Understanding Peel's housing need and service levels

How Peel's housing needs are assessed and the service level we need to fully help our residents.

Peel Region oversees the affordable housing system in Peel. We work with partners to implement our 10-year Housing and Homelessness Plan. which was developed with the community. The Plan was developed with the community and its main goals are to help clients get and keep housing they can afford.

Peel is facing an affordable housing crisis that is deep, enduring, and inequitable.

The affordable housing system has insufficient resources to maintain assets, increase supply and support clients at the level that fully addresses the need of our community.

Challenges Peel is facing

There is a lack of deeply affordable and supportive housing for those people with low incomes, or who are experiencing family, physical, mental health, and addiction struggles.

Rising housing prices and rent has made it increasingly unaffordable for middle-income earners to live in the region and now need our help to remain in their homes.

Our role

As Service Manager of the affordable housing system, we focus on the lack of affordable and supportive housing. The Ontario government and Canadian government are more focused on policy and increasing market housing.

We provide households with financial and non-financial support to help them get and keep housing they can afford. This includes ongoing subsidies and one-time funding for first and last month’s rent, or overdue rent. Non-financial support includes referrals to community agency partners that provide life skills, counselling, budgeting education and other support that helps clients get and keep their housing.

Even though we have seen a huge increase in demand, we’ve worked hard to improve our service through our Client Pathway which has helped reduce the time spent waiting to receive housing support, after making a service request.

The numbers

33,000 households in Peel were provided housing, financial assistance, or support in 2023.
4,800 households received one-time financial assistance in 2023 to prevent homelessness. An increase in 1,400 households between 2022 and 2023.
43 days on average is how long applicants waited to get their intake with staff. An improvement from 101 days in 2022.
80% improvement in response time from housing screening to intake between 2022 and 2023.
3.5 minutes is how long it now takes to complete the simplified client consent, previously 7 minutes.
$50 billion is required over the next 10 years to meet 100% of the core housing need in Peel.
$4 billion additional is required to continue to meet 19% of the need over the next 10 year.
97,000 households are in Peel are living in core housing need. That’s 1 in 5 households.
32,329 households are now on the Centralized Waiting List in Peel. A 12% increase since December 2022, and 32% increase since 2020.

Defining core housing need

A household is in core housing need if:

Its housing is unacceptable and does not meet one or more of the adequacy, suitability, or affordability standards.
Acceptable alternative housing in the community would cost 30% or more of its net income.

Peel’s core housing need estimate is based on adjusting our internal estimate for the proportion of households in core housing need for the census year 2021 to account for the latest intercensal population estimates for Peel region provided by Statistics Canada.

Our internal methodology for calculating core housing need was developed out of concern that the official 2021 census estimate of core housing need was influenced by the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Our methodology for estimating need in Peel region for the various programs and service types drew on a variety of data sources.

For further details about our methods contact us.

The 2023 program and service needs and gaps shows the levels of estimated need in each program versus the available supply. It also shows the percentage of need being met. The chart shows, pictorially, if the percentage of need being met has increased or decreased from the previous year. These numbers are detailed for 8 different programs within Housing Services.

We can't solve the affordable housing crisis alone

Chronic underfunding from the Canadian and Ontario governments for both community and supportive housing continues to prevent Peel Region from operating at a scale that meets our community’s needs.

We must continue to advocate to Canadian and Ontario governments for the policy and funding changes needed to effectively address the affordable housing crisis. These policy and funding changes are summarized in our HOME advocacy framework, approved by Peel Region Council last year.

Peel Region Council report: Overview of the Provincial and Federal housing announcements: implications for Peel Region

These positions include:

Ensuring the use of existing housing for homes.
Funding housing services and supports that are delivered by service managers,
District Social Services Administration Boards and sector partner agencies appropriately.
Prioritizing the construction of new non-profit and affordable homes and the maintenance of existing non-profit and affordable homes.
Enhancing social and income support to close the gap between earned income and affordability.