Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of the NWT Housing Corporation. I was asking the Minister questions last week regarding the large number of home ownership units remaining vacant because people don’t fit program criteria. At my constituency meeting in Detah, I was told one applicant was turned down because their income exceeded the $77,000 income ceiling for program eligibility. That seems to lack realism. Suppose a household made $80,000, would they be any more able to buy a home in the private market in Detah? Some flexibility obviously is needed here.
The Minister said a program review was underway and agreed the housing needs are urgent. Can he tell me what action is being taken now to free up these vacant units through more flexible program interpretation?
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Minister responsible for the NWT Housing Corporation, Mr. Robert McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my discussions with the Member I did say that I was going to look at these vacant units, because I know that we have a number of vacant units across the Northwest Territories and we tried to get as many clients as we could into them. Those clients we couldn’t get into them, we converted a lot of these over to public housing. I will commit to the Member that I need to follow up on the number of vacant units that are on there.
He raises the point of income, and that’s one that we’ve had discussions about as a corporation. We tried a GAP program a couple of years ago, where people who were slightly over the coordinated income threshold for that particular community, we would consider them for some of our programs.
Thanks to the remarks from the Minister there. When we talk about getting people into housing, we’re often talking about getting them out of homelessness. The Housing First Movement I’ve referred to in the past points out the dramatic decrease in government’s other service costs. When we meet the lower costs of providing housing, you avoid emergency issues and so on. We need to look at the big picture.
Can the Minister say how the Housing Corporation includes in its analysis of policy, for example, such as we’re discussing the financial benefits of reduced costs of other services when people are housed, or why this isn’t taken into account if they don’t in a total cost-benefit analysis.
We understand the advantages of getting people off the streets and into public housing. That’s why there’s public housing. We have 24 public housing units across the Northwest Territories, and from public housing we like to think that a lot of them can graduate into the home ownership program.
We have approximately 1,600 families we’ve been able to put into the home ownership program over a number of years. We try to be as flexible as possible in getting as many people into some of these programs as we can. For example, with one of the home ownership programs, we allow them to carry up to $5,000 in arrears. We’ve had a very good look at the whole shelter policy review, the whole home ownership portfolio. We try to be as flexible as possible to get people into some of these units. Unfortunately, some of them are turned down for other reasons than arrears.
In most of our communities there is no private market for housing. This is a reality. We can say that if a household makes over a certain amount of money, they should go to the private market to build, but we know that’s not happening. In large part, that’s due to the basic lack of local capacity to construct housing. Again, reality.
Can the Minister say how this lack of local private capacity issue is considered in the equation of setting eligibility levels and whether this is under review?
In a lot of the communities they do have the capacity to construct units. We’ve seen that in a number of occasions in the past. We have a lot of our units constructed by local contractors that have the training and knowledge how to build a house. Although there are some challenges in some places, I don’t think that’s primarily one of them.
We do take into consideration the fact that these communities don’t have a private market. The core need income threshold might be a little higher in their community. If you look at the overall percentage of our home ownership programs, they are delivered to a lot of smaller communities because we as the corporation recognize that there is not much of a private market. They are not like some of the regional centres.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final supplementary, Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Just by way of example here, I’ve just got an e-mail here today, mentioning a home ownership unit in Enterprise that sat empty for three years. It has frozen at least twice and has mould in the basement. A person visited Providence recently and the night watchman device was shining brightly, meaning again there was no heat in the unit and it was probably frozen up. Apparently, Fort Resolution has 16 home ownership units vacant. We know about my situation in Detah. Obviously, we need that flexibility in policies.
Can the Minister assure me that we will be not just reading from the rulebook any longer and we will be applying flexibility in getting these units occupied before they deteriorate?
I can assure Members of this House that we try having a little bit of flexibility in some of these cases. We do, obviously, I mean we all know that we need some rules, otherwise we’d have just anybody in those units and we may set up a lot of people for failure, which has happened in the past.
As far as the vacant units go, Members of the 16th Assembly will recall that we had 137 vacant units across the Northwest Territories. We had a number in Fort Resolution, we had a number in Gameti. We’ve had a fairly aggressive program in trying to fill them.
We’ve updated Members at the end of the 16th as to our strategy. Most of these units, to my understanding, have been filled. The ones that we couldn’t get public housing clients into, we converted to public housing. The communities that didn’t have public housing, we’ve entered into some agreements with the local band government to provide the administration and maintenance, where possible, on these. I’m going to commit that I will follow up on the number of vacant units we have across the Northwest Territories, home ownership units. I know there’s always going to be a vacancy. There’s going to be a vacancy in public housing units because we need to get these worked on. I will follow up on the number of vacant units across the Northwest Territories and provide the information to all the Members.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Mr. Hawkins.
