“Charting a new course for affordable housing in Nova Scotia,” the report dropped by the Nova Scotia Affordable Housing Commission this spring, is one of the most annoying things I’ve read this year — and I read The Codfathers.
The pointless graphics, large photos and needless repetition (particularly with regard to how very many “stakeholders” were “consulted” — information shared three times in the course of 61 pages) look like the government commission equivalent of my old junior-high paper-writing technique of double-spacing and narrow margins.
The commissioners devote a page to a photo of a dog:
They devote a page to their autographs — although not, you’ll notice, their various affiliations. To find out which ones are the developers, you have to visit the commission website or poke around in the “subcommittee” listings at the end of the report:
For the record Jeremy Jackson is VP Marketing & Government Relations with Killam REIT, and president of the Investment Property Owners Association of NS (IPOANS). Alex Halef is president & CEO of BANC Group. Gordon Laing is president and CEO of Southwest Properties Limited, Wadih Fares is with WM Fares Group.
The commission also included people like Fred Deveaux, executive director of the Cape Breton Community Housing Association and Community Homeless Shelter, and Jim Graham, executive director of the Affordable Housing Association Nova Scotia, and it does reference barriers to housing faced by marginalized groups and the shortage of housing in rural areas and the need to “build community housing capacity,” but I can’t escape the notion the developers exerted an outsized influence on the finished product. I find it hard to imagine anyone who spent a career trying to help marginalized people find housing describing the COVID period as “challenging but exciting times.”
The report dedicates a good deal of space to graphics like this one — note the tasteful trees and park bench chosen to represent the “homeless” end of the housing spectrum:
They dedicate full pages to pull-quotes and the charitable interpretation of the selection process would be that they allowed the dog to do it because why else, after working for six months on a report about affordable housing, would you trumpet the fact that you can’t define “affordable housing?”
And yet, their apparent inability to “define or measure” the problem they’ve been asked to address doesn’t dim their pride in what they’ve accomplished:
Still, as bad as all that is, I think the worst pull-quote has to be this one:
It’s not just that I don’t know what a “long and diverse array of people” is, it’s that it suggests people looking to profit from housing — those with “an urgent financial stake” in it — are just as deserving of assistance as people in need of housing — those with an “urgent personal stake.”
What’s more, it’s these financial stakeholders — the landlords, the developers, the financiers — who are too often presented in this report as the best people to turn to for solutions to the province’s housing crisis.
Human right or economic driver?
I was listening to a discussion about the American healthcare system the other day and one of the participants mentioned “affordable healthcare” and the other said, “As soon as you’re talking about ‘affordable healthcare,’ you’re having the wrong conversation. Say ‘healthcare.'”
It struck me that this is also true of “affordable housing” — it’s time we simply spoke about housing, period. Housing as a human right. The Commission report almost gets there, but can’t quite decide whether housing is a “basic human need” (pps 15 and 33) or a “right” (p. 35), and every time it says it’s a right it needs to add “and an economic driver” or “the engine of our economy.”
The commissioners explain it this way in the Executive Summary:
The invaluable input we’ve received from stakeholders often reflected two views about housing, which are sometimes considered to be opposites of each other. The first is that adequate housing is one of the most basic needs, and therefore should be recognized as a human right. The other is that housing is a strategic sector of economic growth. Discussions on this topic can be polarizing, but critical to understand. We heard from experts around the world that both views must be integrated to effectively address Nova Scotia’s housing crisis and should not be viewed as mutually exclusive. Both concepts are fundamental to tackling our deep housing challenges and should shape government policies and stakeholder actions in the future.
The report seems far more interested in ensuring the province has “a well-functioning housing market” than ensuring people have decent housing. The two are not synonymous. A well-functioning housing market, for example, is one with plenty of NOAH — naturally-occurring affordable housing — meaning old, rundown, unsafe, rodent-ridden housing stock for people who can’t afford better. (NOAH is to be preserved — possibly even improved, provided the government finances the improvements.)
And in case you don’t quite understand what the commission is driving at, they provide this helpful illustration: “In this report, we will balance your family’s human rights against one man’s right to a very big bag of money.”
Here’s the thing, though, if housing is a human right it’s a human right. You can’t tell people, “You have a right to housing but it is not economically feasible for us to provide it to you,” although that’s precisely what we do when we leave the provision of housing to the market. We don’t do it with healthcare or K-12 education (although private companies have managed to get a piece of the action in both those fields — think private MRI clinics and anything involving PowerSchool), we shouldn’t do it with housing.
Housing for All
Fortunately for all involved, there’s another recent housing report out — from the Housing for All Working Group of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), Nova Scotia division — that has no difficulty labeling housing a human right.
Catherine Leviten-Reid
Dr. Catherine Leviten-Reid of CBU was the lead academic on the report, “Keys to a Housing Secure Future for All Nova Scotians,” but its writing was informed by a whole slew of people: the list of those making up the Housing for All Working Group runs to 47 people and organizations, not counting Leviten-Reid, and includes representatives from Dalhousie Legal Aid and the Canadian Federation of Students and ACORN and the Every Woman’s Centre and the YMCA and the Elizabeth Fry Society of Cape Breton, among others.
