Charlottetown grapples with housing crisis
CHARLOTT ETOWN • Jeff Gallant sits on a porch on a Sunday on Prince Edward Island.
Immigration is going strong here, young people are staying put, and the economy is, says one former premier, “on a tear.”
By this narrative, the littlest province has students staying to work in the aerospace and wind energy sector; it has newcomers from India, Iran and China, and with a higher immigration rate than any western province last year, it has a sense of, who are you calling have-not?
Gallant, however, does not register the province’s growth this way. He cannot find a place to live for himself and his two children, as he has been evicted twice in four months. This situation is unremarkable at the moment on the Island, where landlords are doing renovations and raising their rents. P.E.I.’s aggressive growth has resulted in a housing shortage so acute that Charlottetown has, as of November, a lower vacancy rate than does Toronto.
“I don’t know if I should unpack my life or just wait to be kicked out,” Gallant says, two weeks before receiving an eviction notice. His landlord is selling the home.
He works at a shop printing T-shirts and hoodies, and to pay the first month’s rent of $1,200 at his current house, he had to borrow money from his mother, who formerly worked at a dollar store, and his stepfather, who works part-time at a bingo hall.
In a rental market given over to bidding wars, Gallant says he only managed to get the unit because the landlord thought his son, Logan, three, was cute.
He has two months to find another unit, although he plans to appeal the eviction to the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission. He envies his friends who live in cheaper cities in New Brunswick.
“I would love to leave this island,” he says. Mainlanders might suspect P.E.I. is a province that does not change, as if it had not just elected the country’s strongest Green Party to official opposition status.
The Island is still a place where the new premier and opposition leader hugged it out after April’s election — an election in which one riding had two candidates with the same name, Matthew MacKay versus Matthew MacKay.
But it is changing with pace and without foresight. Islanders are repatriating after living out West, newcomers are responding to new policies designed to attract them and rural seniors are moving downtown to be closer to doctors.
As of last fall, the vacancy rate in Charlottetown is 0.2 per cent, the lowest ever recorded in the city by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. This rate compares to a 1.1 per cent vacancy rate in Toronto. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Charlottetown is $921, and the median price of a single detached home is approximately $285,000, an 18 per cent increase from last year. In the Greater Toronto Area, tenants have faced a housing shortage for more than a decade, but now the crisis of the 905 has entered the 902.
“We’re a small city with big-city problems,” says Charlottetown Mayor Philip Brown.
He blames the province, as it did not sufficiently invest in bus routes to enable students to live outside Charlottetown or rural health care to prevent seniors from needing to urbanize. Affordable housing units, recruitment of construction workers — these duties, he says, belong to the provincial government.
Working four blocks away, Hannah Bell is the provincial Green Party critic for housing and social development. She says the city should share the responsibility but has dragged its feet by doing two years of surveys. They know two per cent of units are used for Airbnb, and they know that the “twin sister” to a housing crisis is food insecurity, whereby people sacrifice their food budgets to pay rent. She says she has met constituents who cannot find pet-friendly units so are considering putting down their cats and dogs.
The housing shortage is challenging the very identity of the Island. It markets itself as “the food island,” when in fact it has one of the highest rates of childhood food insecurity of any Canadian province.
Its slogan is “the mighty island,” when some constituents, Bell says, are left living in their cars.
The bridge to the mainland costs nearly $50, paid only in that direction. It’s the island where you have to pay to leave, and Gallant, for one, would be glad to.