Housing Hell Facts: Natal Day Marks Cost of Rent Day in Halifax
Halifax Natal Day Weekend: A Celebration Overshadowed by the Cost of Rent
As Halifax gears up for its annual Natal Day celebrations, a different kind of carnival is taking place: "Cost of Rent Day." This year, as we revel in our city's community spirit, we must also confront a cancerous concern that threatens the good of our society—the escalating cost of rent.
Let me explain and do the math on Cost Of Rent Day. It’s the day of the year when the average renter has earned the equivalent of their annual rent.
Here it is by the numbers:
Average Halifax Income: $55,026 (Per Halifax Partnership)
After Taxes: $40,626 (Per Turbotax)
Average one-bedroom Rent: $1,992 (Per Rent.ca)
Average Annual Rent $23,904
Days Income required to pay Rent: 215/365
215th day of the year: August 3rd
Your math may differ a little, but most of us are working over half the year just to pay for our housing.
It’s important because Renters are by far the biggest and most precarious household group in Halifax.
Halifax Total Households (July 2024 Est.) 200,000
Renters 42% 84,000
Mortgage 37% 74,240
Own 21% 41,760
The Cost of Living Crisis
We are grappling with an increasingly unlivable reality. Halifax is facing a housing crisis. Our city, known for its historic charm, scenic waterfront, live-work-walk ease, and vibrant cultural scene, is becoming unaffordable for many of its residents. The average rent in Halifax has surged dramatically, especially when apartments roll over to new tenants or renew, leaving many to question their ability to continue living in the city they love and leaving too many with no place to go.
The Disappearing Dream
This new Halifax is not the city we want. It’s not the city we inherited. And it is not the dream of the rising generation.
It’s an astonishing fact that thousands among us, struggling to pay rent, will save their money often for years and even go into debt to travel, maybe just for a week, to stand in a beautiful city – often hundreds or thousands of years old but unchanging because of its perfection - the kind of community they dream of. They return to their Halifax life, even less well off monetarily, but richer spiritually and in life because they, for that week, got to walk the streets of the kind of city they dream of.
Families who have lived here for generations are now finding it impossible to keep up with the rising rents. It’s worse still for newcomers. Young professionals, fresh graduates, and even essential workers like nurses and teachers are struggling to find affordable housing. The dream of owning a home is becoming more fantasy, pushing people toward the fringes of the city or even out of Halifax entirely. And it’s here where the secret frontline of the struggle is really being battled.
For generations, Halifax County was a community of communities. All with their own dream. Diverse in age, style, costs, ideas, and ambitions. Anyone could find the spot that was right for them. Now it’s just one big box municipality with one set of rules, and a one-size-fits-all plan sprawling over 5,500 square kilometres of mostly undeveloped land (an area slightly larger than PEI or New York City) from Hubbards to Ecum Secum.
What’s Wrong?
Fundamentally, the price of homes keeps rising because supply has been artificially restricted. Even if we built ten times as many homes next year it will simply not be enough. There is a growing backlog of homes needed, so even if we bring growth into check it will take around a decade at double our current construction rate just to rebalance the market.
The current plan to build “urban and up” is the greatest destroyer of wealth and beauty this province has ever seen. And that’s saying something given our history of failed economic development schemes. Growth is not even paying for growth, let alone contributing to the economy. It’s a plan that parasitically kills the very quality of life, culture, natural beauty, and history it feeds on. The GDP per Capita in Nova Scotia, and Canada, is going DOWN not up. I’ve written about it in detail here.
Driven to crisis largely by international immigration and people moving from other provinces, Nova Scotia has added nearly 150,000 new residents since 2016 — more than 13 percent of the current population, which as of June 2024 according to StatsCan was 1,072,545.
And that would be fine, except… over the same period Nova Scotia added only about 5,000 new housing units per year.
We need more than 10 times that just to catch up. In a recent report , the Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation concluded to fix the affordability gap, Nova Scotia needs 70,000 more new units of housing by 2030, on top of what is already in the works.
Our Un Representative Government
It’s a mess. In other cities they might call it corruption, conflict of interest, or incompetence. But we don’t use that kind of language here. The worst you are going to hear in the media is, “It’s Complicated.”
