Calls for more public, affordable housing as Nova Scotia sees crisis

Ask what affordable housing is, and some will give a traditional definition.

“Affordable housing, to me, would be where you are paying one-third of your income for rent, and nothing more, not a cent more,” said Linda Carey.

Carey lives in public housing. She says affordable housing is almost impossible to find.

“There’s nowhere, nowhere, city housing, and that’s a list, a waiting list,” she said.

Shelby D’Eon wouldn’t call her apartment affordable. The preschool teacher earns a $55,000 salary and spends $1,500 on rent each month.

“That’s almost eighty per cent of my budget,” said D’Eon. “I haven’t moved. I’ve been staying there for five years because I don’t want to move because everything is even more expensive than that.”

With demand for housing up, and supply still low, many are overspending on housing. As a result, there are calls to increase supply.

“For Nova Scotia, we need 50,000 units by 2030 in order to reach our affordability goal,” said Kevin Ndoro, of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Housing advocates say the lowest earners are often left behind and that buildings are not going up fast enough.

“We should be building public housing on the kind of scale that we put money into highways every year,” said Dalhousie Legal Aid’s Mark Culligan.

Affordable housing is an umbrella term. When governments announce they’re building new units, not all include public housing, but housing to support low-income earners.

“Trying to actually create, not deeply subsidized housing, as opposed to more affordable housing at 30 per cent of income,” said Jim Graham, with the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia.

He says public housing groups across Nova Scotia have long waitlists.

“Check with any housing authority, anywhere in the province right now, I think, and they would tell you,” said Graham.

While there are cranes in the skies across the Maritime region and lots of apartments going up, some feel those units are only for the wealthy.

However, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation says increasing supply at all will increase affordability for everyone.