Halifax desperately needs new public housing after a 50-year stall, says expert

A renewed focus on building social housing would help vulnerable people affected by the housing crunch, according to a retiredDalhousie University urban planning professor.

Jill Grant said effective socialor publichousingis built with public funds and subsidized so that people pay rentbased on their income not a percentage of average rents in the area.

Examples of social housing in the Halifax area include Mulgrave Park and Uniacke Square, she said.

Most of the social housing in the metro area was built in the 1950s and 1960s, Grant said, when the federal government viewed housing as part of rebuilding the economy after the war.

Despite the need for affordable housing, the number of social housing units has not increased since the 1970s, Grant told CBC Radio Information Morning Halifax guest Host Bob Murphy.

This is a condensed version of theirconversation thathas been edited for clarity and length.

We hear the government say that it's trying to tackle the housing crisisbut was that primarily geared to people who can afford homes as opposed to people who need assistance?

Even in the projects where they're talking about subsidizing some units, a lot of the subsidies are going to developers.

The projects that the provincial government is supportingin parts of Dartmouth, they're talking about providing forgivable loans to the developer for 20 years. But theiraffordable means between 60 or 80 per cent of what the market would charge, which is affordable for some households. But there aremany households that can't afford that.

At the same time, they're providing some support for non-profit housing, but I noticethat the funding that's going to support non-profit housing is in the form of repayable loans, mortgage support, but it has to be repaid after three years.

The subsidies are going to the wrong place. And we're not seeing the building of housing where we can expect long-term, real affordability to remain in place.

Many organizations are telling us we are in desperate need of this kind of housing. Why do you think government hasn't built more social housing?

Public housing is expensive.

Social housing has been devalued in the public perception, partly because there's been so little of it that it has become a housing of last resort for some households.

Households that are in most desperate need are the ones that are likely to to be able to qualify for public housing.

Those neighbourhoods have been perceived as being troubled neighbourhoods.

There hasn't been the kind of public and other supports that need to be there to help people deal with the kinds of issues that they face.

They've become kind of reservoirs of poverty and that's not what they started out as.

Public housing started out as an opportunity for low- and moderate- income households to begin to save the resources so that they could transition into other housing options.

And in the 1960s and so on, you'd find households that were paying rent geared to income, but they weren't impoverished households. They were just households where people were saving up to get a down payment and hoping eventually to get into the housing market.

Some people sayit's important to build them in neighbourhoods where the income levels are mixed. So that you have some lower income housing mixed in with people who are able to afford more expensive homes. What do you say about that? Is that a way around this fear of segregation?

That's the kind of justification that's used for it, but it often means gentrification. Itmeans that the lower-income households start to feel less like it's their neighborhood and more like they're being taken over by yuppies and those who can afford to buy their cappuccinos in the local cafes.

The idea of of mixing neighbourhoods is one that is trying to deal with the problems of segregation, polarization and isolation. But it has some negative effects as well.

I think it's better to talk to people in neighbourhoods and figure out what is it that they need to support their community to help deal with the issues that their families are facing, rather than assume that we know what's best for them.

You said one of the reasons why government has shied away from building more social housing is because of costs. But are there not also many costs associated with not building the proper supply of housing?

Yes, there are.

But those costs are faced by individuals and households rather than by government, and they don't get the kind of priority that that they need.

We see all kinds of people having to live in parks and tents and and emergency shelters, and that's still a relatively new phenomenon in Canada.

I was wondering about housing as a social determinant of health, that if you're not pouring money into social housing, you're going to end up paying for it as a government in other areas. So through our health-care system, for example, that there's a correlation there.

People who are poorly housed are likely to have many health issues.

The big problem is that it's the individuals and their families who tend to end up dealing with those issues, often because people don't go to get the care they need right now or they can't get the care they need. We don't have doctors.

We aren't putting in the money to provide people with the kind of services they need.

We've individualized the problems for people. And that's a big, big issue.

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