Affordable Housing Programs Act - Bill 489

THE SPEAKER « » : The honourable Leader of the New Democratic Party.

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : I am pleased to move Bill No. 489 for second reading.

It's been an interesting conversation this afternoon. I think at the heart of why we have focused our Opposition Day on moving these housing Bills is because of the contention that we have heard through this session that the plan is working. Based on the conversations we have with our constituents, that just isn't the case for so many Nova Scotians.

We want it to work. We want everyone to remain housed. One of the challenges that we have is that when this government talks about supply, which is the only word they can use - we're speeding up evictions? Supply. What about affordability? Supply. What about rent control? Supply. Well, let's dig into that. What does supply mean?

Yes, we need supply. We need tens of thousands of housing units, but when we hear announcements about units being built, about housing starts - not housing completions, by the way, housing starts - we often hear the term "affordable." Then we get the question from our constituents, from the public, from the media: "What does 'affordable' mean?" We are not able to give an answer, because there is not a single definition of affordability when it comes to housing.

It's very clear that this government is committed to primarily easing the path for construction for the private sector. That's the path this government has taken to housing. I think it's great to have more supply. We know we need it. We need it at all ends of the spectrum, but we also know that trickle-down housing isn't really a thing.

When we're in this Chamber advocating for real people, real human beings who are concerned about the price of housing, who are concerned about finding homes they can afford, who are concerned about keeping homes, those people will not be impacted by this mythical supply. They will not be impacted even if the gamble that this supply is going to lower prices in 10, 20 years - those are the horizons we're looking at.

The thing that will impact their lives - the kind of supply that will impact the lives of people in this province in real time - is housing that they can actually afford. The question is: What does affordability mean? Well, as members on the government side have said, that's different for different people. Not everybody needs public housing, not everyone needs social housing, and we absolutely agree. So if it's different for different people, then common sense should prevail.

What our Bill says is that we should define affordability, and we should define it based on all different people. We shouldn't have a blanket definition, so we'll define it the way that the Province itself defines it when it comes to provincial housing, the way that mortgage companies define it when it comes to stress tests: 30 per cent of your take-home income. That's what's affordable.

I would venture to say that 90 per cent or more of the people in this Chamber are homeowners. All of us would have gone through the mortgage application process where we needed to get that mortgage, and we needed to show that no more than 30 per cent of our income was going to our housing costs. So we are asking government to take a common-sense approach and to use a single definition of affordability when all of the affordable housing announcements are made.

We also know that affordable housing is, in fact, best built by the non-market housing sector. There are jurisdictions around the world - Vienna is the most famous, people talk about it - where over 50 per cent of the rental market is non-market housing. That doesn't mean it all looks like public housing as we have here, but the reality is that developers themselves are in business. They're in the business of housing, and we have all kinds of businesses in this province, in our districts. We have fisheries, and we have forestry, and we have small businesses, and we have tech, and we have all kinds of things, and all of those businesses have budgets and bottom lines, and sometimes shareholders. Housing development is no different. They're a business.

The idea that the for-profit housing sector is going to build the amount of affordable housing we need is just nonsensical. The private sector has told us as much. One landlord organization, speaking on behalf of some of Canada's biggest landlords, recently told the CBC, "We're not tasked with building deeply affordable or social housing. We can't be there. We're in business. Let's draw a line between these two." I'll table that after my colleague takes a look at it.

The thing is, they're not in the business of doing that. We need supply, we need homes that people can afford, so who could help make that happen? Well, government could help make that happen, and the non-market housing sector could help make that happen. That's why this Bill specifies - and this is at the request of many non-market housing providers that we've spoken to - that when the government who - you know, the minister really likes to talk about all of their country-leading affordable housing programs. Well, when they disburse the funds from those programs, non-market housing providers in this province should be prioritized. The scoring system should prioritize those providers.

Those providers will often work in partnership with the private sector. They'll use innovative building methods. They may not go it alone. Many are not primarily housing providers or builders. There are not-for-profits that do a lot of different things, but we think it stands to reason that if, as part of its push towards supply, the government is genuinely trying to preserve and build affordable housing, then the non-market sector should be prioritized in that regard.

I think the best example of this - and we've talked about it in this House before - is what's happened in my district in the Southdale-Mount Hope special planning area. In March 2022 - end of the fiscal year - out of the blue, this government announced that they were giving Clayton Developments $22 million to build affordable housing. It was a little bit hard to figure out what that meant. It certainly didn't, as far as we could understand, mean rent geared to income, as we've suggested today. I think it was a percentage of market rate. At the time, we had so many questions: Where does this announcement come from? Why Clayton? What does "affordable" mean?

They said that they would build 373 affordable homes with that money. I've tabled the document. At the time, the minister told reporters: "This project will produce more affordable housing units than all our programs have produced in the last three years combined." Sounds amazing except that it didn't happen. The developer gave the money back. They gave the money back. When they tell you they are in the business of housing, believe them. They didn't give the money back. It was a forgivable loan, and they didn't take advantage of it.

The point is, they didn't want the money. They said no, thank you, we don't want your money, because they are in the business of housing. They are not in the sector of creating homes that people can afford. If people can afford their homes, great. I am sure they are very happy to. I will say we have many landlords in this province who work with organizations like ISANS, AHANS, Adsum, and others to make special arrangements for people who need affordable housing, but those are one-ups. We believe that we could see so much more leadership in this House to make a systemic change.

We have so many people sleeping rough right now. We have so many thousands more people whom every single one of our offices hear from, I guarantee you, and who talk about how difficult it is to balance the budget at the end of each month. Housing is the biggest stressor.

In the end, just to finish this story, in Southdale-Mount Hope, the YWCA partnered with Shaw Group in using panelized, flat-pack, off-site housing techniques - which many non-market housing providers have used, from AHANS to Adsum at the Sunflower to North Preston in Dartmouth - to build for and house 32 families. The Province stepped up and they donated - or they funded, with other orders of government - $2.7 million or $2.9 million, something like that. So $22 million to a private-sector developer - nothing, years later - but $2.9 million to a non-market housing provider that innovates the project themselves and partners with the private sector themselves, and we've got 32 families with stable, affordable housing that they are not worried about getting kicked out of.

These are the things that this Bill aims to replicate. These are the kinds of arrangements that we want to see more of. We hear in this Chamber all the time that the solution to the housing crisis is simple: Build more homes. But it's not simple. Again, in our MLA offices - contrary to the assertions of the Minister of Service Nova Scotia - we spend an enormous amount of time educating people about the Residential Tenancies Act, sharing information about government programs, and helping them to try to afford the homes they need, and it is getting harder and harder.

According to the 2022 Census, 32.2 per cent of Nova Scotian households rent, and 25 per cent of renters are in poor housing need. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Halifax right now is $2,669. Can you imagine: $2,669? You can't save for a down payment when you are paying that much rent and when the average price of a home is $435,000.

In 2021, the Housing for All Working Group called on the provincial government to build or acquire 33,490 units of non-market, affordable housing in the next 10 years. We've heard an announcement of 273 public housing units; 7,300 people are on the wait-list for public housing. That's a lot of numbers. But at the end of the day, what we want to impress upon the government - to anyone who's listening - is that this housing crisis is not a simple problem. It is a multi-faceted problem, and we need a multi-faceted approach.

Our Homes Within Reach plan, of which this legislation is a part, attacks this issue from all angles - from supply to making rents more affordable to making home ownership more achievable. I think all of us in this Chamber want to make Nova Scotia a place where everyone can thrive, from families to seniors to students to everyone in between. We are calling on government to actually make that a reality.