In Nova Scotia, the provincial government is committing to maintain what they call their “baseline” of 11,200 units. They're building more public housing for the first time in a long time.
It's still a small investment relative to what's needed, but the NOAH, the naturally occurring affordable housing, is disappearing at a rate...and that's probably what a lot of the students are experiencing. A lot of the housing down around the universities is also in the most attractive service core, and that's right across the province and in other towns outside of Halifax as well. We're seeing that disappear to higher-end development, so those sites are off-line for a period. That's initially impacted. From a supply perspective, if you're a free market economist, eventually you'll have more housing responding, but it likely won't be leased to students. It won't be attainable for students from a price perspective.
I think the things that Dr. Summerby-Murray was speaking about around student housing and the strategy are necessary. I think the universities are going to want to take care of their own, but the naturally occurring stuff in other regions is also kind of.... I don't want to say it's under attack, but there's nothing to support our retaining it, and I talked about the community-led initiatives and things that don't cost money, as Mr. Blois said. It takes a long time for federal dollars to flow to not-for-profits through CMHC.
That's not meant to criticize the good people who work there. The process is the underwriting that's required. It doesn't take as long for Reaching Home dollars to get out the door to resolve and respond to homelessness, so one thing we would advocate is that if the federal government is looking to promote more investment in not-for-profit housing, let's duplicate what has been successful with Reaching Home and put those dollars in communities.
Let communities decide where they want to invest to buy things like the naturally occurring affordable housing, because we don't have what the private sector has. We don't have equity, or if we do, it's encumbered. It's limited by the previous existing programs. I can't mortgage an old building to go and buy another old one that I can keep. The provincial program requires a 20% down payment even if it will write the mortgage up to $10 million. There is no federal program that exists today that allows us to purchase those, so for coinvestment and a lot of the financing programs that exist, if we could make those community led, that would be better.