How do two of New Brunswick’s largest municipalities address the housing crisis? This question guided our analysis when writing “New Roles Amidst Crisis”. Saint John and Fredericton are two mid-sized Canadian cities which each take different approaches to address the affordable housing crisis, demonstrated in their affordable housing strategies. Using a comparative analysis, we looked to explain these differences. Specifically, we considered how each city frames the affordability problem, the proposed solutions, and how the two city councils imagine their role in addressing this housing crisis. We then compared these factors between the strategies. What we found were some differences in problem framing and proposed solutions, as well as the imagined role of the city councils that reflect both the economic conditions in the two cities as well as the broader reality of changing roles for municipalities in the province.
As of the 2021 Census, Saint John and Fredericton had comparable populations, 69 895 and 63 116 respectively, with a similar percentage of renter households (45.8% in Saint John, 43.4% in Fredericton). Although there are higher levels of economic poverty in Saint John, rates of housing unaffordability and core housing needs are generally comparable between the two cities, according to the 2021 Census. This is perhaps due to the much greater percentage of Saint John’s renter households (15.5%) living in subsidized housing compared to Fredericton (8.7%) and/or because of CERB payments that temporarily reduced housing unaffordability at the time of the census.
At the time this paper was written, New Brunswick was governed by Progressive Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs, who championed a free-market approach to housing, emphasizing increased supply as a key mechanism to address affordability issues. Rents in New Brunswick increased at a much higher rate than the national average, more folks were waiting for public housing, and rates of homelessness grew becoming more visible than ever.
Affordable Housing Strategies
The increasing unaffordability of housing, combined with the increased visibility of homelessness, led the population to call on local governments to act. It is in this context that the cities of Saint John and Fredericton developed their affordable housing strategies. In analyzing these strategies, we found that the City of Saint John proposed a more interventionist approach, envisioning a larger role for government where they could regulate the private market and use tax-payer dollars to address housing affordability. The affordable housing strategy in Saint John pays greater attention to the policy and programmatic factors impacting affordability, such as a lack of rent control in the province and insufficient social and supportive housing programs. While the City of Fredericton’s strategy includes some interventionist proposals, it primarily favours a more traditional market-based approach with a focus on increasing private market development to address affordability.
While the City of Saint John’s strategy does mention market dynamics such as supply and demand, it also recognizes the structural factors driving the housing crisis, as well as the human right to housing. In the case of Fredericton, the focus is more on market factors, high population growth, low rates of construction, low vacancy rates, and increased demand from COVID-19. Fredericton’s strategy acknowledges the lack of affordable housing and other supports for folks living in poverty but places more emphasis on these market factors. The strategy presents the crisis as familiar to those who have experienced poverty, but new and alarming to those who have not, implicitly suggesting some level of poverty and housing precarity is normal. The Fredericton strategy focuses on recommendations to review and amend zoning bylaws to allow more housing to be built faster, relying on free-market economics to avoid spending taxpayer money to address affordable housing.
The Role of City Councils
The different approaches found in the cities’ housing strategies can be explained in part by how each municipality positions city council’s role. Fredericton often frames the housing crisis as external to government decision-making, whereas Saint John acknowledges the role of policy decisions in shaping housing affordability. As these cities continue to articulate their role in the housing space, further attention to the similarities and differences in their strategy design and implementation will be important to understand the evolving role of cities in New Brunswick’s crisis of housing affordability.
Increased pressure on local government in the face of growing homelessness and housing affordability is not limited to New Brunswick as this special issue of the International Journal of Homelessness demonstrates. In addition to demands to intervene in the housing space, municipal governments in smaller and mid-sized cities are often operating in the context of NIMBYism, territorial stigmatization, and harmful narratives of people experiencing homelessness circulating in the media among other challenges. As more municipalities engage with housing policy, opportunities grow for knowledge and resource sharing and the development of promising practices for mid-sized cities.
Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.5206/ijoh.2023.3.16837