Halifax deputy mayor calls on province for new public housing, none since 1995

Halifax Deputy Mayor Sam Austin is voicing his frustration with a lack of provincial funding for public housing for the Halifax Regional Municipality, writing his feelings in a lengthy Twitter thread on Tuesday.

“(The housing crisis) has been a problem that’s been 30 years in the making,” the Dartmouth Centre councillor told Global News. “We need to put away the ideological blinders and actually be using every tool in the toolbox. And one of those tools is public housing.”

Last week saw protests by local housing advocacy groups and Haligonians calling for social housing.

There hasn’t been a new build by the province for rent geared to income units since 1995.

“As the government likes to say, ‘we need more supply.’ Supply should include public housing as well,” said Austin.

Nova Scotia Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister John Lohr told media at the legislature Wednesday that the province is dealing with the housing crisis very aggressively.

“We’ve got one of the highest per-capita public housing densities of any province in the country and we had a very clear mandate from the Auditor General to do a better job of managing what we have,” Lohr said. “We’re working very hard on that – to do a better job managing the units, turning the units over quicker, managing who is in the units and all of those things.”

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He went on to mention the $50 million over four years that is being allocated towards upgrading the current public housing units — buildings that currently have a two-year waitlist to get into.

“We’re not going to fix the waitlist unless we add to the unit stock,” Austin said. “It’s a limited number of units for a growing population. The unit count hasn’t changed, the population is getting larger and the need has certainly grown over the last while in particular.”

Since HRM’s amalgamation in the 1990s, public housing has been a provincial responsibility.

Austin says the reason for that change of power was to have a consistent approach and supply throughout the province.

“Unfortunately, that didn’t happen because the consistent approach was, ‘we’re just not going to do this anymore.’ And the whole program just ceased.”

While he says the province has been implementing rent supplement programs and other housing solutions, he believes public housing needs to be part of the solution as well.

“I don’t like taking shots at (the province) for decisions that they’re making which are challenging,” said Austin. “But, I feel on this one it has to be said that this is an ineffective, incomplete solution unless you’re thinking about public housing. Because the effects of that decision end up falling on the municipality.”

“When people don’t have enough housing, it’s in our public spaces, in our parks where we’re sheltering,” he said. “We’re diverting money that would go to primary municipal responsibilities to deal with the housing crisis that we’re in. And all of this is coming from the fact that on the provincial side, we’re just not getting the job done.”

Austin hopes the province takes another look at including new public housing builds as part of the solution moving forward.

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