My problem this week, as I got back to my regular publication schedule, was that my story ideas were all too big to turn around in time for this week’s edition.
I don’t like scratching the surface of things, but while I dust off my shovel and get ready to really to dig into some of the topics currently running around my brain, I thought I’d take one—affordable housing—and explain why it’s been so much on my mind of late.
Houses by Juniper Littlefield via the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia
The first reason is an international student from Nepal who knocked on my mother’s door in September hoping she might have a room to rent him. He had found himself a job but his accommodations were temporary and he was desperate to find something he could afford, close to his place of work. In the course of a few weeks, he went from couch-surfing at a friend’s, to living in an attic in the North End (he showed us a video of the room, it was a dump), to finding a room with a “granny” who packed him lunches and cooked him meals and hoped she could make the arrangement permanent. I sincerely hope it worked out.
His arrival reminded me that I’d had exactly the same experience with an international student in the winter of 2019. He’d knocked on my door hoping to find a room to rent. His budget—$350/month—would have severely narrowed his options. As it happens, I can tell you exactly what $350/month bought you in Sydney that winter because the Post‘s Nicole Sullivan wrote, at the time, about two CBU students who were paying $350/month each to live in a windowless garage with neither kitchen nor bathroom facilities (they were expected to use those in the owner’s house).
I checked the “Off-Campus Living” section of the CBU website (which, to the university’s credit, seems much better organized than it was in 2019) and realized—no surprise here—that a student with a $350/month accommodations budget would have an even harder time finding a place in 2022, which is probably why so many seem to be looking to share rooms (anecdotal evidence based on my perusal of Facebook and my conversation with our friend from Nepal).
There were only seven listings on the CBU site as of October 11 and those for single rooms ranged from $500 for a room in a home (near a bus stop) where you’d share the kitchen and bathroom with the landlord to $850 for a double room (without cooking facilities) in a motel located 40 minutes by car from CBU and on no bus route.
Bad numbers
Interestingly, to help students with their searches, CBU provides them with a PDF of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s (CMHC) Primary Rental Market Statistics for Cape Breton (read: CBRM).
I say interestingly because the flawed nature of these statistics has been the subject of much recent discussion—including a 2019 study by Catherine Leviten-Reid of CBU, Bridget Horel of CBU, Rebecca Matthew of the University of Georgia and Fred Deveaux and Peggy Vassallo of the Cape Breton Community Housing Association and a 2021 letter from the Mayor and Council of CBRM to the federal department overseeing CMHC.
The problem, as I explained in an earlier article, is that CMHC defines the “primary” market for rental housing as “units in buildings in which there are at least three rentals, such as purpose-built apartments” and doesn’t collect data on the secondary market, comprised of “rentals in buildings with fewer than three units.” According to Leviten-Reid et al, CBRM’s secondary market accounts for 43% of the municipality’s rentals.
As I wrote in 2021:
…when CMHC is doing the math on vacancy rates or average rents in CBRM, it is leaving 43% of the market out of its calculations. When I spoke to Leviten-Reid on Tuesday, she said CMHC says there are 2,053 private rental apartments in CBRM. But Leviten-Reid said their research found 6,589 rental market units — and the most recent census data shows CBRM has 11,595 tenant households in non-farm, non-reserve, private dwellings, 25% of which were subsidized rentals, which means 8,696 non-subsidized or market rentals. She said there were some discrepancies between the three sets of data but the bottom line is:
“What they understand is our rental housing universe here, even for primary rentals, seems to be off.”
Just how off CMHC is an be seen in this excerpt table from the PDF CBU is giving its students:
Source: CMHC Rental Market Survey
CMHC believes we had a 7.2% vacancy rate for 2-bedroom apartments in CBRM as of October 2020, up from 5.1% in October 2019, and an 8.2% overall vacancy rate as of October 2020, but as Deputy Mayor Earlene MacMullin told Council back in 2021:
Our staff, affordable housing providers, residents, researchers, and housing advocates in CBRM tell a very different story on both the cost and availability. They tell us that costs continue to go up while availability continues to go down. This being more critical for certain populations such as individuals living with disabilities, single adults, the LGBTQ25+ community, and people of color.
Council’s letter to Social Development Canada asked that CMHC “assess the reliability of its data,” something it does not seem to have done. A serious consequence of this is that CMHC’s numbers are used to determine funding for affordable housing projects, and where the private market vacancy rate is high, affordable housing is not considered necessary.
A less serious, but not pleasant, consequence is that students seeking accommodations in CBRM are given an inaccurate notion of the local rental market and must surely be puzzled by their difficulty in finding a place in an area with an 8.2% vacancy rate.
Shelter
That reference to “certain populations” within CBRM reminds me of yet another piece of anecdotal evidence that all is far from well when it comes to housing in CBRM. I went to the Asian market on Townsend Street last Sunday, arriving just in time to see police and ambulance attendants removing a man from the sidewalk in front of the homeless shelter next door.
The man seemed dazed but was moving under his own steam, watched with interest by a small group of people sheltering from the rain on the back steps of the credit union across the street.
The scene reminded me that Sydney’s homeless shelter closes during the day, and people must find other places to go. Any other day of the week, the McConnell Library would have been an option, but not Sunday.
The homeless shelter moved to its Townsend Street location in 2019 because it had outgrown its Margaret Street facility. As Fred Deveaux, executive director of Cape Breton Community Housing, told the CBC at the time:
It’s very difficult to find affordable housing right now in this community. We have very low vacancy rates and people are living in poverty … they can’t always afford rent and amenities and food and everything else that goes along with having independent housing.
Three years (and one pandemic) later, things are no better. In fact, according to a report released in August by the Affordable Housing and Homelessness Working Group (AHHWG), things haven’t improved since it conducted its first service-based homelessness count in CBRM in 2016. At that time, researchers identified 304 people experiencing homelessness in our municipality. The most recent count (which included all of Eastern Nova Scotia) found that number had risen to 325:
Stay tuned…
I have truly just scratched the surface of this topic this week—I haven’t even considered the problems with the province’s housing authorities or a recent study that found 3,700 Nova Scotia homes are being listed as short-term vacation rentals, effectively removing them from the housing market. I don’t yet know how many people Hurricane Fiona has displaced (temporarily or permanently) nor have I found an answer to a question that has been nagging at me for months now, namely, if CBRM is experiencing such a “boom,” why can we not find the resources to house 325 people?
But I am just getting started, so expect to see more in-depth reporting on these issues over the fall and winter.
