Judy Haiven looks at ways the city could spend the money coming from the feds to provide affordable housing. Which one do you think HRM will go for?
“This lady was given a $600 a month increase to her rent. Now I don’t know all the details, but I imagine she’s another renoviction victim. She’s also a single mother.” A shortage of good quality affordable housing has been an urgent problem in towns like Antigonish long before it reached its current peak here in the city of Halifax.
Landlords raising rents, renovictions, homelessness and the underlying acute shortage of affordable housing in Halifax and elsewhere in the province have been getting a lot of attention. I spoke with NDP MLA Susan Leblanc about what residents of Dartmouth North are telling her, and how rent control is urgently needed.
The Nova Scotia NDP is calling for a first right of refusal policy for residential housing units being sold in the province. The NDP proposal is driven by the urgent need to increase the non-market housing stock and protect tenants of these buildings, Lisa Roberts, the NDP’s housing critic, tells the Nova Scotia Advocate.
Just prior to a municipal election, ACORN Nova Scotia took to the plaza in front of the Halifax Central Library last Saturday to mobilize support for a comprehensive landlord licensing program. Stephen Wentzell reports.
Nova Scotia taxpayers have already paid $150 million to build the Convention Centre, and now we have to pay another $12 million to cover its losses for this year alone. It’s time we converted the Convention Centre to affordable and accessible housing.
ACORN is holding a tenant speak-out at the Central Library one week ahead of the election to urge city council to adopt a comprehensive Landlord Licensing program.
Lisa Roberts: There was rent control here in Nova Scotia until 1993, when the then Liberal cabinet eliminated it with no fanfare or debate. The current Liberal government could re-establish it through a similar cabinet decision or it could pass our bill. Either way, it would be an important first step towards stabilizing the rental market and protecting renters from massive increases.
We talk with Halifax Peninsula North candidate Virginia Hinch. “A lot of community members are being pushed out of our communities because they no longer can afford it.”
A rental or landlord registry in Halifax is slowly, very slowly, becoming a reality, but housing activists argue that the proposed regulations should be much stronger.