Bad news: If something significant doesn’t change, Toronto’s social housing agency will be forced to shutter 7,500 units by 2023 because they’ll be uninhabitable, and fully 90 per cent of the existing units will be in poor or critical condition. Making the repairs to prevent this will cost $1.7 billion more over the next decade than the city has already committed.

Good news: Toronto Community Housing and Mayor John Tory (open John Tory's policard) have a plan, unveiled in a press conference Monday and contained in a report released at the same time.

More bad news: The plan is to ask the provincial and federal governments to cover the shortfall.

Oh, crap. Guys, we might be screwed.

Not that the plan itself is bad, per se. It points out how the longstanding, long-growing state-of-good-repair backlog could be dealt with, and why it should be, and what benefits and risks attend doing the right thing or failing to do so.

It’s not like the mayor was wrong when he said at the press event that “the moral and business cases illustrated by this study make a bullet-proof case for why the Ontario and federal governments should invest now to repair housing.”

He’s right. The problem is that the moral and business cases for supporting social housing have been clear for a long time.

I think they were clear when the federal government withdrew most of its oversight of social housing in the 1990s. It was true at the turn of the millennium, when the province threw responsibility for funding and running social housing onto cities. It has remained true ever since, even if the case has become more pressing, and even while the province has continued to withdraw social housing dollars (see, for reference, the whole budget showdown between Tory and Premier Kathleen Wynne earlier this year, caused by the withdrawal of those dollars).

The business case and the moral case may be made of Kevlar, as Tory suggests. But history shows that the political case for Queen’s Park and Ottawa to accept their obligations is made of something else, a material that seems not so much to repel bullets as to repel funding.

This is especially true of the governing provincial Liberals, who vacuumed up Toronto’s votes just last year and, because of them, don’t face an election for three or four more years.

The federal Conservatives do face an election this year, and may even want to make some nods to urban issues, and even Toronto issues, as their opponents are either doing or plan to do. But with transit and gridlock so top of mind, and waterfront renewal up for debate, is the specific crisis at Toronto Community Housing likely to become a national priority?

I suppose it doesn’t hurt to hold a big event to point out yet again that it should be a priority — heaven knows, Mel Lastman and David Miller often enough called in the press to announce “Plan A: we need upper government support; Plan B: see Plan A.” Let’s say history shows it isn’t entirely ineffective. But it is close.

So I’m expected to write, as Toronto politics blogger Neville Park tweeted Monday, that we need a Plan B. And we do.

Even more bad news, gang: there is no easy Plan B.

To fund this repair backlog out of property tax revenue would require an increase much larger than the one we launched to fund the Scarborough subway extension. The back of my napkin says we might be looking at a dedicated property tax increase of about 3 per cent for the next 30 years to fund a $1.7-billion capital project.

The other option, if we won’t pay for it ourselves and the upper levels of government refuse to do so, is to let our public housing stock crumble around the existing tenants in traditional slumlord fashion, and close a lot of it down, turfing those poor people into a private housing market that is already driving middle-class people to the margins, where they might either become homeless or need to leave the city altogether.

Will the people of Toronto accept the business case and the moral case to properly fund housing, to address a crisis, if the province and the feds don’t, immediately?

Because there’s more bad news: the disaster scenario outlined in the report is less than a decade away.

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The report unveiled Monday clearly outlines the risks of inaction. Our mayor has now asked, again, for help in facing those risks. If his appeal falls on deaf ears, are the people of Toronto willing and able to take action on our own?

The unspoken questions need to be spoken, and debated, pretty much right away.