
Recently, you may have come across some news coverage of a project we’ve started; from
now until early 2023 we will be working on a Housing Needs Assessment for the
entirety of Nova Scotia. It’s a bit unusual for us to be fielding media
requests about the beginning of a project, usually the interest comes at
the end when we actually have some results to talk about… if the interest comes
at all. Yet, we shouldn’t be too surprised. Housing challenges continue to grow
across Canada, and in many ways Nova Scotia has been particularly impacted. This
is an issue we’ve been engaged in for some years now, building up our experience
from Truro, NS to Terrace, BC. We are very excited at the opportunity this
project creates for us to set a new standard for conducting these types of
analyses, all right here in our home province.
I would be remiss to not prominently mention
the collaborating firms we have on our team. While Turner Drake is getting the
name recognition due to our role as project manager, the reality is this is
very much a combined effort. In fact, the budget for this project is more directed
to public engagement than data analysis – my excel file doesn’t care if I load
in data for 1 municipality or 49, but talking to people can’t scale like that.
We have an enormous geography to cover, and a diversity of stakeholders in each
community to engage with. So, we are thrilled to have Upland
Planning & Design Studio as well as Colab undertaking that process with us. Back closer
to our focus, we are excited to be collaborating with MountainMath on the analytics and data
dissemination.
Beyond the team itself, the scope of work we
have gives us even more to look forward to. The RFP issued by the Province for
this study was thorough enough to ensure the right questions will be answered,
but was also flexible enough that we were able to put our own spin on things to
ultimately propose a Needs Assessment as we think they should be done. We can’t
get into everything, but here are a few highlights:
- We
are excited to finally undertake this work with the benefit of data from the
2021 Census as it is released over the course of this year. While data sets
related to the housing market and inventory are updated at least annually, this
is not the case for many important socio-economic indicators that tell us about
the people who are trying to access and maintain that housing. The 2021 Census
will give us a contemporary view into these factors, something that has been an
increasing challenge with this work over the last number of years. Until this
point, we’ve had to rely on the 2016 Census, which predates virtually every
important trend affecting our housing situation today.
- We
are also eager to introduce a much more detailed understanding of Short Term
Rental activity (i.e. AirBNB) across the province. This is a fraught topic; the
use of our housing stock for short-term rental purposes has very clear negative
and positive impacts, and these are highly variable between communities, and
even across different neighbourhoods in the same community. Up to this point a
lack of detailed data has prevented us from clearly understanding where the
problems are, and how severe they may be. We’re looking forward to pulling back
the curtain on this facet of the housing market!
- Finally,
this project is an opportunity for us to up the ante in terms of making our
work useful and accessible. While government is our client, housing issues are
top of mind for many across the province and we want our efforts to benefit anyone
working toward housing solutions. It is incredibly difficult to write a static
report that presents such a breadth of information (both thematic and
geographic) in a way that is useful to more than a few end users. That is why
we are exploring how to better share our results so more people across the province
can adapt it to their needs, interests, and locations. A more dynamic, web-based,
and customizable approach to disseminating housing-related data and insights is
one of the outcomes I am most excited for.
While this project will
provide our client with key information they need to design and target public
policy responses, the unfortunate reality is that our work will take time, and across
the board we are playing a game of catchup where time is the most precious
commodity. Housing affordability has rapidly eroded over the course of the
pandemic, and was being degraded more slowly for years before that. Take a look
at trends just in the owner-occupied market (which has lagged the rental market
in terms of demand pressure):

This is only a narrow view of a larger and more
complex picture, but it helps to illustrate just how severe the problem is for
lower income households. Not long ago, a household earning $40,000 had a shot
at about half of the ownership opportunities across HRM, these days they’re
fighting it out for the cheapest 10% of the market. While across Canada we are
starting to see more serious engagement in the issue and more on-the-ground
interventions, my perspective is that no jurisdiction is yet grappling with the
elephant in the room; that a sizable proportion of the population is now firmly
outside the boundaries of what market-rate housing can serve. None of the low
hanging fruit or amount of “innovative” policy and partnership that is
comfortably within the boundaries of government intervention is going to get
around this basic fact, and it’s going to take time for government to tool up
and get back to engaging with this issue at a scale that approaches historic
precedents.
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Neil Lovitt is the Vice President of Turner Drake's Planning and
Economic Intelligence divisions. He engages in numerous consulting
assignments, including non-market housing feasibility studies, Housing Needs
Assessments from coast to coast, land inventory analyses, and infrastructure
studies. To see how you can benefit from the unique expertise of our Planning
and Economic Intelligence team, call Neil at (902) 429-1811 or nlovitt@turnerdrake.com.