Only 106 public housing units completed since promise made to build 380
More than 13,000 New Brunswick households are waiting for a unit
In October 2022, Dorothy Shephard, the social development minister of the day, told a crowd in a Saint John gymnasium the government would spend $102.2 million to build new public housing for the first time in a generation.
"Significant cost-of-living increases, combined with a housing market boom, has contributed to an unprecedented demand for public housing units," Shephard said at the event.
"I don't know how we can't say there's a crisis."
But three years later, less than a third of the promised housing has been finished.
As of July, 106 of the promised 380 units have been completed. Another 127 are being built right now.
When asked how she would rate the progress so far, housing researcher Julia Woodhall-Melnik said the province would not receive high marks.
"I would give it a solid C," said Woodhall-Melnik, an associate professor of social sciences at the University of New Brunswick. "You know, A for effort over the past year. However, I would say almost D minus for the work that happened before this year.
"We know that it takes a long time to build housing units, and really we should have had shovels in the ground when we started to see the rise of encampments across the province. The first death of an individual who lived in an encampment in a fire should have spurred multiple shovels in the ground."
There were early signs of trouble on the housing front. In November 2023, it was revealed that only $4 million of the $33 million earmarked to build new public housing units that year had been spent.
Jill Green, then housing minister, told reporters it was taking time to turn the New Brunswick Housing Corp. back into an organization with the capacity and expertise to build public housing.
When recently asked why the province was still falling behind on its public housing targets, current Housing Minister David Hickey echoed that sentiment.
"We're scraping the rust off an organization that was not building housing for 30 years, and that means standing up a lot of work.
"Over those three decades, we've seen the issues that have compounded in this province. It's led to a wait list of 13,000 people waiting for a unit like this. It's led to well over 2,000 people living on the street in the province of New Brunswick. It's not going to happen overnight, but the vision is there and the clarity is there on how we are going to solve this."
However, Woodhall-Melnik said that the urgency of the need should have pushed the province to look for creative solutions to get new housing online quickly.
In 2021, when she began tracking the public housing wait list, fewer than 5,000 households were on it. When Shephard announced the new units in 2022, there were nearly 9,000 households on the list. As of June, that number is more than 13,000, representing over 21,000 people.
"The government didn't necessarily need to just solely look at social housing as an option for spending this money," Woodhall-Melnik said.
"They could have reached out to folks who provide non-profit housing, who are ready to build, who have ideas for their clients, who have, you know, people that they serve every day that are ready to walk into these housing units."
According to Hickey, the province won't stop at the initial promise of 380 made by the Higgs government. The new target is 573, an additional 193.
Realistically, Woodhall-Melnik said even that won't meet the need.
Something is better than nothing, right? Movement towards movement, towards more social housing. Yes, let's do it. Let's keep going. Hopefully, when they finish those 500. they go and build another 500," she said.
"But really even bringing that number up to 573 will not do anything to really make a huge dent on today's current wait list."
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