We need more housing support to combat homelessness says local prof

“We really need to act quickly so that it doesn’t balloon to what exists now in much larger cities where it is really really deeply overwhelming to all the systems.”

CITYnews halifax \ Tyler Dunne

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With the reports of homelessness on the rise in Halifax, one local professor says there needs to be a significant push towards developing more social and supportive housing. 

Jeff Karabanow is a professor of social work at Dalhousie University who says the writing has been on the wall for decades concerning the increase in homelessness in the city.

“I moved here 22 years ago, and I remember the first interview I did was talking about the need to reinvest in affordable housing,” Karabanow said.

“We were seeing more and more people entering homelessness and that people could just not afford to live in a safe and affordable space any longer.”

Karabanow says the province needs to invest more into existing supportive and social housing and provide more incentives to the private sector, which can develop supports much faster than the non-profit sector.

“We really need to act quickly so that it doesn’t balloon to what exists now in much larger cities where it is really really deeply overwhelming to all the systems,” Karabanow explained.

Karabanow says the pull away from housing outside of the market economy has been ongoing for at least 40 years at the federal and provincial levels.

“And what we’ve seen now is just this perfect storm,” Karabanow said.

“[We are] now at a point where we have stock that is crumbling, and we just don’t have enough supply for the increase in demand.”

But, Karabanow says he is optimistic that the housing landscape can look different in 6-12 months with new supportive and social housing projects on the horizon like the development in Dartmouth.

“These are the pieces that we need to just kind of blanket our city so that there can be folks on the lower level of the economic strata that have some safety,” Karabanow said.

Investment aside, Karabanow says a shift also needs to happen with the housing market’s financialization.

Karabanow says there’s nothing wrong with individual folks holding on to their properties as a future investment for their children or themselves as they retire.

The challenges, he says, come from large cooperations that buy vast amounts of property and then raise the rent as demand increases and supply falls.

“The private sector cannot, with their trickle-down economic theory, provide the support that has been constantly argued that it will come – that we will start to see housing become more affordable for individuals,” Karabanow said.

“We’re not seeing that anymore.”

Karabanow says that while some of the right moves are happening, and those in politics seem to be deeply compassionate about helping those surviving on the streets, the system needs to hurry up and not just move individuals from one park to another – especially before that start of the hurricane and winter seasons.

“Over the last year, I’ve really been advocating with different levels of government that there is empty office space across HRM that could be rented out right now to provide some form of support.”