Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to ask the question to the Minister of the Housing Corporation. Why are there so many empty houses in Fort Good Hope and how many empty houses are there in Fort Good Hope?
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The Minister of the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My understanding is we have an eight-plex in Fort Good Hope. I believe this is what he’s referring to. That is empty. I think we’re in the process of selling that particular unit. I think we have another eight units that we might be in talks with the local government about taking on these units.
The Minister is correct on the eight-plex that is sitting empty and in the process of selling it in the community. I’m not too sure where it will be going to or which organization or person. It’s been there for a while.
Why is it taking so long to dispose of this empty unit while there are a lot of people on the waiting list? Why are the empty units still sitting there while there are a lot of people on the waiting list to get into these units? What can we do to expedite this situation so that we can put people into houses rather than have them in other houses where overcrowding is a major health issue?
Every community has an allotment of public housing, and as we take the units out of stock, we have a disposal plan. We try to sell off the unit if we can. Those that we dispose of, with the new WSCC regulations we have to do a hazardous material assessment and abatement before we’re able to dispose of those units. So it’s added on a tremendous cost to our ability to dispose of many of these units. The Member and I were having a conversation where, back in the day, they’d just come in with a backhoe, take the unit down and haul it off to the garbage dump. We don’t have that ability anymore. So we’re trying to come up with the funding to… It’s almost double or even triple the cost in some cases, so we’re challenged that way and our aggressive disposal plan is not as aggressive as it used to be. So we’re taking steps to try and address that. Thank you.
Certainly, the Minister and I were speaking this morning on why it’s taking so long to dispose of these empty units, knowing that Fort Good Hope has a long list of potential tenants who want to go into these units and there’s overcrowding. It’s causing health issues; it’s causing social issues and people want to get into these units.
Is the Minister actively looking at an expedient process where these empty units can either be retrofitted by the local community organizations or be torn down? Like the Minister said, in the old days it was good because you could go in there, knock the houses down and build a new one. Now we seem to have more bureaucratic red tape costing us more, so it’s more difficult to replace these units or sell them off to the local government. People want these empty units filled either by building new ones or tearing them down.
Is the Minister looking at an expedient process for this to happen in Fort Good Hope?
The eight-plex that’s in Fort Good Hope, I’ll get the update on that and share it with the Member. I’m not sure where we’re at with that.
As far as the other units go, I’d have to get an update on those. If there are some there that we deem are write-offs, we will sell them if people want to take them on and try to do some renovations themselves. We’ve had that done in the past. I’ll get an update on all of the units that are in Fort Good Hope and the status and where we’re at with those.
Again, we’re challenged by the fact that we have to do an assessment and remediate a lot of these units before we dispose of them. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There is a TV program called Clean House where they come in and they take all the junk out of the house and people sometimes have a hard time letting go of some of their junk in the house. It’s almost like this Housing Corporation is letting go of some of their junk in the House here. So, I know this can be done because in my hometown of Tulita the Housing actually did a very good job of turning over these empty units to the community corporation real estate. They actually bought these units, fixed them up and rented them out.
Can this happen in Fort Good Hope where the Housing Corporation can go and say these units can be turned over to the community? The community is waiting to purchase these, build them and get these young couples into these houses. That’s what they’re waiting for. So, can the Minister clean house on this issue?
Thank you. We’d love to clean house, but again, we’re faced with some of the challenges of the proper assessment and remediation. We would be more than pleased to sell these units to a community group as we did in Tulita and they took on responsibility of those units. I think they were in the process of renovating them and they would rent them out and they would collect the revenues. We’re more than willing to partner with communities where we have a lot of these vacant units, and if there’s an opportunity for them to take those off our hands and fix them themselves then we have other opportunities to possibly look at putting new replacement public housing in the communities. We’re faced with many challenges and we’ve continued to try and address those. We understand that it is an issue across the NWT, so we’re looking at taking on that challenge head on. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
