Tantramar MLA Megan Mitton
Tantramar MLA Megan Mitton says she intends to keep pushing for major reforms to the law that is supposed to protect New Brunswick tenants from big rent hikes.
She adds that the new Liberal government’s 3% annual rent cap that takes effect on February 1st has a major flaw.
“There needs to be vacancy control,” Mitton says. “And what that means is tying the rent cap to the unit and not to the tenant.”
She notes that under the new 3% cap, landlords can increase rents by more than the cap when tenants move out of an apartment and new ones move in.
“Tying the rent cap to the unit and not to the tenant is the right policy,” she says “because it doesn’t just protect tenants from significant rent increases, it also protects the affordable housing stocks so that rents don’t increase too much between tenants.”
Mitton made her comments on Saturday during an interview at Mount Allison where professors, politicians, students and members of the public were holding a workshop to discuss ideas for a forthcoming book on New Brunswick’s political history since the year 2000 and how it compares to developments in the rest of Canada.
University of New Brunswick Professor Julia Woodhall-Melnik, who is co-writing a chapter on rental housing affordability, says in the last 25 years, governments pursued neoliberal policies that promote the growth of the private housing market over the provision of publicly subsidized housing.
“At present, public policy at both the federal and provincial levels is insufficient to address the growing severity of the housing crisis and the changing nature of renting,” she told workshop participants during her keynote, lunch-time address.
Professor Julia Woodhall-Melnik, Canada Research Chair in Resilient Communities, UNB SJ.
Woodhall-Melnik showed slides dividing the last quarter century into three, 10-year periods: the 2000s to 2010, 2010 to 2020 and the years since.
She said the first period featured limited government investment in public housing coupled with tax incentives to promote real estate investment trusts (REITs) in which private investors are encouraged to buy up properties that can generate profits for shareholders.
For a local example in Sackville, click here.
In the 2010s, Woodhall-Melnik said New Brunswick lost more than a third of units that rented for less than $750 a month accompanied by nearly a tenfold increase in the number of apartments with monthly rents of $1,500 or higher.
At the same time, she said, the provincial government did almost nothing to protect low-to-middle-income tenants.
And although in 2022, the Higgs government did bring in a 3.8% rent cap, it did not renew it for 2023.
Woodhall-Melnik describes New Brunswick’s latest investments in public housing as too little too late.
“In New Brunswick, a provincial investment of $102.2 million in public housing to renew and develop 490 housing units, when approximately 11,000 households sit on our provincial waitlist for public housing, is a mere drop in the bucket of what is needed to provide affordable rental housing to low-income households,” she said.
She also criticized government reliance on providing financial incentives to private developers in what she sees as a futile attempt “to build our way out of the housing crisis.”
Woodhall-Melnik says most of the new rental units built by private developers are “targeted towards higher-income renters who make up a very small percent of the rental population within New Brunswick.”
She also suggested that Canadian governments will never solve the housing crisis as long as they view housing as a generator of private wealth and investment rather than a public good and a human right.
“We have a solution [to the housing crisis]. she said, “we’re just never going to do it.”
For a concise summary of rent control measures from the tenants’ rights group ACORN NB, click here.
Rent control… a classic socialist/communist move (which is what greens really are).
Once you have rent controls, guess what happens? Nobody wants to build new purpose-built rentals. Which means, effectively, that those who are already in rentals are being subsidized, and those who are looking for one have few options. Rental housing effectively ends up being an “old timer” privilege.
Keeps out the riff-raff, you know. Just like how high housing prices keep “undesirables” out of “good neighbourhood” schools.
That’s what the people of Tantramar apparently voted for. Elitists!
Sorry, but I believe in free enterprise and having the market dictate the costs. The cap shouldn’t exist at all. Rent control will push landlords to sell, stop new construction and properties not being updated. Putting caps or even more restrictions on rentals have not considered the rising cost of heat, lights, new construction materials. The adverse effect happens when window plants, building supply stores and trades people with less work, turning the economy on a down swing, this is basic economics. Landlords are the entrepreneurs risking investment while tenants have no risk at all. I do not believe in a welfare state only keeping our people weak depending on Government handouts, I believe in self-sufficiency giving our people the dignity of earning their own way and becoming wealthier and stronger. As a previous letter said, let’s not become a left-wing communist province.
I love how the usual “we can’t put a limit on making money for people, that’s COMMUNIST!” cries are coming out with this.
Two questions for those opposed to rent caps:
1. do you currently rent and if you do, why are you against rent caps? If you don’t rent, why do you care about rent caps?
