Finance committee  High acuity.

Finance committee  Most of the people coming in on the data were renting and lost that rental, or when a relationship broke down, they could typically find another piece of housing, but because of the cost and the availability, they're now less likely to find it. That's what's happening. I don't think you're seeing homeowners necessarily yet.

Finance committee  The housing system is messy, isn't it? You have homelessness and shelters. You have the people who are homeless and it goes all the all the way up to the “big REITs”, which still only represent less than 20% of the whole housing system. It's a lot of small players, whether not-for-profits or the private sector.

Finance committee  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.

Finance committee  I think the government's share, including federal and provincial taxes, is about 35% to 40% for market housing. It's a form of tax—other fees or taxes. I think we need to recalculate that since the discussion around HST waiving has come on. That's a number that came out of CBRE, which is a local firm that has a lot of expertise in this.

Finance committee  First of all, the reason I spent most of my remarks talking about Reaching Home or the homelessness strategy is that this is community led. The federal government identifies organizations across the country and gives them a block of funding to respond to the crisis of homelessness.

Finance committee  If I have to wait seven months for the loan from CMHC, like I do for coinvestment, it will be ineffective. It needs to be community led. Give the money to organizations like ours to go out and purchase the buildings ourselves, as opposed to my bringing you the building and then your taking seven months to decide if we can buy it or not.

Finance committee  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.

Finance committee  I think most rental housing usually includes the energy or the heating. However, the cost of everything has gone up, and low-wage workers in particular are not receiving cost-of-living increases or even having access to generate more income, so they're more vulnerable to falling into homelessness.

Finance committee  We are building an additional 32 units through coinvestment, which is another CMHC program. We are active builders of affordable housing right across this province. We have about 150 units that we've built, bought or converted over the last two years, and we have about an additional 300 in our pipeline.

Finance committee  Thank you. I'm Michael Kabalen. I'm the executive director of the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia. We were founded in 1990 as an advocacy group, even back then, to advocate for the need for continued investment in forever affordable housing in our sector and our region.