Governments must make money more accessible to meet housing demand, says Municipalities N.L. president

The head of Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador says it's going to be difficult for the province to meet the rising demand for housing in the future, especially if federal funding is difficult to obtain for most small towns.

Amy Coady says most towns in the province don't have the capacity to apply for federal programs like the Housing Accelerator Fund, which uses an in-depth, data-driven application process.

That's a problem, Coady said, considering the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation expects Newfoundland and Labrador will need at least 60,000 more units than are currently being built by 2030.

"That's a massive number," she said. "When we look at the members of MNL, 75 per cent of our members are municipalities under 1,000 [people] with probably a half-time clerk."

Coady said her hometown of Grand Falls-Windsor applied for the Housing Accelerator Fund, and it took their director of engineering out of the mix for several days to complete the application.

She worries smaller towns won't have the resources and will shy away from applying.

"We're missing out on so many opportunities because we can't even get the applications completed," she said. "These programs are fabulous, but we need these programs to meet us where we are. Not where we need to be."

Aled ab lorwerth, the CMHC's deputy chief economist, told CBC News in September that there are several areas where federal, provincial and municipal governments will have to make adjustments in order to meet the expected demand. He noted the length of bureaucratic processes as one of the impediments.

"The challenge is huge," ab Iorwerth said. "What it's going to require is everybody pulling together. All orders of government, the private sector. Nobody is going to be able to do this on their own."

Construction association says creative solutions needed

Matt Mallam, chair of the Newfoundland and Labrador Construction Association, hopes industry leaders will continue to have a seat at the table for discussions about solving the housing crisis.

To build as many units as the CMHC is projecting to be necessary, Mallam said the province will have to shake its reliance on single family homes.

"That's physically impossible to do that with single-family dwellings on 50x100 lots," he said. "You need to get more creative with how you're going to fill that need in terms of putting more homes under one roof."

That becomes a challenge in Newfoundland and Labrador, he said, where construction costs are elevated. Apartment buildings, for example, are difficult to build because of the cost to import materials and the sheer amount of materials needed. 

"Newfoundland is in an especially more challenging environment," Mallam said.

Labour is another key concern, he said, as the workforce would need to be drastically increased to meet that kind of demand.

That's led the industry association to lead recruitment sessions at high schools around the province — and to look outside the country for migrant workers. 

He hopes the construction association will be involved in discussions about solutions.

"It would be nice to know what everyone's plan is moving forward so that our industry can plan for it to have the right amount of labour available," he said. "We're open to any form of creative solution to kind of fill the need of what we're going through right now."

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