I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about housing in Dartmouth North. As we go into Supply debate on this budget, I want to talk a little about the current situation in Dartmouth North and what we see or don’t see in the budget for the scenarios that I’m about to offer and to describe. When I was elected, when I first knocked on doors in the 2017 election, the thing that I heard most about in many parts of my community was the people’s concern about the rising rents. At that time, Dartmouth North, as I’ve said before, was a place where you could get a cheap place to live. At that time in 2017, rents were beginning to rise. There was this indication that things were getting a little out of hand. Meanwhile, income assistance rates were frozen, minimum wage was extremely low, there was quite a lot of unemployment at the time. It was a tough go for many people.
When I was elected, I went to our then-leader, the member for Halifax Chebucto, and I suggested that we introduce some legislation on rent control, which he thought was a good idea, so we did. That piece of legislation sat on the order paper for several years. We introduced it, reintroduced it, the government at the time was not interested in looking at rent control at all, even though we were sounding the alarm in the NDP caucus about rents rising and that kind of thing. In 2019, things began to change in a very identifiable, remarkable way, I would say.
I remember sitting in my office in the Summer of 2019 and reflecting to Sandi and Rebecca, who work with me, everyone who comes in this office now has an issue with housing. They said, it’s true. It wasn’t totally true, there were a few other things that we were doing in our office in terms of case work, but by and large we were beginning to see and hear stories of people getting evicted for funny reasons and not knowing that they could carry on an eviction process through Residential Tenancies to protect their rights. People were applying more for housing, for public housing, and being told that the wait-lists were two years long. People’s rents were going up in a way that was just unsustainable, and they literally were unable to pay for the rent increases, and renovictions began to become popular, as it were.
Then when the pandemic hit, we heard the then-Premier say the now famous words “Stay the blazes home.” People couldn’t stay the blazes home if they didn’t have a home to live in, so we lobbied hard for putting in a ban on evictions and some kind of rent cap and that did happen. For a while it was sort of just to manage the pandemic but then, of course, the pandemic hasn’t really ended yet, has it? Some things were sort of turning around a little bit to protect people. Meanwhile, the situation was getting worse.
Now we come to 2023 and we see that the rent cap is being extended, though no longer will it be a set-in-legislation rent cap, but it will be a set-in-Executive-Council rent cap. The minister has said he suspects the rent cap will be 5 per cent but we know that anything that is set in Executive Council is subject to change at any time, with no debate, no scrutiny, and no need to answer questions, so it’s a bit concerning.
Here we are now - rents are skyrocketing. In Dartmouth North we have the lowest vacancy rate in the province. The average vacancy rate for Nova Scotia is 1 per cent, which is unhealthy. We know that a healthy vacancy rate ranges around 3 per cent. In Nova Scotia our vacancy rate is 1 per cent, in Dartmouth North it is around 0.6 per cent, so it’s lower. It’s the lowest in the province. There is nowhere to rent an apartment in Dartmouth North. If people need to leave an apartment for a reason like the condition of the apartment - say it’s an unsafe building, say their neighbour is harassing them and they just don’t feel safe anymore, say they had their job hours cut and they no longer can afford something - if they try to find another apartment in Dartmouth North, it would be virtually impossible 5340 because every time an apartment comes up for rent, the rents are doubling and, in some cases, tripling.
At 71 Primrose, Mr. Speaker, there are a number of tenants - I think there are 16 units in that building, maybe a few more - who have all been told their units need to be renovated. I have been in some of the units, and they do not need to be renovated. I’m not a contractor, but I know a brand-new backsplash and brand-new cupboards and brand-new flooring when I see it. Many of the units literally have those things. They do not need improvements and if they did, they would not be the kinds of improvements that require someone to move out, but the tenants in this building have been told that, no, they need to leave and if they want to come back they certainly can but their rents will go up almost $1,000.
The Minister Responsible for the Residential Tenancies Act will say that this type of practice, or this type of thing that is happening, happens few and far - not very often, the occasional time this happens. The other thing that is happening in Dartmouth North is there is a gal who lives in my neighbourhood who was told by her landlord - she had a fixed-term lease - he would not be renewing her fixed-term lease, which I think she was paying upwards of $900 for her apartment, but he would not be renewing it because he had a family member who was going to move into the unit. A few weeks later, after she moved out of the apartment, she saw the unit listed on the internet at $2,200. So that landlord used the fixed-term lease loophole to get her out of that apartment and to charge more than double the amount that he was getting for that apartment. Now, I understand inflation. I understand that people are facing inflation, expenses are going up. I understand that if you pay for your tenant’s heat that it is going up. I understand that roofs cost more. I understand all those things, Mr. Speaker, but I don’t understand how this government can sit back and allow such an abuse of the Residential Tenancies Act.
