Jon Harstone, a pillar of Toronto’s affordable housing community, died on January 1, 2022. The housing sector remembers and benefits from his extraordinary instincts about the skills and connections necessary to get housing projects off the ground. He was just 71.
Harstone was part of a generation of housing developers who came of age when affordable housing development was firmly on the federal government’s radar. He bragged that the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) distributed millions of dollars to a young guy like him to see what he could do with the money – and he ended up doing great things not just then, but throughout his life motivated by the need for affordable housing.
Jon didn’t just work in the co-op sector – he lived there too. Dufferin Grove Housing Co-operative was incorporated in 1973, with Jon, just 23 at the time, as one of the incorporators, along with fellow co-op stalwart, Mark Goldblatt. Around the same time, he attended informal meetings with other co-op activists that eventually resulted in the formation of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto (CHFT) where he worked until he joined Co-op Habitat, a resource group developing co-ops in Mississauga. From there, Jon worked for and was a founding member of Homestarts, a non-profit housing developer, where he instrumental in developing 35 co-ops and over 3,000 units of affordable housing. In 1991, Jon became the Manager of CHFT’s land trust, Colandco Co-operative Housing Land Trust, which owns the lands under which 13 housing co-ops are built. Jon reorganized and simplified Colandco and set up the Bathurst Quay Community Land Co-op.
In 1998, when homelessness was declared a national disaster, Harstone founded St. Clare’s Multifaith Housing Society. St. Clare’s has built or renovated over 400 affordable units in Toronto by repurposing urban properties into housing for people experiencing homelessness or precarious housing.
His relationship with CHFT, however, remained strong and, together with CHFT Honorary Lifetime Board Member, Pam McConnell, Harstone ensured the successful completion in 2011 of Local 75 Hospitality Workers Housing Cooperative, one of the rare newbuild and green housing coops in downtown Toronto. Some claim Pam and Jon were the only people who truly understood the complexity of the project, taking much of that expertise with them at their untimely deaths. In the last 20 years of his life, in addition to Local 75, Jon assisted twelve non-profits develop over 600 units of affordable housing, including the new units at Margaret Lawrence Housing Co-op.
While Jon may have formally stepped away from St. Clare’s in 2019, despite best intentions, he never retired. In 2020 and 2021, despite the pandemic, he worked closely with CHFT Executive Director, Tom Clement, on new co-op housing development projects in the GTA. Thanks to Harstone, thousands of low- and moderate-income Toronto residents now live in safe, secure, supportive, and affordable homes. And for that, Jon was made an Honorary Lifetime Member of CHFT in 2011.
