Alberta lacks information, maintenance plan for affordable housing stock, auditor general says

The Alberta government lacks information on the true state of its affordable housing stock and lacks standards and a plan for maintaining it, according to a new report from the province's auditor general. 

The fall 2024 report, tabled in the legislature Monday, found the Ministry of Seniors, Community and Social Services no longer evaluates the urgency of a repair or an update after a previous ranking system was abandoned in 2019.

The report recommends the province compile that information and set up a maintenance plan to fix units according to need. 

Patty Hayes, the assistant auditor general who examined the file, said putting off maintenance hurts the sustainability of the affordable housing program, as well as the health and safety of the people living in those units. 

"If you've got leaking roofs, leaking windows, you can get mould. You can have poor heating and ventilation, especially in the wintertime," she said. 

"It's got some real impacts on people if the buildings they live in have deteriorating conditions that go on for years, unaddressed."

The report recommends the province start compiling an accurate list of repairs that need to be made and set up a maintenance plan to fix affordable units according to need. 

"Those affordable housing units need to be around for a long time and like our vehicles and like our own homes, we need to maintain them," said Alberta Auditor General Doug Wylie at a news conference Monday. 

"They will serve Albertans much, much longer if we maintain them."

2022 government review

Seniors, Community and Social Services Minister Jason Nixon was not available to comment on the auditor general's report Monday afternoon. Alysha Wilshoff, his press secretary, sent a written response to CBC News. 

Wilshoff said the auditor general's findings are similar to those in an internal government review from 2022. 

"Work on those recommendations was already underway at the time of the OAG review and the department is making good progress," she wrote. 

Wilshoff said the government issued a request for proposals seeking someone to prepare a long-term strategy for affordable housing maintenance. 

She said the government has allocated $121 million over three years to maintain and fix provincial affordable housing stock. Funding will facilitate that work in 4,250 units within the current fiscal year. 

The province owns about 27,000 affordable housing units that are managed by 80 different operators.

Index scores

Independent experts used to evaluate the conditions of units and list what repairs and maintenance were required. The projects were ranked using an index score, but that practice stopped in November 2019. 

The auditor general review found that half the housing stock have index scores that are at least a decade old. Housing operators offer evaluations but the information isn't complete. 

Money allocated to repairs falls short of the demand, the report said. In 2022-23, housing operators sent 3,400 funding requests that totalled $333 million. The province funded 215 projects at a cost of $31 million. 

The province has acknowledged in previous ministry annual reports that there is about $1 billion in deferred maintenance on its affordable housing stock. 

The report mentions an instance from 2022-23, where a fire sprinkler system and roof replacement that would have received 100 out of 100 under the old system wasn't funded. A suite renewal project that received a score of 69 out of 100 was. Rankings on internal lists changed within the same year with no explanation. 

Managers told the auditor general that they relied on personal knowledge of a facility, old requests and a need to split funding among projects to make their decisions. 

Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood MLA Janis Irwin, the NDP Opposition critic for housing, said she found the auditor general's findings reflect what she has been hearing from people who reach out to her. Irwin said she has heard complaints about bed bug infestations and a lack of heat in the winter. 

She urged Nixon to take the report seriously and invest in getting the government's units up to par. 

"The longevity of these projects is very much in jeopardy at a time when not only we should be investing in maintaining and upgrading our units, there should be a whole lot of new affordable housing units being built as well," Irwin said. "And they're not."

In 2022, the provincial government released the Affordable Housing Management Framework — a strategy for determining whether the province would keep a property, transfer ownership to another operator or sell it on the open market.

The document stated the province wished to move away from being a significant owner of housing stock and instead focus on funding and regulation.

The plan said the province would sell about 20 properties a year and reinvest the earnings into existing or new affordable housing stock. 

About $10 million worth of assets have been transferred since then.