Non-profits next target for building, says housing minister

The P.E.I. government is looking at all opportunities in the housing market in its efforts to get Islanders into affordable homes, says Housing Minister Rob Lantz, and non-profit groups are next up in that conversation.

Since 2019, Lantz said, the government has created 500 "deeply affordable" housing units for people with very low incomes.

"You have to start where people are most deeply impacted but we have to work our way through the whole housing continuum," Lantz told CBC's Island Morning Friday.  

The next step in that process is working with non-profits, he said.

The province has programs to assist with the financing of home construction. Most of that assistance in recent years has gone to the for-profit sector, but the government is now interested in working with the non-profit sector in the hopes of creating more affordable housing.

"There's a whole piece in the middle here," said Lantz.

"There's a lot of people who earn too much to qualify for public housing but they don't make enough to pay for market housing. I think the non-profit sector, we can work with them to provide that missing piece in the middle."

'Build, build, build'

While the province will not turn down a good opportunity to buy existing units, said Lantz, that is not the priority.

"My mantra has been build, build, build," he said.

"Supply is the very most important thing now."

Lantz acknowledged that the province is not yet building fast enough to keep up with population growth.

Last month, a researcher told the P.E.I. Federation of Municipalities that the province is currently short about 5,000 housing units, and that the province will need to build about 2,600 homes a year over the next decade in order to bring some balance to the market, given current rates of population growth.

The province has only once recorded more than 2,000 housing starts. In 1973 there were 2,122. In recent years, the closest it has come was in 2019, with 1,504. Housing starts have declined every year since.

But Lantz is taking hope from a strong showing for starts in the third quarter of 2023. The 442 starts from June to September made for the best quarter since 2019.

In addition, the construction workforce is growing. Since July, there have been more than 8,000 construction workers in the province, compared to an average of 6,500 in 2019.

"Things are building," said Lantz.

"It's going to take time, just like building any other industry. We need to build capacity in the housing industry here to keep up with that demand. It's going to be tough and we're going to have to pull a lot of different levers."