That brings me to this budget, and what’s in this budget for housing. I hope I’ve painted a bit of a picture about the situation that’s happening. People are getting renovicted, people are getting kicked out because of a fixed-term lease loophole. People’s rents are rising. There is no place to go in public housing, and there is no place to go in market housing. And this budget has no money for new affordable housing. Now the Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs will say that the government has put millions of dollars into housing, and that is true. Millions of dollars into housing is true. But it’s not millions of dollars into affordable housing. And this government refuses to adopt a definition of affordable when it comes to those development deals, when buildings are going up - at least in HRM, apartment buildings and many, many units are being built as we speak. There are three or four in the tiny bit of Dartmouth North that I live in myself. And none of those units are guaranteed to have affordable units in them, none of those builds are guaranteed to have affordable units in them. The minster says, okay, so what we’ll do instead is we’ll provide rent subsidies. We’ve got 1,000 more rent subsidies coming. Except that you have to be paying more than 50 per cent of your income to now qualify for a rent subsidy. And the minister explains that - the reasoning for that change well, because there’s so much pressure on the program. Well, no kidding there’s pressure on the program. Rents are skyrocketing, landlords are misusing the Residential Tenancies Act to misuse fixed-term leases. Renovictions are happening all over the place, and there’s nowhere to live. So of course there’s pressure on the rent subsidy program. My office has been signing people up, or helping people apply to the rent subsidy program for at least six or seven months. Because it is literally the only way to stop people in my community from becoming homeless and adding to the tent communities that are already up and around Dartmouth North and other places in HRM.
We are hearing stories - I heard a story on The Current this morning, Mr. Speaker, about a woman in Bridgewater who has been living in a tent with her daughter, and they have to stop doing homework when it gets dark out, because there’s no more light to do homework. Think about that for a minute, folks. Think about that. Imagine raising a child, who goes to public school, in a tent. There’s another story that The Current played the other day about a woman, I think in Lunenburg, somewhere like that, who’s renovating a school bus to live in. Which would be kind of cool, but right now the cost of renovations is making it impossible for her to finish that job. This is the province that we are making decisions about and for.
This is the province where this government says there’s so much pressure on the rent subsidy program that we have to change the qualifications to cut out people who are in what the CMHC defines as core housing need. We recognize people are in housing need, but we’re not going to help them until they’re in deep housing need. That is reprehensible. It's a terrible move, Mr. Speaker. So what happens to folks who are in this situation? They pay more and more of their income, the little income they have, on their rent. Which means they buy less groceries, which means they go to the food banks, which this government is happy to support. No one goes to school hungry in this province, we heard that today. So people are using food banks, people are using the insufficient food programs there are in schools. People are just going hungry. People are splitting their medication prescriptions in half. Spreading their medications over longer so they’re becoming more unhealthy.
Therefore, we’re putting all kinds of burdens on people in general, and also our systems that we are trying to improve, like our health care system and our education system. When kids go to school hungry, they don’t learn as well. When people can’t take required medication that they’ve been prescribed, they get sicker and they’re more of a burden on the health care system. If we want to fix health care “more, faster,” then we need to properly invest in affordable housing. We need to make sure that everyone who needs one can access a rent subsidy. We need to make sure we’re actually building new affordable housing that is rent geared to income. That means it doesn’t cost more than 30 per cent of one’s income. And we have to make sure that people can buy nutritious food. These are not difficult concepts, Mr. Speaker. This is what we need to do to make sure that our population is healthy and that our health care system can flourish and can become a system of wellness. Imagine being the minister of the Department of Wellness. Well, we could have one, if we could do all of these other things that contribute to wellness in this province. I will end my time by saying that I am wholly disappointed that there is no real investment in affordable housing in this budget, that the rent subsidy program has been cut to shreds, and that this government thinks it’s okay that people go to food banks for their food instead of being able to afford their own purchasing of food in grocery stores or in a market. It’s shameful, it’s reprehensible, and we need to change it.