Panel at Antigonish economic forum tackles housing crisis, solutions elusive

Housing, housing, housing, viable housing.

That’s what’s at the top of the list to enable the continued growth of the Halifax Regional Municipality, Wendy Luther of the Halifax Partnership said Tuesday at an Atlantic Economic Forum panel session at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish.

“Halifax has been the second fastest growing city in Canada for the past five years, behind Kelowna, and the fastest growing downtown,” said Luther, president and CEO of the public-private development organization for HRM.

“How do we serve and make sure our entire community thrives,” she said, while many residents outside of the urban HRM core don’t even consider themselves residents of Halifax.

The challenge is to maintain HRM’s growth momentum against the backdrop of that municipal dichotomy,

“By landmass, the largest municipality in Canada,” Luther said. “We have the largest rural population of any province in Nova Scotia. We have 96.4 percent of PEI’s landmass”

Luther said that HRM has an economic growth strategy, a growth plan, but it is “not growth for growth’s sake.”

After the housing crisis, Luther said transportation, logistics, economics and talent are the next key ingredients for growth.

“Are we attracting and retaining the right people to grow our economy?” she said.

For HRM rural residents, she said there are problems with housing and transportation, and a problem with the transition from rural economies, which are or were based on primary resources.

“The same issues came up, with different flavors,” Luther said.

Luther was one of three panelists charged with addressing urban growth and housing challenges in Atlantic Canada. All three sketched a picture of the challenges they experienced, but the conversation fell short of solutions.

“Our biggest problem in HRM is housing,” Luther said. “Approvals are moving faster than ever, taking an average of 18 days to get building approval. Due to headwinds around interest rates, talent, supply chain, although there is a deluge of approvals in the market, developers are not building at pace.

“The intention to grow is there. The understanding of the intersection between transportation and other utilities is well understood, but how do we keep our feet in the fire when it comes to actually implementing some of the solutions we know about?”

Luther said she talks to developers who do business in Halifax’s city, suburbs and rural areas, who are pointing out the density bonus issue.

“Developers are under an additional burden as they build more and more,” Luther said. “You will be taxed more if you house more people. That doesn’t make any sense with the structure we’re in. We’re looking at inclusive zoning and we’ll have something in the pipeline soon for HRM.

“One of our developers says very clearly that they are landlords, how can they work with the government to actually house people in mixed-use complexes and use that money, instead of being currently taxed in density bonuses, and the money goes in a jar.”

By the time people figure out how to use that money for affordable housing, it will be wiped out, she said.

“How can that be retained and used within existing developments to reduce costs?”

Luther said it’s one thing to find houses or build them, but it’s not so useful if you can’t go to work, can’t go to school, can’t get to amenities.

“How can we do it differently in terms of our own transport?” she said.

Amanda McDougall-Merrill, the mayor of Cape Breton Regional Municipality, also delved into the transportation component of housing.

“In our heyday of population and growth, we had all these beautiful homes in our historic downtown area,” McDougall-Merrill said of the communities that make up the merged CBRM.

“We now actually have the same number of houses and a lower population, but one person lives in that house. Thirty percent of our housing stock is currently occupied by one resident.”

The answer is shared accommodations that are permanent and secure and allow everyone to live in a dignified and safe place, she said.

“We have to compact. We need to make available what we have before we focus on bringing in more, and that’s not to say we shouldn’t focus on bringing in those developers… but we have inventory, we just need to connect our communities, increase throughput.

McDougall-Merrill referred to the community of Westmount in CBRM, “a beautiful, beautiful place”, where students could live if bus service was available.

“Transit doesn’t make money and we need to find ways to increase revenue so we can offer more services, better connect communities and open shared accommodations,” the mayor said.

Robert Greenwood, director of the Harris Center for Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University in St. John’s and the third member of the panel, said housing policies require urban-rural specificity, that one size doesn’t fit all and that housing planning and policy interventions should be decentralized.

McDougall-Merrill said in the housing and transportation policy, “we need to make sure residents get the services they need to thrive. We need to make sure they have the services to last into the future and keep this generation and future generations in our community.”

This cannot be done without “healthy, honest and modest cooperation between all levels of government,” she said.