About half of the 7,000 Nova Scotians waiting for public housing are seniors

CITYnews halifax / By Lyndsay Armstrong, The Canadian Press

HALIFAX — About half of the 7,020 households on Nova Scotia’s wait-list for public housing are composed of seniors, the deputy minister of housing said Wednesday, a number the opposition said should make the government feel ashamed.

Seniors also compose more than half of the 1,800 low-income residents living in Nova Scotia’s 11,200 public housing units, Byron Rafuse told a legislature committee.

In response, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said, “the government should have an enormous amount of shame at the number of seniors that are struggling to make it month to month.”

Those seniors, she said, have worked their whole lives and are now on a fixed income, unable to keep up with the rising cost of living.

Braedon Clark, the Liberal housing critic, said the high proportion of seniors on the public housing wait-list is disappointing and “incredibly sad.”

However, Rafuse said the government is making “fairly good” progress toward shrinking the wait-list, adding that the province has reduced the time it takes to prepare a unit for a new tenant after the previous residents move out. A government spokesperson said the average time someone spends on the wait-list is 1.7 years.

Brian Ward, head of the Nova Scotia Public Housing Agency, said Wednesday that unit turnaround times have been reduced by 25 per cent since December 2022. It now takes 134 days, or almost four-and-a-half months, for the agency to get a unit ready for a new tenant.

Nova Scotia has previously announced it will put $58.8 million toward 273 new public housing units for more than 700 people, with another $24.4 million from Ottawa. The province says these will be built gradually, and so far 17 of them are occupied.

All 273 new homes are expected to be complete between 2027 and 2028, said a spokesperson with the Nova Scotia Public Housing Agency. These planned builds mark the first new public housing units built by the province since the 1990s.

Rafuse told the committee meeting the province’s housing plan “will create the environment” for an additional 41,200 homes over the next five years. He said that in the past year, 4,600 housing units have been built in the province.

Clark said the government’s ideas for tackling the housing crisis “are OK, but the execution is too small and too slow and too many people are being left behind.”

The Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia says that as of last week, 1,287 people in the Halifax Regional Municipality reported they were homeless.

To meaningfully address housing needs in Nova Scotia, the government should throw its support and money behind non-profits that are equipped to create new affordable homes, Clark said. The government is underutilizing these organizations, he said, and “has to be empowering and further the funding capacity and scale of the non-profit (housing) sector.”

Chender echoed these sentiments, and said she was disappointed by the government’s progress a year after launching its housing plan.

During the Wednesday meeting “we didn’t learn anything new. We heard the same sort of disappointing deflections that we always hear about housing,” she said.

“They’re spending the most ever and yet we are not meeting any of the needs.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 2, 2024.

Lyndsay Armstrong, The Canadian Press