Guelph is “a city of resilience,” mayor says in state of the city address | Globalnews.ca
Mayor Cam Guthrie has described Guelph as a city of resilience.
The State of the City Address on Thursday focused on housing and the 2025 budget among other topics.
A lot of the “heavy lifting” the city did in the past 12 months was around housing, Guthrie said.
“The heavy lifting revolved around internal process changes to make things easier and faster — policy and zoning changes to allow more flexibility of the type of housing we can have in the city of Guelph.”
Although Guthrie didn’t reach his goal of reducing the budget’s tax levy to 4 per cent or less, he said city staff did bring the levy down from around 10 per cent to just under 7 per cent.
During his speech, Guthrie acknowledged how hard the last year has been for residents and businesses in the Royal City. He said that in spite of such challenges, he is proud to see how Guelph demonstrated its resiliency.
Guthrie said the city can pull together amid the uncertainty of U.S tariffs, provincial and federal elections and housing.
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“We are a resilient city. We’ve gone through difficult times and there is a lot of uncertainty in the world today,” he said. “We need to recognize that and acknowledge those uncertainties. but also acknowledge that we as a community can weather these storms, we can get through these issues.”
Guthrie praised the city’s working relationships with community partners to address issues such as homelessness.
Some of the other highlights included kickstarting the potential logistics on an encampment site and leveraging city-owned lands for housing.
The city had a provincial housing target of 1,500 homes in 2024. As of the most recent reporting date, there have been only 849 housing starts or less than 60 per cent of the target. The city didn’t meet its goal due to builders and developers facing higher building costs and high interest rates.
Forty-one out of the 50 municipalities that are provincially tracked didn’t meet their housing target, and out of those that did miss their target, Guelph’s performance is still in the top 30 per cent.
The city said it also did well in some forms of non-market housing. Kindle Communities opened 10 Shelldale in June, a five-storey building offering nearly three dozen supportive housing units. The following month, Wellington County opened shelter space at Norfolk Manor for 68 people with around-the-clock staffing support.
In addition, the University of Guelph announced in late November that it is developing a new on-campus residence building for first-year students for the first time in 25 years.
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