Our elected city politicians, far from being citizen representatives, have become more like shop stewards for the bureaucracy and the connected, protecting them from accountability, hiding and coddling their ideology and power-mongering, speaking to protect them rather than the people or the place. So you’ll hear every reason under the sun about what’s happening here and why housing is in crisis:
Cost of materials
Shortage of labour
Lack of trades education
Not enough staff bureaucrats (ironically and of course…)
Interest Rates
Bad Developers
Other levels of government
Immigration
Cost of living
None of these things, even when combined, have the economic impact on the costs and timeline of housing that the bureaucracy does. More than all other factors, it is the stifling and oppressive burden of bureaucracy that is at the root of all our housing troubles.
City Planning is Ruining Lives and Our City
The blame for this crisis lies squarely with the bureaucratic nightmare that is our city's planning department, a Kafkaesque machine wastefully and wantonly more than doubling costs and tripling timelines for new construction and outright outlawing the kinds of housing we desperately need along with the kinds of homes and communities we dream of.
Bureaucracy Gone Mad
City planning in Halifax has devolved into a labyrinthine process, riddled with red tape and nonsensical regulations and processes. No one is happy. These rules, far from fostering growth, diversity, and creativity, stymie it at every turn. They create a system where building anything—from a modest apartment complex to a single-family home—becomes an exercise in endurance, patience, and deep pockets. Good development is almost economically unsustainable in the city, and near impossible in the outlying areas where older communities are left without accountable government, infrastructure budgets, or the ability to go their own way and follow their dreams. Maybe more tragic, new complete communities with new ideas, new spirit, and new visions are outlawed by one-size-fits-all big-box planning rules and never born.
“More than ambition, more than ability,” said Adm. H.G. Rickover half a century ago, “it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.”
What Should Nice Homes Cost and How Long Should They Take To Build
A small craftsman bungalow or Halifax-style strawberry or saltbox house on a flat lot with a plan that the crew has put up before, “kit” lumber, economical systems, and simple built-in shelves, cabinets, and such, with no weather problems, could go up in a month. The cost of material, labour, and a fair profit for the builder would be less than $200,000 under reasonable 1950-era planning rules and regulations.
Today, under the current burden of bureaucracy the cost is more than double that and the timeline is six to nine months at best. And that is AFTER the approvals are in place. These planning approval timelines range from 3-6 months for something that ‘fits’ in their philosophy of Urban and Up development, to three years for a typical ‘development agreement’, to ‘whenever the developer gives up hope or runs out of money’ for rural development of new (or traditional) ideas.
The Cost of Inaction
While we drown in paperwork and wait for approvals, the cost of rent soars. It's a cruel joke that in a city with ample land and resources, people are being priced out of their homes. The middle class is disappearing, young families are not being born, and essential workers are left wondering if they can afford to live in the city they serve. This isn’t progress; it’s regression. It’s growth without prosperity. And increasingly, it’s life without purpose.
A City at a Crossroads
Halifax stands at a crossroads. Will we follow the path of other major cities, where the cost of living pushes out all but the wealthiest, leading to a sterile, soulless, impractical Urban and Up landscape devoid of the vibrancy and diversity that once defined it? Creating more and more housing that no one dreams of. Or will we take action to ensure that Halifax returns to a beautiful place where people of all income levels can live, work, walk, and thrive?
A Housing Market in Chains
The planning department’s utopia of rules has turned into a dystopia for the rest of us. The endless restrictions and bureaucratic hurdles mean that the kinds of housing we need—affordable, accessible, diverse—are often outright banned or made so difficult to develop that builders simply give up. We are left with luxury condos and sprawling estates that fit the planning department’s anachronistic ideology, but no viable options for the average Haligonian.
The Need for Accountability
It’s time for a reckoning. The failure of city planning in Halifax needs to be exposed, scrutinized and reformed. We cannot afford to continue down this path. We must demand a joint inquiry by provincial and federal authorities into how our city planning has gone so disastrously off course. This inquiry must uncover why our system is so unaccountable and unchangeable, even in the face of a housing crisis. We need to do this for the rising generation who may never have the power or voice to do it for themselves unless we act.
What Needs to Be Done
Since 2010, the construction of new homes in Halifax has consistently been the wrong type in the wrong place and the wrong price point. Construction has lagged behind population growth, resulting in demand vastly outstripping supply. The recent high net immigration figures have dramatically added further fuel to this fire while also pushing public infrastructure and resources to a breaking point.
It’s been said as simply as it can be said. We need more housing faster. No schemes for rent control, affordable housing, co-ops, or other incentives can fix the problem. At best they are band-aids. At worst, they could destroy our city, our economy, and our peace.
Addressing the housing crisis in Halifax requires one single thing. More housing faster. And it must be the housing that we need, that we want, and that we can afford.
There is no other path to this goal than a ground-up restructuring of city planning.
