Co-Housing, built to bring this to Kingston around three models — covenant housing, where seniors keep their home and their independence with legal protections built in; shared housing, carefully matched across mixed incomes; and home-sharing through HomeMADE.

Every GNCH home is designed with a Weathering Centre — shared storage for dry goods and staples. Housing and food security in the same building, because they were never separate problems.

And the first clock isn't theory either. I've spent years on the survival end of this in District 11 — three nights a week, four hours a night, through last February at −18°C. I know which people fall through which gap, and at what hour.

Where this actually stands today

GNCH is in formation. Intake isn't open yet.

The numbers we've published — 20 to 30 per cent below market, 80 per cent retention, fewer emergency calls — are targets we've committed to, with baselines set at pilot launch. They're not results.

I'm telling you that plainly because if you're reading this page, you've probably been promised housing before by someone who needed something from you.

What's real: one household with six years behind it, a partner organization already operating in Ontario, GNCH taking shape, and an outreach team that has been on the street since long before there was an election. What isn't real yet: a unit with your name on it.

What I do, and what changes with a seat

I help people navigate housing systems now. That's what POET does — finding the service that already exists and getting someone through the door of it. That doesn't depend on the election, and it won't stop after it.

What a council seat changes is speed:

Zoning that permits shared, co-operative and low-barrier supportive housing instead of quietly blocking it
City-owned land used for non-market public housing, assessed on its merits
A housing strategy that treats deeply affordable and supportive housing as essential infrastructure, not an afterthought
Permitting that doesn't add years
Development charges that reflect what a unit actually costs to service (see [affordability and growth →])

None of that is one councillor acting alone. It's what moves when someone at the table owns the file — someone who knows the streets, knows the data, and won't put it down.

→ Register your interest with Good Neighbours Co-Housing This goes to GNCH. That list will be the first cohort that we start helping find suitable housing.

→ Join the housing group This one stays with me — a newsletter, and a group of people building something rather than waiting for it. You don't have to need housing to work on housing.

The wider position

Co-housing is one tool. Kingston needs a portfolio: co-operative, non-profit, community land trust, permanently affordable, supportive, and market supply built on land that's already serviced.

Council has an uneven record here. 900 Division Street was reserved for a co-operative housing project in February 2024. In September 2024 Council denied the bridge loan 11–2. In March 2025 Council voted 7–4 to sell the land on the open market instead and it was bought by a for profit developer.

I'd support non-market housing where a project can show credible financing, long-term affordability, sound governance and efficient use of serviced land — with City support tied to transparent milestones and real taxpayer protections. Not a blank cheque but a real plan.

And one thing that gets missed: Kingston taxes existing apartment buildings at 1.7 times the residential rate. That premium lands in your rent. New purpose-built rental is taxed at the residential rate. That's a policy choice, it needs to be questioned, and I'd push to shift it.

Building takes a decade. Matching starts this year. Keeping someone alive starts tonight. A housing plan with only one clock isn't a plan.