Sandra Boucher is beaming when she talks about her new one-bedroom apartment on Fredericton’s north side. She said the layout is gorgeous, complete with a beautiful kitchen and cupboards.
“It’s absolutely heaven being in this particular building,” she said. “I love it. And all my neighbors do, just because we all came from really old buildings.”
Boucher moved into a new 20-unit complex on Charles Avenue in October. A second building is under construction next door for larger family units.
It’s part of a provincewide push to get back into building public housing. But after decades of dormant growth, the public housing supply has stayed relatively the same, while demand for affordable units has skyrocketed.
There were 4,300 households on the waitlist for public housing back in 2020. That figure, according to the provincial government, has climbed to an all-time high of 14,000 households today.
Residents in government-subsidized, social or public housing typically pay 30 per cent of their household income on rent.
It’s been a big help to Boucher, who lost her vision when she was 21. She said back then “no one would hire you anywhere.” Without a stable job, she said she was unable to afford a place on her own when her marriage ended just over a decade ago.
She waited about 16 months for a place to become available back then. She said with rising costs today, she’s sympathetic to anyone in search of an affordable place to live.
“I don’t know how people can get through this age right now,” she said. “There’s people with children, and I can’t imagine feeding two or three kids, because I’m just barely making by with what I’m earning.”
Building in an ‘unprecedented way’
It’s that cost of living and affordability crisis, that David Hickey, the minister responsible for housing, said has his government building in an unprecedented way.
There are roughly 4,600 public housing units in the province today, but Hickey said that supply has been stagnant for decades.
“The public housing units that we built in the 1970s are still the public housing units today,” he said. “The rent supplements that we put in the 1970s in many cases are not affordable today.”
In October 2022, under the previous Higgs government, former social development minister Dorothy Shephard announced the government would spend $102.2 million to build new public housing for the first time in a generation.
The New Brunswick government is building some of the first public housing units to open in the province in about 40 years, according to the minister responsible for housing. But it comes at a time of record demand, with 14,000 households in line for one of those units.
But a little more than a year later in November 2023, only $4 million of the $33 million earmarked to build new public housing units that year had been spent.
Jill Green, then housing minister, told reporters it was taking time to turn the New Brunswick Housing Corporation back into an organization with the capacity and expertise to build public housing.
Last summer, less than a third of that commitment was met, with new housing only becoming available under the new Liberal government, Hickey said.
“The only public housing units that have been opened in the last four decades have been under our government.”
Hickey said the current government has opened 200 public housing units so far, with another 198 units in progress and a goal of 573 public housing units within their mandate.
He said building up the affordable housing supply provides better long-term value and stability, and that includes partnerships with other stakeholders.
In March, the province and the federal government announced a combined $210 million in capital spending to help non-profit developers build up to 1,200 new housing units across New Brunswick over the next two years.
“We are committed to an end in sight of saying 20 per cent of housing in this province should be non market housing directed to support affordability measures,” he said.
More affordability measures needed
The recent increase in demand doesn’t surprise Julia Woodhall-Melnik, a social sciences professor at the University of New Brunswick and co-director of the housing, mobilization and engagement research lab.
She said the demand has climbed steadily along with the cost of living. She’s encouraged to see the new housing starts but said affordability needs to be addressed in several ways to truly fill that need.
“Increased costs of services, increased costs of transportation, of food, of hydro in the province, that’s a big thing that impacts homeowners and renters,” she said.
Increased property taxes and mortgage rates have also had a major impact, she said.
“We’re not seeing the conditions of affordability that we think we would need in order to really move the needle on rental housing affordability.”
She said roughly 16 per cent of renters in the province are currently on the waitlist for subsidized housing, based on the available census data from 2021. But that could easily be much higher, she said, since more than half of renters already meet the income requirements.
Woodhall-Melnik said when she started studying the waitlist in 2018, people typically waited between 12 and 18 months for an affordable housing unit. But that has gone up substantially in recent years, with some people now waiting eight to 10 years, she said.
Matthew Wright waited even longer. He settled into a subsidized ground floor apartment in July, after 35 years on the waiting list.
Wright has had mobility issues since birth and requires the use of a wheelchair. He added his name to the housing list when he finished high school, knowing it would be a challenge to find an affordable, accessible place to live.
People waiting for public or subsidized housing are prioritized based on need, rather than a first-come first-served basis. Those priority cases would include people with children, those fleeing family violence or someone at risk of becoming homeless.
Wright said he understands he wasn’t a high priority, given that he had a safe living environment with his family. But relying on his now-elderly parents for assistance up and down stairs in a non-accessible home, recently bumped him up the list.
He said the move has been life changing.
“It means a lot to me and my mental health has gotten really better,” he said. “All I have to do is go out the door and I’m close to everything.”
He’s grateful for the independence of having his own place, and the fact that it’s in a new construction has him feeling especially fortunate.
“I consider myself very, very, very, very lucky to get into a new building,” he said. “I actually thought I was going to be in a 20- or 30-year-old building and then you have the 20- or 30-year-old problems, right?”
With new housing stock in development, those images of dated or neglected housing units from the 1970s may soon subside. Though Woodhall-Melnik said she believes the need for anything affordable in this economy shows no sign of slowing down.
