A proposal to implement small-scale co-operative housing on the Toronto Islands requires a great deal more planning and it’s too soon to tell if it’s even a viable option, experts say.

The Toronto Island Residents Housing Cooperative Inc. is spearheading the plan to bring eight to 10 units to the front of Shaw House and the Canoe Club building.

The units would be non-subsidized and geared toward young families, according to TIRHC. Their plan is for it to function like standard co-ops, meaning the building dwellers will make all the decisions and anyone who wants to live there will have to go on a waiting list: first come, first served.

But plans to build affordable housing on the islands may be premature.

“The tendency when people think about affordable housing is that we don’t have enough of it, so ‘oh, here’s a parcel of land; let’s stick some affordable housing there,’ ” said Sharad Kerur, executive director of the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association.

“That’s all well and good. Except for, you have to think about it holistically from the perspective of the individual who’s actually going to be living there.” Meaning you need to think about groceries, daycare, transportation and emergency services — needs that are often more complicated on the island.

The TIRHC plan is a reimagining of sorts of a large-scale islands co-op housing plan shut down by Mike Harris’ Progressive Conservative government two decades ago.

His government put a stop to the plans for dozens of units, but some islanders, including Eliza Moore, never really stopped thinking about it.

Moore is president of the TIHRC, which was been a registered corporation for almost four decades. In the last two years, plans to bring a smaller number of units to the islands have started taking shape.

Students at the Ontario College of Art and Design have sketched out the potential buildings, which would be sustainable and energy efficient and feature small, dense units.

“New co-op housing is a way to provide more mainlanders an Island living experience at an affordable cost,” said Eliza Moore and TIHRC vice-president Jane Davidson-Neville in a joint email to the Star.

But Sean Gadon, director of the city’s affordable housing office, said plans for an Island co-op are unlikely to work.

“The city’s current affordable housing priorities, in terms of the development of new affordable housing, would not include housing on the Toronto Islands,” Gadon said, adding, “you’d need a business case and I don’t believe a business case exists for the development of housing on that site.”

When it comes to finding non-government funding, Tom Clement, executive director of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto, isn’t sure how they would.

“The logistics of the money, I don’t understand how it would work,” Clement said. “I just don’t know how it would be viable.”

A business plan and financing are still in the works, but according to the island’s June community newsletter, TIRHC is planning to finance the non-subsidized co-ops with a mixture of fundraising, community bonds and conventional mortgage financing.

Even if they manage to secure the necessary financing, Kerur said the islands face a set of hurdles other locations with affordable housing might not, including access to specific services and the cost of taking the ferry.

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“Support services are not likely to be right there on the Island. They’re going to be located somewhere else so the issue then becomes how do they get to those services?” Kerur said. “Emergency services, Wheel-Trans, all those things come into play.”

Even with details still to be sorted out, Moore and Davidson-Neville are adamant the co-op would be a good fit.

“As a community of parents and grandparents we also feel we have an opportunity to provide affordable housing for young people and young families in a community,” they said, “and to make that housing as environmentally-friendly as befits a co-op in a park.”