HALIFAX – In a morning briefing, Nova Scotia premier Tim Houston expressed worry, today, that it may be impossible to tackle the province’s scarcity of affordable housing without an increase in the availability of affordable housing.
“It’s discouraging,” the Premier began, “I’m starting to get the impression that we’ll never be able to find a solution that doesn’t address the problem directly”.
He continued “Folks told us they wanted to sleep under their own roof. So we spent millions of dollars on a shelter with a roof that they would share with 50 other people, but they weren’t interested. They said that they wanted to sleep on their own beds. So we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a website that made it easier for them to pay to sleep in someone else’s bed, and, again, no takers! What are we supposed to do?!”.
“We’ve rezoned so developers can build more rental properties, we’ve demanded that existing rental properties limit the amount of commercial space on their ground floors, we’ve even removed height restrictions to increase the density of rental properties, and that still hasn’t stopped people from wanting homes of their own!”, he continued. “I mean, we’ll try anything at this point. What if we built more UNAFFORDABLE housing?”.
Trying to strike a more hopeful tone, the PC leader insisted that, despite the lack of progress, his government wasn’t done trying to find unobvious fixes for the crisis, and just commissioned the formation of a new task forced dubbed “The Band-Aid Committee”.
