Services infrastructure shortfall exacerbates Nova Scotia’s rural housing crisis
It’s a problem we see or hear about every day. Tents in the park, people living in cars, being evicted or worried they won’t make rent. This week, we’re looking at the scope of the problem, how we got here, who can fix it and how.
More than a dozen tents set up in front of Halifax City Hall scream out the heart-wrenching tale of homelessness and housing deficiencies.
The province’s housing crisis, though, also exists in a less visible, in-your-face way in rural Nova Scotia.
“We don’t really have the same ways to measure and count homelessness in the rural areas,” said Steve Pomeroy, a senior research fellow for the Centre for Urban Research and Education at Carleton University it Ottawa and a member of the Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative.
“A lot of the estimates of homelessness comes from data that’s generated by shelters and they count the number of beds and occupancy,” Pomeroy said. “The rural areas tend not to have emergency shelters, it tends to be a much more informal kind of homelessness with folks couch-surfing with their friends, jumping from one friend’s couch to the other and a bit of sleeping outside.”
Mayor David Mitchell says housing is a “significant and growing” problem in Bridgewater, a town of nearly 9,000 residents on the province’s South Shore.
“We have virtually a zero per cent vacancy rate,” Mitchell said. “We have sustained growth going back 30 years and then of course with the pandemic spike of newcomers from across not just Nova Scotia or Canada but from all over and the housing stock just can’t keep up.”
The Provincial Housing Needs Assessment Report, compiled for the Nova Scotia government and released in late October, estimated that at the current pace of construction, which brings about 6,000 units to market each year in Nova Scotia, there will be a shortage of 41,200 housing units by 2027-28 if aggressive action is not taken.
The report identified a shortfall of housing units across the province of 27,000 at the end of 2022, and a requirement of 71,600 total units, including the current shortfall, by 2027.
The current shortfall on the South Shore was second only by region in the province to Halifax Regional Municipality, which accounts for nearly half of Nova Scotia’s population. The South Shore numbers were a 3,050-unit shortfall as of the end of 2022 and a total requirement as of 2027 of 5,125 units.
The shortfall in HRM was pegged at 17,500 units as of year’s end in 2022, the deficit was 2,550 units in both Cape Breton and the North Shore and 1,650 in the Annapolis Valley.
2,500 approved units
“When there is a lack of supply and an abundance of demand, as prices increase, it does tend to push some folks out of their current housing arrangement,” Mitchell said. “If there is nothing to fill in the gap somewhere else, they end up either couch surfing or moving in with relatives or friends or in some cases, sleeping rough.”
Mitchell said more than 150 people in the South Shore region were sleeping rough through the fall.
“They tend to be mostly in Bridgewater because this is where the services are but these are folks from across the South Shore of the province.”
Mitchell said a recently opened 15-bed shelter is likely to be used more as temperatures drop.
The mayor said the default premise that a shortage of housing development is due to government red tape, particularly municipal stumbling blocks, is not accurate in the Bridgewater case.
“We have 2,500 approved units, many of those affordable units,” Mitchell said. “The issue in our situation is a lack of infrastructure capacity.”
The Bridgewater units approved by town council are being held up by sewer capacity.
“Our pipes were sized for X number of dwellings and we are growing well beyond that predicted growth,” Mitchell said.
Annual growth of about two per cent for the past three decades increased by many times that in the last few years in Bridgewater and most Nova Scotia municipalities, Mitchell said.
“We all prepare long-term,10-year capital plans for the basic (growth) pattern that we’ve been seeing and we’re well outside of that now.”
Overhauling the sewer system will cost about $70 million.
Sewer costs
“My normal capital budget is $7 million,” Mitchell said. “It needs to come partially from the federal government, partially from the provincial government and we’ve increased taxes twice in the last three years because we do know that there is a municipal component to it. It’s going to take all three orders of government to make it work.”
Nova Scotia Housing Minister John Lohr said 200-plus projects with a collective price tag of nearly $200 million were included in the March 2023 version of the Invest Canada Infrastructure program.
“We approved a number of those projects in the last year and a half, based on applications with the lens of housing,” Lohr said. “There is still more work to be done clearly with Bridgewater, Wolfville as well.”
Lohr said in the last two years the province pumped $64 million in funding for municipal infrastructure on an application basis.
“The reality is that we need the next iteration of the Build Canada fund to come forward from Ottawa,” Lohr said, noting many municipal infrastructure needs across the province.
“I do know there are other communities, especially those built similar to us, lined up by a river,” Mitchell said.
Bridgewater’s pump stations overflow into the LaHave River by design from 40 or 50 years ago, Mitchell said.
“You would never do that today for obvious reasons and we have to stop that.”
Mitchell said there exists a $100-billion infrastructure debt among municipalities from coast to coast.
“It’s not a unique Bridgewater, Lunenburg County or Nova Scotia issue at all.”
Brenda Chisholm-Beaton, mayor of Port Hawkesbury and past president of the Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, said housing pressures on her community of 3,500 people have long come from seniors living in homes that were too big for them without a viable exit option and student housing for the NSCC Strait Area campus and the Nautical Institute.
Chisholm-Beaton said second-stage housing for Strait area women and families transitioning from emergency shelters would go a long way in Port Hawkesbury and the Strait Area Chamber of Commerce has identified a huge housing challenge for area businesses of varying sizes.
Labour gaps
“We have a shortage of housing and that is creating labour gaps for businesses,” she said.
Port Hawkesbury is “busting at the seams” in terms of people coming from outside the province wanting to live in the community but there is simply no availability of housing to rent or buy in the area, Chisholm-Beaton said, adding that “people are getting whiplash” with how fast housing turns over after becoming available.
“We need to come up with very innovative and very quick solutions to be able to bridge the housing demand and to be able to accommodate the people who want to come to our communities.”
Chisholm-Beaton said the COVID epidemic created a reverse trend on rural living, convincing people that they could work from home and that they didn’t have to live in urban centres.
Recent municipal data identifies a shortfall of at least 200 units in Port Hawkesbury, the mayor said.
“I expect that number is much higher,” she said, adding that most of the 49 Nova Scotia municipalities would be in a similar situation.
Well-positioned
Chisholm-Beaton said the Strait area is well-positioned for population growth but “we are all trying to run as fast as we can to figure out solutions, how can we work with the province, how can we work with the federal government, how do we work with not-for-profits to be able to meet some of those needs.”
She said the Strait Area Chamber of Commerce is working with stakeholders to establish a housing not-for-profit for the area.
“There is no cookie-cutter solution that is going to work for every community,” Chisholm-Beaton said. “We have to figure out what is the best solution for Port Hawkesbury and it’s probably going to be a combination of various solutions because we do have needs all across the housing spectrum. I suspect rural Nova Scotia is likely in the same boat as we are.”
Chisholm-Beaton said Port Hawkesbury experienced an industrial boom in the 1950s and the accompanying infrastructure for water and sewer was built to support a population of 7,000 to 10,000, leaving the town room to grow.
She said infrastructure deficits among municipalities have created a “huge need to partner with the other orders of government” to achieve housing goals.
