Non-profit housing groups happy to get new funding, but dollar figure still uncertain

New funding for non-profit housing organizations is terrific — but now the sector is waiting to find out how much they'll get, the executive director of the Manitoba Non-Profit Housing Association says.

"We don't know yet if the amount of funding that they're making available will be enough, but we're really pleased that they're working on it, because it's something that's really critical to keeping housing sustainable over the long term," Christina Maes Nino told CBC News on Monday.

The new funding model, paid for through the federal Canada community housing initiative, will provide subsidies to non-profit organizations that offer affordable rents at up to 8,500 housing units in the province, the Manitoba government said in a news release on Friday afternoon.

The funding will be stable and predictable, and could come in the form of monthly subsidies to help cover operating costs and capital needs, the news release said.

The funding agreements will be made with non-profit organizations that provide housing and won't be tied to specific buildings, allowing the groups to use the money where their need is highest, Manitoba Housing Minister Bernadette Smith said in the news release.

The non-profit housing sector has been asking for years for help, as funding agreements signed when buildings went up 30 to 40 years ago are expiring as their mortgages are paid off, said Maes Nino, who expects to get more information about how much new funding is available when the provincial government releases its budget on April 2.

The expiry of one of those agreements led to the sale of Lions Place, a 284-unit non-profit housing complex in downtown Winnipeg, to a private Alberta firm last year.

Organizations whose funding expired are now being offered more under the new funding model announced last week, Maes Nino said.

"It's desperately needed to maintain the viability of the housing," she said. "Most of the organizations that have 100 per cent rent-geared-to-income units would not be viable without this funding."

Those organizations would either have to raise rents or stop maintaining their buildings in order to make ends meet if they didn't get new funding, she said.

The organizations have been told new five-year funding agreements will come with inflationary increases after years of not getting any increases, Maes Nino said.

"What it doesn't do yet is go back to look at where organizations would be in terms of funding if they would have had those inflationary increases for 10 years," she said.

There are also no promises about what will happen at the end of the five-year agreements, she said.

And the funding isn't expected to cover the costs of building maintenance and improvements in 30- to 40-year-old buildings.

"They need modernization and repair. The amount of funding available, as far as we know, won't actually deal with that yet," Maes Nino said.

"We've calculated that, including public housing and non-profit housing, we'll need about $1.5 billion over the next years to cover that capital deficit."