Noreen Dunphy became aware of the co-op model as a housing option as a young community organizer mobilizing low-income homeowners and tenants in Toronto’s Inner-City neighbourhoods in the early 1970s. She focused on preserving a community in south Cabbagetown just east of downtown, while exploring the feasibility of adding new affordable housing for tenants. A city funding program that helped repair old houses in these communities was accessed for South Cabbagetown homes, and put Noreen in touch with others making similar efforts. That was how Noreen met another organizer, Mark Goldblatt, working in a community just west of downtown. Both of them became interested in applying the co-op housing model to acquiring and rehabilitating older housing for tenants in these kinds of older neighbourhoods, in addition to developing new co-operatives. This was prior to the 1973 National Housing Act amendments that soon would make the rapid expansion of non-profit co-operative and rental housing possible in Canada.
With the mentoring help of co-op pioneers in the Ontario Habitat Foundation and Co-op Habitat in Toronto, and the national work of the Co-operative Housing Foundation of Canada, they and other emerging co-op activists were ready when the 1973 amendments were approved and the first CMHC start-up grants for non-profit and co-op housing began to flow.
At the same time in a nearby neighbourhood where Noreen lived, community activists including Noreen were trying to protect from demolition a group of older houses with tenants in the Don Area (which became the DACHI Co-op) and the Spruce Court low-rise rental property, which eventually became the Spruce Court Co-operative. Spruce Court’s 77 units grouped around leafy courtyards were built in the World War 1 era to provide low-cost housing for working class earners. By the 70s, the nine-building complex was showing its age and was half empty. The owner was looking for a buyer and it was thought the housing would be demolished for redevelopment.
Dunphy, Goldblatt and others engaged in fights to preserve similar communities in the City began meeting, including Spruce Court’s historic sister development, now the Bain Co-operative; the Forward9 Co-op in the Beaches; and what would eventually become Dufferin Grove Co-op in the west end. Those meetings starting in 1974 were the genesis of CHFT, a group of like-minded people and organizations who needed each other for mutual learning and policy development, support in technical areas and most importantly for advocacy to governments. The goals of protecting and increasing affordable housing in neighbourhoods so they maintained their mixed-income character and did not displace tenants are familiar to community activists fighting fifty years later in other parts of the city.
Noreen Dunphy recalls the road to co-op status wasn’t an easy one for Spruce Court. The newly formed co-op sector hadn’t the demonstrated expertise or financial resources to purchase it on the landlord’s deadline; instead, they worked with the tenants and local community leaders to successfully lobby the City of Toronto to purchase it on behalf of the tenants. It was around that time that Noreen, who’d lived in the community but not in Spruce Court, needed new housing. She moved in while the City owned the complex with the goal of helping the tenants’ plan to form a co-operative and to have the City eventually transfer the property to the residents. But it proved hard to persuade the City to let Spruce Court go and fulfill the promise that the tenants felt had been made to them. With the assistance of CHFT, Spruce Court Co-op formed in 1978 and eventually after much lobbying by the tenants, just like the Bain Avenue Co-op, the City transferred the property to the Co-op.
For Dunphy, co-op living is valuable because every member is on an equal footing and there’s no distant landlord making decisions about their homes. The mutual respect among members and the one-member-one-vote principle ensures people in the community have control over their homes and, at the same time, the opportunity to develop skills in their volunteer positions that can carry over to their work lives. She emphasizes the opportunity to put down roots and the importance of community too. While at the co-op, she developed her close friendship with future City Councillor and CHFT Lifetime Honorary Board Member, Pam McConnell. Noreen remained an active member of Spruce Court until she and her family bought a house in the Danforth area of Toronto in 1993.
Noreen’s co-op involvement, however, was by no means limited to Spruce Court. CHFT applied for and received a federal youth grant providing salaries for Noreen, fellow Honorary Lifetime Member, Mark Goldblatt, and one other staffer. While meagre, this grant allowed them to focus full-time on Federation work. During this time, they participated in the City planning for the developing St. Lawrence neighbourhood and acquired a building site (Woodsworth Co-op) in the first phase, and shortly after obtained another site in the west end for a new project (Primrose Co-op). But during these early years, funding was precarious: the federal youth grant program was abruptly terminated and for a time, all continued to work while on unemployment insurance. Eventually CMHC and a few years later, the Ontario Government, began to provide “Resource Group” funding to support these new kinds of non-profit organizations developing non-profit and co-operative housing. Luckily, they were young and committed and felt that implementing the co-op housing model was worth the uncertainties and personal sacrifices. Additional staff were able to be hired, and the growing CHFT never looked back.
CHFT was significantly involved with the national co-op housing sector and the eventually re-named Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada. In the early 80s, CHFT was also trying to unify the co-op voice in Ontario to lobby the provincial government for more co-op housing. With the 1985 election of David Peterson’s minority Liberal government which needed the support of the NDP, the ground shifted, and the Co-operative Housing Association of Ontario (CHAO which later merged with CHF Canada), formed overnight. Noreen Dunphy became CHAO’s first staff person and stayed for three years.
By the late 80s, Noreen left working for the sector but has stayed true to her roots, holding significant positions in government and the broader housing sector. She brought her housing perspective to former Mayor David Crombie’s Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront; she became Special Advisor to the NDP Minister of Municipal Affairs in Ontario in the early 90s; she later joined the staff of City Councillor, Pam McConnell; and spent a few years at the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association (ONPHA) in a variety of capacities, including working on the well-known “Where’s Home?” reports, a joint ONPHA/CHF Canada analysis of Ontario’s private rental housing situation.
Noreen Dunphy spent the last 15 years of her working life as a housing policy expert in the City of Toronto’s Planning Department having received her Professional Planners designation. Dunphy reflects on how this was her first professional credential as she had left her undergraduate degree, incomplete, in the early 70s. She says instead, like so many others who sowed the seeds of the co-op housing sector, they were impatient to make a difference and left University. Dunphy’s education was on-the-job along with her colleagues. As a fearless 20-something, she had the confidence to find like-minded people and pursue a vision bigger than any one individual’s goals. She’s glad they didn’t know what they didn’t know at the time, but just went for it. We’re proud Noreen Dunphy was named an Honorary Lifetime Member of CHFT in 1998.
