By Kendall Worth!
As I brought up in this recent BLOG post, here in Halifax there are currently 1155 people who are actively homeless (note: this number was released on January 22nd 2025 on the AHANDS website). This number is only expected to increase unless something is done - and soon. While governments on all levels are working as slow as cold molasses to make affordable housing available, we on the community level may need to dig deeper to find solutions ourselves. Unfortunately, we as citizens in the community do not have a large budget like governments do. Also here in Halifax we are experiencing a much colder winter than previous winters, making these problems even more urgent.
The solution is for more non-profit housing to become available. However, the kind of money we would need is the kind of money this BLOG Post here talks about.
To learn about not-for-profit housing models in Halifax, there is AHANS, Welcome Housing, and on the Dartmouth Side there is Dartmouth Housing.
These not-for-profit housing organizations keep their rents affordable, but the supply is not keeping up with demand.
Anyway, you could say that 1155 is a slight decrease from what I reported in my BLOG Post dated October 9th, 2024, because I reported 1316 homeless people in Halifax. However, there hasn’t been much of a decrease. The difference of 161 people may have found a shelter somewhere for the winter months.
Anyway, unlike government-funded, low-income housing and private landlords, the not-for-profit housing model can do pretty creative things to keep their housing affordable. Affordable housing should be no more than 30% of one’s income. So, let’s say you make $1500 a month (regardless of if it is earned or through disability income), 30% of this amount is $450.00 a month. That is what the rent should be. Also, with this not-for-profit housing model I am suggesting, power, heat and hot water should automatically be included. When I say that a not-for-profit housing model could do creative things to keep rents low, there are 2 things:
#1 – They can host fundraisers to help out with cost of building maintenance stuff, and operational costs of the building.
#2 – Maybe residents of the building, or other community volunteers can help out around the buildings with things like day-to-day cleaning, shoveling, cutting grass and other similar tasks. This way, the organization does not have to hire outside contractors to come in and do this simple work.
One major drawback about Suggestion#2 is that many people who are on income assistance or who are on other Disability Income, may not be able to help out with this work as it may not be good for them. The issue at hand, however, is that finding affordable housing in Halifax is like finding a needle in a haystack. However the other side to this is that some apartments in Halifax and Dartmouth have been changing landlords every year to 2 years. According to one person I talked to in my community, her landlord has changed 3 times within the past 4 years! What if some of us could get together and get that $64 million dollars talked about in my BLOG Post Dated May 14th, 2023 from somewhere? Now as this community source told me, this company may want to sell several of their buildings in Halifax. With this amount of money, we would be able to buy the buildings this landlord currently owns and this could create the start of our the not-for-profit landlord idea I am proposing. I am being told by the source who brought this to my attention that there are a lot of vacant units in the various buildings owned by this landlord. So the next steps would be lowering the rents for current tenants so that no one in these building becomes homeless, and then decrease the homeless population by filling those vacant units. Even if there are only 100 to 200 vacant units, that would create homes for 100 to 200 people in need. Then, as the not-for-profit organization, we can move forward by organizing fundraisers to help out with operational costs.
However, the bottom line is that something needs to happen. Agencies who help and support the homeless population here in Halifax are getting more and more frustrated by the amount of people who are looking to use their services. Contacts I have at MOSH, which I did a BLOG Post on, have been telling me that they are seeing a huge increase in unhoused people trying to use their services over the past few months. Also, food banks and soup kitchens are seeing longer-than-normal line-ups and much of this extra traffic is coming from the homeless population.
The question is: How much longer are we going to be in this housing crisis? A solution needs to be found ASAP!
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