Not much new for public housing
The Houston government’s Thursday budget had little new for public housing.
It includes $35.3 million to starting building 222 new units under a program announced last fall.
The province also plans to open another 25 modular public housing units by the end of March. Those units, announced last week, will help as many as 88 people displaced by wildfires.
The Municipal Affairs and Housing Department said Thursday that tenders go out this year and all units are expected to be ready by 20272028.
Opponents and advocates wanted to see more done to deal with the housing crisis.
“We have a huge issue with this premier’s ideological opposition to building affordable housing. We have a massive, massive number of Nova Scotians in core housing need and lots of middle-class folks that struggle each month to pay the rent,” said NDP Leader Claudia Chender.
“We see almost nothing to help those folks in this budget."
Others are willing to give the government some credit for getting back into building public housing.
Putting up 222 public housing units over the next four years with federal help is “a good start,” says a Halifax real estate consultant.
“It’s a certainly a big departure from the longstanding trend in the last few decades where very little housing at all was built,” said Neil Lovitt, vice-president at Turner Drake and Partners.
“It’s definitely not the full extent of what should be provided before we would say the job is done.”
The need is hard to quantify, Lovitt said.
“It’s a number that’s in the thousands, not in the hundreds.”
Lots of people are struggling now with housing affordability issues that weren’t nearly as severe a decade back.
But even if you go back a decade, “there were still plenty of people at that time, that as a society, we were okay with leaving in very unaffordable-for-them housing,” he said.
The question is how badly we want to solve the problem. Do we want to “get back to a previously acceptable level of population that was struggling? Or do we want to be very ambitious and solve the problem entirely?” Lovitt said.
“At the very least though … there is a lot more than just 200 households’ worth of people that need a non-market housing solution.”
He said it’s not just those housed who benefit.
“If people are able to be housed affordably and stably, there are net savings in terms of the health care system, in terms of the justice system, and in terms of other social support programs that are greater than the direct cost of housing people,” Lovitt said.