Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of the NWT Housing Corporation. In my statement I outlined the desperate housing situation people are facing going into winter. There are 137 names on the Yellowknife Housing Authority waiting list, 500 across the territory, and several service organizations say that the situation is so bad it’s scaring them. There have been some good changes in our approach to housing, but the facts, unfortunately, show that things are just getting worse. The statistics essentially reflect an emergency.
I’m wondering what the Minister is contemplating to deal with this situation and how are we going to get people housed as winter comes on.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Minister responsible for the NWT Housing Corporation, Mr. Robert McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We do have vacant units across the Northwest Territories where the public housing stock units are vacant, but those units are being worked on. We have approximately 130, I think, where there’s some major M and I work done. We’ve tried to encourage our LHOs to have this work completed as quickly as possible so we can turn them over and get tenants into them. Unfortunately, sometimes due to lack of capacity, that does become very challenging. A lot of the units are under repair, and once the repairs are completed we will move tenants back in, which should shorten up the waiting lists in each community.
We have heard that answer before, yet here we have this situation where we have a huge waiting list that is building rapidly.
At my constituency meeting a couple of nights ago in Ndilo/Detah, I was told there are up to 10 vacant home ownership units in the community. Most are all still empty while un-housed people sit on these waiting lists, often because household income thresholds do not match reality. There are about 30 empty units in Behchoko for want of money to do repairs. We’ve been hearing about that for over a year now. Again, this is an emergency.
What steps will the Minister take now to get families into the vacant home ownership units, for example, and what steps will he take now to get damaged units repaired and back into the housing pool on an expedited schedule?
Members have heard the answer before and they will continue to hear it: As long as we have vacant units that need to be repaired every year, we will have vacant units that are being worked on. That answer will never change.
As to what we’re doing right now, I understand the Member is concerned over the vacant home ownership units. That is one that we’ve aggressively been trying to address. Sometimes we can’t get folks in there because the income doesn’t match or there are other reasons. It’s not always just the income. The ones that we’ve had in the past, we have tried to convert to public housing so we can utilize more of them.
I’ll have to follow up on the 10 that are in the Member’s constituency, because I do know we had 135 a couple of years ago and we had very aggressive plans, and we had converted a lot of these into public housing units so we could utilize them, because we’ve heard from across the Northwest Territories that we have all these vacant units. We don’t want them vacant. Some have been vacant for five years. We’ve been trying to address that.
Again, I will follow up on the 10 that the Member speaks of and find out where they’re at and how we can go about filling these vacant units, because we don’t want to see vacant units in the Northwest Territories. That’s not our goal.
I was told at my constituency meeting – the Minister talked about the vacant home ownership units – that people are being turned down for home ownership units because the income ceilings are unrealistic. Obviously, with up to 10 vacant units in a community as small as Ndilo/Detah, there’s something wrong with the program practicality. The Minister knows that. He just told us. Knowing that, let’s do something about it.
Will the Minister commit to review those guidelines again and consider means to place home ownership units or transfer them into the public housing stock, which I know he said he would do the latter?
We’ve tried every which way to get as many people into these home ownership units as possible. We’ve tried having a 10 percent gap where if they were over the ceiling, then we would consider them. We’ve had some limited success with that. Some people have been turned down for other reasons.
I will commit to the Member that I will follow up on these units and see where they’re at, because I would like to see, as much as the next guy, a lot of people moved out of the public housing spectrum and into home ownership, but we have to ensure that we work very closely with them and make sure that we’re not setting a lot of them up for something that they are not capable of handling. A lot of the people are surprised, once they get into home ownership, the amount of money that they have to pay as far as bills go.
I will commit to the Member that I will work on these particular units and see how we can best do something with them very quickly.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final supplementary, Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the Minister’s commitment there. I know the Minister realizes that housing is really the fundamental first step of getting people out of poverty. They need a basis to live and carry on their lives. This is so important.
I mentioned in my statement the new Transitional Rent Supplement Program and the current refusal to develop policy for people renting in boarding houses to access the program. With Yellowknife at less than a 1 percent vacancy rate in the residential market, will the Minister stop penalizing these people for the lack of housing choices and open a program to applicants who are renting rooms in houses?
This was one of the concerns we heard across the Northwest Territories. A lot of folks out there who are just trying to get into the workforce, however, rent was taking up a good portion of their money that they were making. We’ve tried to address that.
Obviously, being a new program there are still some things that need to be worked out, and then with most programs will be evaluated after a year, but for now our goal is to try to work with those who are in the market housing industry. There are many other cases that we can hear about and discuss, but those cases I think will have to have that discussion at a later date.
Right now when we’re rolling this out, we want to just concentrate on getting them into private market rentals, and then we’ll go from there and evaluate the program after a year.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.