The temptation to compare the two reports is irresistible, so I’m not going to resist. I’m going to compare them on a number of points, beginning with their titles, which the Housing for All report wins hands down with a reference (“keys”) that actually applies to housing, instead of one (“charting a new course”) that does not.
Where the affordable housing commissioners declined to produce a budget or targets for the creation of affordable housing units arguing, as noted above, that it couldn’t define or measure affordable housing and that it had insufficient data on existing community housing and demand for affordable housing, the authors of the Housing for All report dove right in. They said 30,475 Nova Scotians live in core housing need:
…which typically means that they are spending more than 30% of their before-tax income on rent/mortgage costs and utilities, but in some cases can mean their housing requires major repair or the number of bedrooms they have is not suitable based on household size and composition. Core housing need is disproportionately experienced by those who rent, at 28.1% of renters versus 6.3% of homeowners.
The recommendations in the Housing for All report would result in:
…over 30,000 units of permanently affordable housing, enough for all those in core housing need and who are homeless…
This plan requires a capital investment of $531 million each year for 10 years. It will require an additional $161 million on average per year in operating spending over those 10 years.
The report also spells out how this could be paid for, through a combination of measures, including savings from moving people with disabilities out of institutions and into community-based housing, an increase in the deed tax, a 1% payroll tax (shared equally between employers and employees), a wealth tax (1% over $10 million), an increase in the capital gains inclusion rate from 50% to 100%, a provincial flipping tax to discourage speculation in the property market, an empty property tax for those who don’t live in the properties they buy, the elimination of the Your Energy Rebate, the facilitation of the donation of land and equity to non-profits and — most innovatively — the introduction of a municipal income tax to replace property taxes as the main source of municipal revenue (i.e. replacing a regressive tax with a progressive one.)
I don’t have time to get into these proposals in detail, and there’s no doubt they will spark controversy and would represent a real change to the way we do things — but wasn’t that supposed to have been the silver lining of the pandemic? That we’d change the way we do things? Weren’t we supposed to have seen the cracks in our systems so clearly there was no turning back?
I found myself wondering why the Affordable Housing commissioners were so hesitant to go there — to set targets for affordable housing units or estimate costs or imagine how it could be paid for. Are they afraid they might accidentally create too much affordable housing? Is that really in the realm of the possible, given the province’s dismal record in this area since the federal government bowed out of the affordable housing game in the ’90s?
Or is it just that these solutions don’t offer a significant enough reward for the private sector?
Private sector
I mentioned earlier that the Commission report views the private sector as a “partner” in solving the province’s housing crisis, and it’s probably time to explore some of the ways in which the private sector stands ready to assist us.
The commissioners would like the province to replace Housing Nova Scotia, which “delivers affordable housing programs, administers mortgages and loans, and operates the public housing stock through its five regional Housing Authorities,” with “an arm’s length independent provincial housing entity.”
The idea may have merit, but the reasoning, as presented in the Commission report, is vague — and every second word seems like a red flag:
Housing Nova Scotia needs to adapt quickly, making financial decisions responsive to its mandate and evolving housing market; innovate new strategies on borrowing and lending and secure adequate capital to ensure its sustainability.
Because nothing ever goes wrong when we “innovate new strategies in borrowing and lending.”
And this issue of “sustainability” has me giving the commissioners the side eye too. Here’s what the report says about the Provincial Public Housing Program:
In Nova Scotia, there are nearly 12,000 subsidized rental housing units delivered across the province through five regional Housing Authorities. Rental revenues are low and cannot fully cover all operating expenses. This is a structural loss that is common in public housing systems around the world due to tenant rents being set at a level that is insufficient to cover operating costs, combined with higher management costs due to higher and more complex tenant needs.
Public housing is subsidized by government — that’s a feature, not a bug. In fact, that’s basically the definition of public housing. It may not ever produce enough in rents to cover operating costs (although with the advent of greener, more efficient buildings, the operating costs might well be lowered) but that’s not the point.
The Commission report says the new organization should have “higher risk tolerance” and “improved risk management capacity and its enabling legislation should allow it to:
…make effective and timely decisions, especially those related to divestiture and acquisition of real estate assets, and make decisions related to lending, revenue generation, and partnerships.
But given the existing shortage of public housing units, any plans to allow this new entity to “divest itself” of real estate assets should be examined very carefully.
And a recommendation that provincial regulations be “modernized” — on the advice of both non-profit and private sector developers — and that municipalities be permitted to “eliminate or minimize municipal taxes, fees, or charges for affordable housing developments, including partnering with the private sector” is also an eyebrow-raiser.
Because as Catherine Leviten-Reid explained to me when I spoke with her Tuesday, we have had decades of experience — particularly in the United States — with private sector solutions to the housing crisis, and what the research shows is that they offer, at best, a temporary solution. Private developers given incentives by governments in exchange for keeping rents low for a fixed period of time will keep rents low for a fixed period of time. When that period ends, more often than not, they raise the rents.
Our conversation actually covered a lot of ground, but I’ve run out of time this week, so will pick it up next Wednesday.
