In a room overlooking the tent encampment at Grand Parade in Halifax on Monday, federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser, along with his provincial counterparts, renewed a commitment to address the housing crisis across the region.
“It would be a moral failure to accept that homelessness and chronic homelessness has to be part of life in Atlantic Canada,” Fraser says.
To tackle the crisis, the group of ministers agreed to create a template for modular homes that meets the unique needs of the region.
“We’ve got a vacancy rate of 0.9 per cent in the province so all of the problems that we discuss when we get together very similar on Prince Edward Island,” says Rob Lantz, minister of housing, land and communities.
“To have agreed-upon designs means that all Atlantic provinces can use the same designs, and all the modular contractors can bid on the same,” adds his New Brunswick colleague Jill Green.
That should save time and money.
“We’re hoping to come up with a design that are quality buildings, that people will enjoy living in, but they can be produced more cheaply than something that’s being built in the market today,” says Fraser. “We’ll be looking for labour-efficient designs that can be built in a factory with fewer workers given the labour shortage that the construction sector is dealing with.
“We’re going to be looking for cost-effective designs that use the lightest materials possible without compromising on the quality of the actual building that people will inhabit at the end of the day.”
John Lohr, Nova Scotia's housing minister, sees this as a solution to be used in rural parts of the province but says there are some potential urban applications for these modular homes.
“It’s also a solution for apartment builds, too,” Lohr says. “It’s very possible that we will have modular apartment builds as well.”
With more than a thousand people without a home across the province, advocates hope these meetings bring about permanent solutions to the housing crisis.
“I would love to see all the unhoused Nova Scotia in permanent housing,” Matthew Grant says. “What I would like to see is that there is a true, serious discussion to get all the unhoused into permanent housing.”
More answers could be provided when the housing ministers meet in Ottawa in April and again in Atlantic Canada later in the summer.
