AN ADDRESS SHOULD BE A HUMAN RIGHT

It's interesting that Premier Tim Houston has identified an immediate need for 1,100 new housing units in Nova Scotia.

According to AIRDNA, a website that tracks the short-term rental sector, there are over 2,598 active listings in Nova Scotia. Those are apartments, condos and houses taken from the long-term rental market for short rentals to holidayers. About 30 per cent of those would be seasonal rentals, like cottages.

In HRM, AIRDNA says there are 1,300 active rentals. In essence, that's the equivalent of six hidden hotels operating in the city. It's also a lot of places not available for rent. Plus, it restricts the job market since a typical Halifax hotel employs between 0.5 and 0.8 people per bedroom. A 200room hotel will employ between 100 to 160 people like front-desk clerks, chefs, servers, managers, office and sales staff, housekeepers and maintenance crews.

So the city is out these long-term rental units, plus 600 to 900 jobs as well as potentially under-assessing these commercial properties at a residential tax rate.

Perhaps there is an opportunity to incentivize owners of these short-term units to release them back into the long-term rental pool?

With regards to homeless people, couldn't we pull together a type of incubator housing? In the 1970s and '80s, we built incubator malls across the province.

These facilities offered cheap rents to start-up businesses. Each unit had an office, washroom and large production space. If we could do it for businesses, why not people?

Many years ago, Money magazine carried a feature which said the greatest impediment to employment was the lack of an address. Without an address to file with government officials, employers can't hire people. Without an address, people can't be clean and rested enough to present themselves for work. Without an address, you can't open a bank account, so even those who qualify for various types of social assistance or pensions can't receive their money.

An address should be a human right.

Can we adapt an incubator concept to convert existing municipal, provincial and federal buildings into a type of dormitory full of bedsit units? We have the example of an office building converted into a hotel. Another option would be to rehab some of the 8,000 churches projected to close in Canada in the next decade into simple housing for the homeless. These units wouldn't be elaborate, but would provide a safe, warm place to live. If they are downtown, then they are walkable to work.

We could bring people in off the street and allow them to adjust by first helping to maintain the building in lieu of rent. They would have a defined timeline, say a year, to reorganize their lives and possibly find employment and build a nest egg on which to move forward. That timeframe would also provide an assessment period to determine if an individual needed more specialized assistance or placement.

The premier has shown surprising flexibility and speed in responding to the housing issue. Let's see if other branches of government can push the envelope for what the late Jane Buss, former executive director of The Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia, called “cheap and cheerful” solutions.