VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
STATUES SEE IT ALL
Tyvek huts and tents in Halifax give stark evidence of the tragic lives led by marginalized people — complex lives that are often not of their own making. Hopefully they remind others that their own lives are largely attributable to good luck, good timing and good mentors — rather than achievement alone.
The province and municipality can fix this housing problem through combined efforts — and they should do so quickly out of respect for the dignity of both the tent-dwellers and the public. Although the Spring Garden Road campgrounds give shelter, they lack plumbing — and therein lies the dignity issue.
Statues of Winston Churchill at the old library and Robbie Burns at Victoria Park represent personalities who led colourful lives — but not as colourful as the varied "nature calls" that they are forced to witness daily between midnight and 9 a.m. when the new library finally opens. HRM maintenance staff and police on patrol wince when asked about this reality by early-morning walkers in the area.
Elected officials cannot have it both ways. If they choose to condone a downtown campground indefinitely, they should, in the name of decency, contract with Royal Flush, Honey Huts or Porta Potty for the provision of sanitary services. The alternative is simple: provide affordable housing.
If corrective action is not taken for the sake of the campers or the public, it should at least be done for the sake of Churchill and Burns.
Fred Honsberger, Halifax
PASSING THE BUCK
Halifax Coun. Waye Mason’s July 9 opinion piece, “Much still to be done to address historic Halifax housing crisis,” is a classic example of trying to pass the responsibility for the crisis in affordable housing on to the province.
Mason has taken this position before. In a recent media interview, he dismissed any responsibility for the city to intervene by claiming the province has responsibility for housing. Perhaps he hasn’t read the Municipal Government Act, which requires municipalities to “include housing policies addressing affordable housing, special-needs housing and rental accommodation.” In addition, it is a truism that any municipality has a moral and civic obligation to look after the welfare of its citizens.
The reality is that Coun. Mason, the mayor and city council have contributed to the problem and have a responsibility to deal with it. In the past few years, Halifax has lost hundreds of units of low-rent housing to developers and businesses with permits from the city to construct higher-rent units, many in Coun. Mason’s district. The permits were handed out, in many cases, in the face of considerable opposition from residents. To add insult to injury, developers in the HRM are allowed to buy their way out of including low rentals in their buildings.
We are grossly lacking in leadership on this file. While the mayor and certain councillors became involved with the proposal for a CFL football team, they turned a blind eye to a humanitarian need. Hardly a sense of priorities.
The more disappointing, because the city has resources of land, personnel, property and finances to deal with the problem and there are solutions.
For example, in the short term, the old library that Coun. Mason has suggested be torn down could be equipped as an emergency shelter. It has water, light, toilet facilities and rooms that could be furnished for short-term occupation. There are hundreds of large containers stacked up at the port that could be modified for temporary or permanent modular housing and put on public land.
While the housing crisis has been growing, thousands of dollars have been spent on bicycle paths, traffic calming on certain residential streets, and closing off through traffic. By coincidence, Coun. Mason lives on one of those streets.
The city should take the lead in promoting the construction of a subdivision on one of the large parcels of land identified as a potential site for a CFL team. The development could be a mix of low-cost and subsidized housing, commercial and service outlets, schools and recreation facilities.
We are supposed to be a democracy, which implies that elected officials are there to serve the needs of the public that they represent. The mayor and council need to be reminded of that fact.
Owen Carrigan, Halifax
NEED ACTION NOW
Re: “Governments, private sector together must address affordable housing,” (July 3 opinion piece by Andy Lynch).
The report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says, “One in five households experiences serious housing affordability issues.” The report pointed to several main causes of the affordable housing crisis, including that “over the last 25 years-plus, there has been very little (almost none) non-market (public, social, co-operative) affordable housing built because of lack of funding and leadership from all levels of government.”
Yet the crisis has been building for 45 years, since rent controls were introduced in the 1970s and private builders promptly stopped building. Then governments, both senior levels, offered programs such as MURB (Multi-unit Residential Buildings), which provided an incentive for private funding, but it was short-lived. So, they proposed to fill the void themselves but soon quietly dropped housing programs as if apartment buildings were going to pop up everywhere. That’s how we got here.
In the meantime, between 1975 and 2020, the population of Nova Scotia grew by 95,000 (Canada’s grew from 23 million to 38 million), with no housing built — the existing stock is 45-plus years old — for the vast majority, the homeless and the very vulnerable, although quite adequate for the rest at, not incidentally, exorbitant prices.
And now, Nova Scotia is proposing to provide 33,000 units over 10 years. But the 30,000 who have been in need for years are desperate now. On top of that, the population will increase by 30,000 or more during the next decade.
The upshot of misplaced funds, and what anyone would consider a very bad business practice by elected representatives that has dwarfed the cost of housing — “Poverty comes with a $2-billion ‘price tag’ for Nova Scotia each year (April 8 story) — is that it has created years of unnecessary suffering for unsuspecting Nova Scotians.
We used to have make-work programs that are desperately needed now, both to mitigate the crisis and to provide jobs, as we can’t get enough housing, or get it fast enough.
Janet Hudgins, New Minas
COMPASSION LACKING
It is wonderful to see the transformation taking place in Halifax. Its reopening following the pandemic. The cranes on the skyline. The promises of new mass-transit initiatives, such as the high-speed ferry from Bedford. Our premier’s recent announcement of Halifax as the country’s start-up and scale-up capital. To be sure, it appears that we are a greater city in the making.
But lurking against the backdrop of all of those platitudes is the continuing homelessness which many of our fellow citizens experience. Their plights are simply the after-effects of the forms of growth referred to above. And it is not fair.
Profiled on July 8 in these pages was Allan Deyoung; a man of 60 who lost his job as a result of the pandemic, and soon thereafter the apartment he could no longer afford. He now calls home a small cabin in the woods, not far from a busy Dartmouth roadway, built for him by Halifax Mutual Aid. But he is about to be evicted. By the city. Illegal and unsafe, the city says. As if there were anything safe about Mr. Deyoung being forced to live on the street.
In our laudable quest for advancement, we are leaving many behind. Mr. Deyoung is just one. There are countless others. Nothing about his cabin in the woods is inherently or objectively unsafe. It seems to trouble no one but city bureaucrats. And they, many would suggest, have more than enough with which to contend without taking on the Mr. Deyoungs of our city, too.
So let’s ask ourselves: Where is our compassion? And how do we propose to be a truly great city without it? Gavin Giles, Halifax