Province unveils 5-year plan to build up P.E.I.'s housing market

The P.E.I. government has released a five-year plan it says will increase the province's housing supply to address the Island's ongoing housing crisis. 

The plan released Friday promises to identify "creative solutions and opportunities" in conjunction with tenants, landlords, community groups, industry associations, developers and all levels of government. 

P.E.I.'s population is expected to grow to 200,000 within the next six years, but there has been no housing boom to support that level of increase. 

Some estimates project that as many as 2,600 new units — including everything from rental suites to single-family detached houses — will have to be built every year just to meet the growing demand for housing.

The strategy released Friday goes beyond social or supported housing, which has historically been the provincial government's sole focus, said P.E.I. Minister of Housing, Land and Communities Rob Lantz. 

"We've had to expand the scope of this department to deal with the whole host of challenges across the whole housing continuum, from market housing right to vulnerable people with complex needs — and everything in between," Lantz said. 

"This strategy lays out a plan to take action right across that continuum and meet the demands of our growing population here."

Would 2,000 new homes a year fix P.E.I.’s housing problem? We ask the minister

9 months ago

Duration 1:37

The P.E.I. government has a five-year plan to address the Island's ongoing housing crisis. It says 2,000 new homes need to be built a year to quell that shortage, but others say that number needs to be bigger.

P.E.I. will require an average of 2,000 new housing units per year to meet those demands, according to the plan — and that's a number Lantz is prepared to defend. 

"It's a number we're confident in and we'll share our work with any of our partners as we work our way through this strategy and adjust if necessary," the minister said. 

'How do we get out of this?'

For the Island's opposition political parties, though, Friday's release fell short of being a concrete plan to meet the demand. 

Interim Green leader Karla Bernard wants more details on how the province will ensure construction workers will be paid adequately, how to engage young people in skilled trades, and how the government will ensure private industry will keep new homes affordable. 

She pointed to her own party's white paper on the housing crisis that identified some of these needs back in 2019. 

"How are we going to get out of this, is what we want to know," she said. "Had government acted swiftly back in 2019 and adapted that white paper, we would not be in the crisis that we're in now. Not saying it would be perfect, but we would have been working on this for the last five years and we would not be seeing the levels of homelessness that we are currently seeing." 

The Liberals, meanwhile, emailed a statement calling the housing strategy "a sham" that offered nothing but "recycled rhetoric and empty promises." 

"This document is a testament to the government's utter incompetence, complete lack of vision, and stunning disregard for the well-being of Islanders. Instead of offering tangible solutions to the housing crisis plaguing Islanders, the document is an attempt to mask the government's own incompetence and lack of vision," the statement reads. 

"Islanders deserve solutions. They deserve a government that is willing to roll up its sleeves and tackle the housing crisis head-on with bold ideas and concrete action. Instead, they get a government that is just not up to the job."  

'Truly affordable housing'

The province will also be announcing more initiatives for affordable housing, Lantz said. 

"With the cost of building housing these days, it's difficult if not impossible to build housing that's affordable for a very large segment of our population," the minister said. 

"We're prepared to make investments and work collaboratively with that sector to really build capacity and really start to build out the inventory of truly affordable housing that will remain affordable in perpetuity."

Lantz pointed to increasing housing density on P.E.I. as one of the ways to work through the housing crisis. That means more units per building project, in the shape of apartment buildings, condos or townhouses.

Since January, both Summerside and Charlottetown have received federal money through the Housing Accelerator Fund to remove barriers to build higher-density housing.

The community of Cornwall announced Friday it is also receiving money through the fund to fast-track 140 new homes over the next three years. 

Housing-first approach

The new strategy takes a housing-first approach to people dealing with homelessness, focusing on transitional housing and supportive housing, said Lantz. 

"Housing is a critical need for everybody and without that, it's difficult to deal with any of the other challenges people might be experiencing in their life, whether it be mental health, addictions or whatnot," he said. 

The plan outlines 20 priority actions to accelerate housing growth and make the market more affordable, including: 

• Provide incentives and financial supports for private sector and non-profit developments to increase the rental supply and focus on higher-density projects.
• Review and modernize regulations to support housing supply increases and a variety of housing types and densities.
• Invest in workforce and immigration strategies to retain and attract key skills to P.E.I. in areas that place pressure on the housing market.
• Work with municipalities to help them build more homes faster.
• Streamline building permitting processes.
• Enhance access to the housing market with a supply of tiny and small homes.
• Invest in government-owned social housing units.
• Facilitate access to affordable housing units for low-income residents through government development and non-profit organizations.
• Build a collaborative intervention model for unhoused or people at risk of being unhoused.
• Work with community partners to streamline access to resources for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness 

P.E.I.'s housing shortage has been described as a crisis since 2018. 

Housing starts had started to grow in 2017, but peaked in 2019 at just 1,504 starts. 

For years up until 2018, starts were below 1,000, and they have been above 1,000 since then. But the boom in new housing units appears to have peaked, and has not been sufficient to keep pace with the record population growth.

A day prior to releasing this housing plan, government released a new population strategy aimed at slowing the province's rate of population growth, in part by whittling down its federal immigration nominations.