When CHFT named Cathy Crowe an honorary lifetime member in 1999, she was 27 years into a nursing career that had already given her a front row seat for the mental and physical health impacts of housing precarity and homelessness. She perceived the issue so pressing that even as early as 1998, she co-founded the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee which declared homelessness a national disaster. She has spent her career since on the national and sometimes international stage as a Street Nurse and advocate fighting for the right to housing.
What she hasn’t been as known for is her special relationship with co-op housing dating back to the early 80s. It was then, as a young freshly separated mother, she found herself needing a stable, safe, subsidized place to live while she upgraded her nursing diploma to a degree. Cabbagetown’s Hugh Garner Co-op provided just that. Circumstances had her stay at Hugh Garner only nine years but when a few years later she once again sought out co-op living, this time it was in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood. She’s never left.
In the 70s, Mayor David Crombie led the charge to turn the area around Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market into a new residential neighbourhood, which, unlike earlier planned communities, would be integrated seamlessly into the city. The result: businesses mixed with subsidized and market housing, mostly rowhouse or low-rise apartments. Many of the residential buildings were formed as housing co-ops funded through Canada’s National Housing programs of the 80s and 90s.
Soon after she landed at St. Lawrence, Michael Shapcott, the co-founder of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, introduced Crowe to CHFT where he worked, getting her involved in the broader co-op sector. Together with other housing activists, to this day she promotes St. Lawrence as a shining example of what can be done when governments invest money in housing. Cathy beams when she shares how in the early 2000s, she and other housing advocates led a group of former Toronto mayors, sitting politicians, and media through the neighbourhood and how on other more recent occasions, she’s help organize marches and rallies that wind up in St. Lawrence, Toronto’s downtown affordable jewel.
Having lived in co-op housing for most of her adult life, Cathy Crowe suggests that three pillars support successful co-op living: good maintenance and operations, a good board, and good ongoing community development. Co-op members who understand the broader housing movement can lead communities through long, careful, and creative examinations of issues as wide ranging as the physical accessibility of space to integrating pets into communities. The process results in decisions that are tailor-made to the community and that work.
True to her roots as an advocate for the un- and under-housed, Crowe sees safety and security of tenure as the key principles for co-op living. When she gave up her nursing licence at the end of 2022, she did so as more of a political statement than anything else – stopping, not retiring, as she puts it. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Cathy Crowe and retiring in the same sentence, so long as there is a homeless person in Toronto.
CHFT is proud to consider her part of our family.
