The affordable housing crisis is a policy disaster, says researcher

Housing precarity has long been part of the fabric of New Brunswick due to state neglect and now financialization of housing is making matters worse, says a housing researcher and advocate.

Tobin LeBlanc Haley, a professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, co-founded the New Brunswick Coalition for Tenants’ Rights in 2020. While blame for the housing crisis is being placed on increased housing demand, LeBlanc Haley noted that financialized landlords such as Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) have been allowed to buy housing stock and make money through renovictions and flipping.

Students organized the panel, “The affordable housing crisis: a policy disaster,” on Sept. 11 on the UNB Fredericton campus to learn more about the affordable housing crisis in the province.

The newly formed student group, the UNB Student Organizing Collective, hosted the event which is part of a series of talks being organized this fall by the Fredericton Community Coalition. The UNB Student Organizing Collective is also leading a campaign for divestment from Israeli companies because of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Association (CMHC) defines affordable housing as costing no more than 30 per cent of pre-tax income on shelter (rent/mortgage and utility). “People are spending way more than that right now,” said LeBlanc Haley.

According to the 2021 census, the median income of homeowner households and tenant households in New Brunswick was $82,000/year and $44,400/year respectively. Median monthly shelter costs, however, were higher for tenants ($830 per month) than for homeowner households ($770 per month). There has been a lot of bending of terms like “median income.”

Politicians talk about the housing crisis by pretending that it exists outside of their realm of action as a state; “the state has facilitated [this] (…) by allowing very weak regulation regimes to persist,” among other factors. The root of this is monetarism and interest rates are central to this. In Canada, asset-based welfare became the focus and the CMHC was created.

In the 1980s, the federal government decided they would no longer be responsible for social housing. Provincial governments either further downloaded or “let it stagnate and rot” like they did in New Brunswick. LeBlanc-Haley stated: “the public good has decayed and rotted.” According to LeBlanc Haley, there are 10,733 households on the waitlist for public housing in New Brunswick.

For LeBlanc Haley, no effective rent control (like in many provinces) means that housing has run wild. “Financialized landlords” survive and thrive because of profit.

The province cannot “build our way out” because we are in a long-term problem. The fault is not with immigration or interest rates. Increasing the number of buildings is built on the theory of “filtering theory” whereby people will decide to move to the buildings, thus freeing up other units. This theory hasn’t worked since the 1980s, according to scholars.

Nichola Taylor, Chair of New Brunswick ACORN, spoke next.

Taylor is the representative on the national Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) board, a grassroots union of low to moderate-income people. ACORN has 177,000 members across Canada and recently celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the organization.

In New Brunswick, “tenants have very few protections;” only Alberta is in a worse situation than us, according to Taylor.

Taylor moved to Fredericton in 2018 but the cost of an apartment similar to hers has doubled in the time that she has been here, “yet salaries have stayed the same.”

Taylor hears “heart-breaking stories” from tenants who are in dire situations. People are making excruciating choices about having housing, heating that housing and/or feeding their families. Unplanned events often send people into making “difficult choices.”

For newcomers, most are living in “below-par standards” in the province. Some newcomers “are afraid to complain,” said Taylor.

“People assume refugees get really nice apartments from the government,” Taylor said, but they are living in apartments Canadians would not accept.

Last year in New Brunswick, there was a decision that cosmetic renovations cannot be a reason for evictions. This is only a small victory. “We need a simple permanent rent cap in place,” Taylor stated, and ACORN is advocating for a 2 per cent cap.

Fixed-term leases are an excuse for yearly rent increases in places that have rent caps. ACORN is watching this evolve in Nova Scotia, because it “is sending vulnerable people into the streets.” People assume that a “fixed-term lease” is year-to-year, but that is not the case. Activists are asking for a “fixed-term lease” to be defined in legislation but it hasn’t been.

UNB international graduate students present at the talk asked why the universities could not provide affordable housing. LeBlanc Haley clarified that the Residential Tenancies Act does not apply to university residences. She suggested that the Graduate Student Union make a case for campus housing affordability.

Simon Ouellette, the Green Party candidate for Fredericton South, reminded attendees that the Graduate Student Union has the power to advocate for changes on campus, including running housing collectives.

A question was raised about the need for a public landlord registry. Taylor specified that Quebec has a popular landlord registry where people share information as a way to track increases. LeBlanc Haley added that we have a data problem in New Brunswick, with many landlords not even filing their tenants’ deposits with the province.

Municipalities’ role in the housing file was also discussed. Cities are “unwilling to make people uncomfortable” about affordability. LeBlanc Haley said defining this term is a “national problem” happening as much at the CMHC as at the municipal level. She added that with the reduction of transfers to the province, downloading the issues of housing further to the municipalities would be complicated.

A national bill of tenants’ rights is a good idea, but enforcement would be complicated with the three levels of government. The political will is not there.

LeBlanc Haley advocates for “a complex and robust rent regulation regime” as a solution, paired with vacancy control; this would force landlords to apply for permission to raise rents.

The next talk in the Fredericton Connection series will be on Student Activism on Sept. 27 at 12:00 PM in Tilley Hall, room 404, University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Stay abreast of future talks by following the UNB Student Organizing Collective on Facebook and Instagram: @socunb.

Disclosure: Tobin LeBlanc-Haley is a member of the board of directors of the NB Media Co-op.

Sophie M. Lavoie is a member of the NB Media Co-op’s editorial board.