2. Do you have issues with there being so many homeless people out and tent cities? Are you aware of the correlation between homelessness and the lack of adequate housing/renting?
Funny how it’s “Elitist” to think rent caps are a solution, when locally, it’s more the “elitist” end of the population who can afford the rents in town, but no others. And it’s not just locals, but ‘out of towners’ moving in because they can’t get places in Moncton, so they take here instead.
Or funny how it’s okay for the market to ‘dictate costs’ when the market is so jaded and skewed towards those who have, vs. those who just want to live but don’t have quite enough.
If you’re against rent caps or any form of renting control, you forfeit the right to bitch and complain, IMO, when the topics of homelessness comes up, or how the price of renting keeps going up and up despite locally no one able to afford it.
I agree with our MLA on this. But everyone knew the Liberals were only going to take a half-measure ~ rent cap without tying that cap to the unit. There hasn’t been any significant investment in public housing in Canada in several generations, and even those programs produced spotty social outcomes – see Regent Park, Toronto. I used to think that locally rent caps would curb supply as an unintended but anticipated outcome. But it seems pretty clear that the limit on supply in these parts is driven more by an inadequate supply of labour to build homes. More generally, and looking beyond Sackville, markets do adjust, as rents have been falling in Canada for several months. So this means that REITs may not be generating the return on investment that their backers hoped, which is why, unfortunately for Sackville, these investment vehicles have arrived here, where the housing supply is still constrained. I also disagree with the expert who, maybe to fit the book’s time frame, suggests that neoliberal housing policy is only 25 years old. Indeed, if one traces any policy arena, housing, universities, etc., the continuities and discontinunities between when neoliberalism replaced, purportedly, whatever came before it, are much blurrier than its critics claim. To put all the faults of the world on neoliberalism is lazy theorizing.
Comment from Bruce Wark: Yes, the main focus of the book is the last 25 years, but Julia Woodhall-Melnik made it clear that neoliberal housing policies go back a lot further. In 1990 for example, former Premier Frank McKenna dismantled the New Brunswick Housing Corporation which had supported non-profit and co-op housing in the 1970s and 80s.
Incentivizing more buildings of all sorts with tax breaks and minimizing red tape would create housing solutions.. and yes, the free market system is still the best system we can all hope to advocate. Knowing how anti-capitalism these university types are around here [while many of them are living in those beautiful historic properties themselves indicates they have NIMBYism… those older homes of course were built by the working class. I won’t be surprised to hear people defending Megan do-gooders “actions” yet again. Housing co-ops are hyped so much because they’re not about private property ownership [another thing the lefties hate]. We could all live in great homes if we had the desire to advocate for liberty and lower taxation and less bureaucracy when it comes to housing construction. It’s a shame how society has lost its way and never celebrates the builders and architects and tradesmen and instead lifts up and recognizes poets, artists, academics, politicians and sports heroes instead of those who create the essential homes we need.
Man that’s hitting the nail on the head S.A. Cunliffe! As far as people living in tents (tell me where these tent cities are in Sackville) has it been considered that a majority of these people are dealing with addiction issues, addressing this issue I would say more hospitals and less prisons. Do the leftists think that landlords want their investments torn apart by the crazy people, then these same people find it hard to rent with their history as destructiveness. Why should landlords have to be considered the welfare office taking on responsibility of the government. At one time to take a trade at NBCC all that was required was a grade 10 education, that requirement should be put back in place to help provide the trades people we so desperately need and to help give our underprivileged a respectable career. Don’t blame the landlords for bringing in so many foreigners into our country when we don’t have the infrastructure to support such moves. Charity starts at home then we can consider helping others. In the Jewish faith it is considered giving a person a job rather than a hand out is providing that person dignity of money earned, with that in mind we would have less people living on the streets. Habitat for humanity is a good style of helping people on the fringe to own their own home where these people take part in the construction of their own home and to help others build more homes. We could take a lesson from the Mennonites where the whole community takes part in construction (old term barn raising). We should have our prisons constructing homes giving the inmates a second chance in life and turning them into productive citizens. At the end of the day I’m thinking of constructive solutions to solving housing issues not blaming landlords for the misguided politicians following popular misconceptions.
Leftists, leftists, leftists…
BOTH types of Government we’ve had in NB has not done their duty to the citizens of the province – not just over housing but other issues – yet narrowing it all down to a “It’s a ….. problem!” is ignorance and baiting at best.
That said, at least “Trade” had a few good ideas that could work. I’ll give you credit for that, despite the bunk and blindness of the rest of what you said.