N.S. government to consider proposal that includes new public housing

Senior housing officials are preparing a presentation for the Nova Scotia government on ways to address the province's housing crisis, and one of those options will be to build new public housing.

Deputy housing minister Paul Lafleche told members of the legislature's public accounts committee on Wednesday that the level of need for market rate housing and affordable units is such that all options must be considered.

That could mean the provincial government building new affordable housing stock for the first time in years.

"We probably need some new public housing," Lafleche told the MLAs.

For years, the housing file has suffered from a lack of consistent people in leadership roles and being shuffled between government departments, Lafleche said.

Making housing the responsibility of a single provincewide agency, which recently happened, should help address long-standing needs that have gone unaddressed by previous governments, he said.

But the deputy minister also cautioned that no single approach is going to solve the issue and fixes will not come quickly.

Other options the cabinet will be asked to consider include further partnerships with the private sector, buying new buildings to be repurposed, and assessing what existing provincial stock can get by with renovations and what situations would require new builds.

Lafleche said an ongoing challenge has been trying to renovate existing public housing buildings to make them more accessible.

"You can renovate an old unit but, fundamentally, the structure doesn't take the renovations well. It's taking way too long … it's just not good. It's very expensive, it's very slow and it's blocking units from getting online, on stream."

Officials said Wednesday that such renovations can take nine months or more, and units are not available during that time. Another option for dealing with accessible housing could be a special kind of rent supplement geared to specific types of buildings, said Lafleche.

A federal program intended to help with the cost of renovations will only produce 90 units over 10 years.

For context, there are 11,200 public housing units in the province and about 6,000 people are on a wait list. Currently, the average general wait time is more than two years, while the average wait for a priority placement is 1½ years. 

Since the Tories came to power in 2021, the primary focus in addressing the need for housing has been to increase the number of rent supplements and speed up the process to get private sector developments approved sooner in the Halifax Regional Municipality, where there is a deficit of about 20,000 units.