Too much and for too long out-of-control ideologically driven, unaccountable, and unfirable city planning departments have been left to set their own rules. Cloaked in the dissembling language of ‘public consultation’ that is nothing of the kind, they are building a new Halifax that is destroying the commonwealth and beauty we have been gifted. After countless plans and revisions and being lost in the minutiae, it has to stop.
To fix the crisis, we need to build more homes: this is the only effective and sustainable solution. There has been no attempt to review the planning system. It must be done. The fundamental change to come must ensure that existing local residents benefit from any new homes in their area. We can’t sell off the commonwealth of existing residents to create the future. We have to build wealth, not destroy it.
Fortunately, we’ve already got plenty of solutions. The world and the history of cities are filled with examples of what we want. This includes building beautiful communities because beauty is the greatest long-term creator of wealth history has ever known; breaking available property down into much smaller developable lots to allow for truly local development, community land auctions, street votes, town meeting government, as well as returning to residents and newly empowered truly local governments control over their finances and futures.
Last year the Province took a tentative step to try and help City Planning find its way. From the mayor to the back office they were met at every step by petulant and petty potentates, dissembling stumbling blocks who behaved more like mischievous gremlins in the works than partners in planning a better city for all.
It’s not simply a matter of changing the head of a department or beginning a new round of 1984–style (literally and figuratively) “public consultations”.
To articulate the mission, I’ll ironically quote Nova Scotia Premier, Dr. John Savage, the father of Halifax amalgamation, from a speech in 1995,
“We have initiated management audits in seven major departments. They are being conducted by outside accountants with no vested interests. Only two have been completed so far, but already, the process is uncovering a maze of inefficiency, needless red tape, isolated bureaucratic empires, high stress, low morale, and dismal productivity--in short, broken government, and an inefficient, rule-driven bureaucracy that is completely ill-adapted to respond to the demands of a world in transition.
The solutions include cutting out layers of bureaucracy; wholesale elimination of departments, agencies, and divisions; decentralized decision-making; new management ideas, and radically altered attitudes. It won't be easy.
Establishing working structures and systems to replace stifling bureaucratic controls is only half the equation--the easy half. Changing attitudes, altering the very culture of the public sector will be more difficult. The days of guaranteed job security, regardless of performance are gone. Productivity, creativity, and flexibility will be requirements for success in the public sector, just as they are in private business. We will be hiring more senior managers on term contracts; bringing people in from the private sector to do a specific job. This would allow constant renewal, new ideas, new styles, and a more vibrant workplace. Changes of this magnitude are frightening, there is no question. But they are also a source of new hope.”
Dr. Savage was ejected from his position for his efforts, and today, 30 years later, nothing has been done, not even the most cursory review of the amalgamation scheme. City planning, now a massive and costly department has turned to stone under its own weight.
We need to stop and start again with new goals and new systems in mind. We need to return to the communities of HRM their financial sovereignty, their decision-making, and visioning, and in short – their dignity.
A Call to Action
As we celebrate Natal Day, let’s remember that the heart of Halifax lies in its people. We must work together to ensure that Halifax, and the community of communities around it, remain a place where everyone can afford to live, not just the privileged few, for they are very few indeed. Increasingly, and with painful irony, the most well-off among us are only the government workers themselves. They are the only ones left with the salaries, job security, work-hour flexibility, guaranteed retirement plans, and benefits needed to survive in Halifax. The cost of rent should not be a barrier to enjoying the beauty and opportunities this city has to offer – for anyone.
This Natal Day weekend, let’s celebrate not what our city is, but what it could be – a community of communities, as diverse and full of dreams as the people who live in them. Let’s commit to building a future where Halifax is livable for all. By addressing the cost of rent head-on, we can secure the vibrant, inclusive community that makes Halifax truly special.
Enjoy the festivities, but also let’s voice our outrage. Demand action from our elected officials in the coming election season for all three levels of government.
Insist on a joint Public Inquiry into the city planning department’s failures. The cost of rent is more than an economic issue—it's a moral one. We owe it to ourselves and future generations to ensure Halifax remains a vibrant, livable city for all.
The time for complacency is over. The time for action is now. Let’s dismantle the utopia of rules strangling our city and build the Halifax we deserve.
Cost of Rent Day, coinciding with Natal Day helps translate the severity of this crisis into simple terms that everyone can understand. Now, action needs to be taken to build the homes we need.
This day, in particular, serves as a catalyst for making housing more affordable for all, so that next year Halifax can celebrate Cost of Rent Day a little earlier.