ACORN hosts town hall to address key community issues in Waterloo Region

Waterloo Region ACORN hosted a town hall Saturday with the aim of bringing the community together to discuss pressing local housing issues.

ACORN, a tenants' rights advocacy group, invited residents of Waterloo Region to a community town hall on Saturday with the goal of providing a platform for residents to share the challenges they’re facing, brainstorm solutions, and help determine ACORN’s priorities for 2025.

“We don’t want people to think we’re just [focusing on] renovictions,” Ryan Murdock, secretary for Waterloo Region ACORN told CTV News. “It’s an important aspect, but everything we do is member led, member driven.”

The meeting, which was held Saturday afternoon at the Kitchener Public Library, consisted of leaders sharing ACORN’s ongoing campaigns at local, provincial, and national levels, focusing on critical issues such as bad faith evictions, soaring grocery prices, and inadequate social assistance rates.

“There was a replacement bylaw, so where if you demolish affordable housing, it has to be replaced because you can’t just claim you’re building new houses and that will fix the affordability issue when there is often affordable housing being developed, redeveloped for no good reason except [for] development profits,” Murdock explained.

Attendees also heard stories of grassroots victories, including a presentation by a Hamilton ACORN organizer on their successful fight for a robust anti-renoviction bylaw in Hamilton.

It’s a move that local ACORN leaders are hoping will be implemented in Waterloo Region.

“So obviously, the anti renoviction bylaw was one of the most important ones...sadly city council hasn’t yet heeded the call so we’re hoping again things like today’s town hall and building more momentum will get them to realize that they need to listen,” Murdock said.

Leaders say the town hall is about empowering residents to take action and create meaningful change.

“Calling for vacancy control as well because we know that in this region, for every affordable unit we build, we lose 39,” said Kitchener Centre MPP Aislinn Clancy, when addressing the crowd who attended the town hall. “There is a massive hemorrhaging of folks on the street with a doubling of homelessness in the last three years. We know that disproportionately it’s tenants and low middle income folks that are facing the brunt of this high rent market.”

Murdock says their local chapter will review their organizing strategies and past successes, demonstrating how community persistence can lead to tangible policy changes.

The event also featured the launch of a new tenant survey aimed at uncovering the scale of housing struggles faced by low-income residents across Waterloo Region.

“The survey is something that we’ll be able to do over the next little while and then come back to, not just [to be] more informed as a chapter, but [to be] able to go forward with politicians who love large numbers and data, to show them that not only do we have anecdotal evidence, but that there are certain issues that plague a lot of their constituents,” Murdock said.