Rebuilding Manitoba’s social housing system

Opinion

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This article was published 12/03/2024 (545 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last month, the Federal Housing Advocate released her final report on homeless encampments across Canada. The report, prepared after extensive consultations, established that the rise of homeless encampments across Canada is a human rights crisis caused by the failure of governments to uphold the right of all people to adequate housing.

Here in Winnipeg, over 1,200 people are without a home and live on our streets. The 2022 Street Census found that insufficient income to afford housing was the most-cited reason for their entry into homelessness; conflict with landlords or loss of housing due to a unit being sold or renovated was the fourth most common reason.

If we are serious about ending homelessness we need to do all we can to prevent it by increasing our supply of housing where rents are set according to a tenant’s income and by strengthening tenant protections, including the rent regulation system. Doing both will prevent homelessness and radically reduce housing-related hardship, which disproportionately affects women, Indigenous Peoples, people with disabilities, racialized community members and other members of historically marginalized groups.

It’s an obvious conclusion and one which is supported by years of reports prepared by academics, policy experts, community members, and housing providers. Increasing safe, appropriate housing was a key recommendation of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, and last year a Scotiabank report underlined the need for Canada to double our social housing stock.

Unfortunately, here in Manitoba we’ve been headed in the opposite direction for years. In 2015, Manitoba Housing owned 18,200 units of social housing. Last year, that number had dropped to 16,400. Even that number may be inflated given recent reports of 2,000 vacant Manitoba Housing units. Reversing the former PC government’s business tax cuts, which Premier Wab Kinew has pledged to keep, would completely fund repairs and much-needed upgrades in electrical and heating systems on 1,000 of those units. The waiting list for subsidized housing could be cut by 20 per cent.

Things aren’t any better in the private rental market. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., vacancy rates in Winnipeg are the lowest they have been in 12 years. For apartments at the lowest end of the market, the rates were between just one and two per cent.

The lack of quality, low-cost units in the private market is the direct result of loopholes in provincial rent regulations.

The Residential Tenancies Act limits annual rent increases each year to a percentage based on the average annual change in the consumer price index. It is generally a fair process that offers certainty to landlords and protects tenants from rent gouging. Unfortunately, the guideline doesn’t apply to new units of any cost and exempts units with rents more than $1,650 per month.

Even more problematic, landlords can apply to raise the rent above the guideline — subject to no set limit — if they can establish increased operating costs or repair expenses.

Rather than being a neutral cost-pass-through mechanism, this allows landlords to inflate their profit margins, with negative effects on housing affordability in Manitoba. After those costs have been fully paid by the tenants — through rent increases which have been as high as 126 per cent in one year — the rent never goes back down.

Unsurprisingly, in the last decade Winnipeg has lost more than 24,000 units renting for less than $750 per month, most now renting for much more. This has only increased demand for subsidized housing.

Our government knows the problems and the solutions. When in opposition, our current minister of finance, Adrien Sala, introduced a private member’s bill to restrict above-guideline rent increases. In addition to curtailing rent hikes, the NDP made a campaign promise to end homelessness by building hundreds of new social and affordable housing units.

Fixing the rent increase system is a nearly no-cost change with immediate positive effects on security of tenure and housing affordability. Increasing the supply of rent-geared-to-income housing will be a larger investment — though opportunities exist to maximize the impact of provincial funding.

Winnipeg is receiving millions from the federal government’s Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF). With a capital funding boost and stable, ongoing operating funding, gains in housing supply through the HAF could actually go to those renters who need it most. Seizing these opportunities and funding additional units could help the province reach the Right to Housing Coalition projection of 1,000 rent-geared-to-income units needed each year for the next 10 years to address homelessness and deepening poverty.

Funding social housing is an investment that pays healthy returns. It creates local jobs and improves the physical and mental wellbeing of Manitobans, producing stronger social and economic outcomes for whole communities. More than that, it’s a concrete way to uphold the human right of everyone to adequate housing.

Yutaka Dirks is the senior policy and outreach adviser at the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights and is the housing organizer for the Reweaving Support Project.