Cota operates a portfolio of 520+ units of supportive housing using a Housing First approach to help people who are homeless and living with mental health and/or cognitive challenges to secure housing within Toronto’s residential rental market. Due to low vacancy rates and increasing rental rates, it has become increasingly difficult to secure housing.

As such, Cota began to pursue affordable housing acquisitions and/or developments as alternative means of creating housing options for our service users with support from its Board of Directors.

In fiscal 2019-20, we successfully acquired our first “Cota-owned” affordable housing site, a ten-unit rooming house located in Parkdale. The acquisition was made possible by capital funds that we secured through an open Ontario Priorities Housing Initiative (OPHI) request for proposal call that the City of Toronto issued in the fall of 2019 and through a Board approved contribution from Cota’s reserve funds.

The site was obtained in early 2020 and renovations are anticipated to begin in late summer 2020. It is our hope that the building will be ready for occupancy in the fall of 2020. Once the site is ready, our intent is to offer the units to existing Cota tenants, as a step-down option from high support housing, and to then use the residual vacancies in those high support settings to accommodate new tenants associated with our recent AHFT expansion. This approach will create a rare opportunity to facilitate some flow through within our supportive housing portfolio and enable our service users to receive various levels of appropriate support.