Cambridge receives $13M in federal funding for housing

Cambridge is the latest city to receive federal cash to fast track local housing initiatives.

More than $13 million in funding was announced Thursday.

“It’s about coming together to build more homes faster,” said Cambridge MP Bryan May.

The money, part of Canada’s housing accelerator fund, is meant to help the city building more than 350 housing units in the next three years and 3,600 new homes over the next decade.

“It’s always great when tax funds from the people of Cambridge, when they’re sent to the federal level, that they come back to us to do the work that we need to do to provide the homes for those same people,” Mayor Jan Liggett said.

Kitchener and Waterloo also received federal funding but only Kitchener got the full amount they asked for. Both Waterloo and Cambridge got millions less than they had hoped.

“There’s often a temptation to say: ‘This community got this amount of money and this [other] community got this much less, or this much more,’” said May. “Every single community is built differently.”

“We submitted our application with our best guess of what we could do to meet the requirements,” added Michelle Lee, the executive officer for the CAO in the City of Waterloo.

She said the application process was unique because money was awarded based on an estimatipm of how many building permits each municipality could get, rather than what it already had.

“There was a little bit of back and forth about how many building permits would actually be reasonable to expect for each initiative,” Lee explained. “I think that was part of the reason each municipality had different amounts granted. A differencing of opinion on how many building permits they think they could achieve.”

Despite the funding falling short, the mayor believes Cambridge received more than enough to reach their housing targets.

“We weren’t turned down for the funds that we actually need to provide for the points that we raised in our application,” Liggett said.