The struggle with current social housing is that we haven't built much of it in a long time, so people see it as a cash suck, in a sense. It's expensive to maintain, and it always will be.
The federal government, under the rapid housing initiative, is essentially creating social housing. You have to have rent geared to income. That has been a strategy to create more of it.
Any construction has its problems. I think a lot of the delays in the rapid housing initiative are misconstrued. It takes time. You're dealing with multiple jurisdictions all at the same time to build stuff.
That was a good program to kick-start how the federal government could create forever rent-geared-to-income housing.
I wouldn't recommend, necessarily, that that's what we continue to build. First of all, if you had a piece of land where you could build all the supply you need for RGI or rent-geared-to-income housing—say that you need 6,000 units in Halifax—the outcomes for individuals who live in that community would be very poor if they're surrounded only by other rent-geared-to-income individuals. If you create mixed-market housing where some tenants are paying RGI, some are paying affordable rents and some are paying near-market rents, you actually have way better outcomes in that community, and you end the dependence on rent-geared-to-income housing generationally.
The challenge, though, is that government hasn't done a great job of managing the stock it has. That's not a Nova Scotia problem; that's a Canada problem. It's because you don't fix things. All of you in government don't really attack things until they become really expensive. That's why we advocate for the non-profit sector. We'll manage the housing with capital reserve. We have good governance with independent boards made up of volunteers who are committed to it, and we have professional property management that fixes things when the problems arise.
I would suggest that we make more investments in mixed-market housing. You'll add supply. You'll add sustainable financial housing. You'll also create capacity for rent-geared-to-income housing. It takes longer, but it will solve the problem more permanently as you invest in it.