Housing advocates say people are desperately trying to find places to live in the San Juan area. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
Newfoundland and Labrador’s housing crisis has been hurting students, seniors and people below the poverty line, but the head of a nonprofit organization in St. John’s that helps the homeless says another demographic is emerging that needs help.
Lack of availability and affordability are two issues facing potential renters right now, with the rising cost of living taking huge chunks out of people’s paychecks, to the point that St. John’s hadn’t seen before, says Laura Winters, general manager of Stella’s Circle.
“They’re seeing a huge increase in family homelessness, which historically hasn’t been a problem in St. John’s, and that’s not just within our agency. That’s across the sector locally, and I think that it really says we’re seeing something different here,” Winters said in a recent interview.
“There’s a tremendous amount of need and an inability of the system to respond to these availability and affordability issues that are so prevalent right now.”
Winters said no agency exists in St. John’s right now to specifically address the plight of homeless families. There are also no shelters that serve families, she said.
Winters said there hasn’t been an increase in income support (received by most of the people Stella’s Circle supports) and there is still a stigma associated with renting to those who use the program.
“I think the impacts of the pandemic are still being felt. The cost of living is going up, people are choosing between paying their electricity bills, shopping or having a mobile phone to be able to search for housing,” he said. to say.
“Some people who used to donate now can’t and I think it’s really exposing the need in our community.”
Winters said housing should be seen as a basic human right.
“It’s about to get worse”
The provincial capital had a rental vacancy rate of about seven percent in 2020.
Housing advocate Hope Jamieson said the number was unusually high, and put St. John’s among the top five jurisdictions in the country. That number has since fallen to 3.1 percent, a “healthy” vacancy rate, Jamieson said, but the sharp drop in a short period of time has tightened the market.
Housing advocate Hope Jamieson says the vacancy rate in St. John’s has shrunk by more than half since 2020. (Zach Goudie/CBC)
“If you think about it in raw numbers, we have 3,900 units, gift or foster, in the entire universe of the rental market in the St. John area,” he said.
“This means the unemployment rate of 3.1, that is 120 units, which in relation to the number of people looking for housing is a fairly small number.”
Jamieson said the data was current as of October and reflected an increase in rents that began to occur before an interest rate hike.
“There’s a six-month notice period for rent increases, so we can expect all of this, if it hasn’t gotten worse, it’s about to get worse,” he said.
“There are all these little things that affect a big problem here in the province.”
Sherwin Flight, administrator of the Newfoundland Tenant & Landlord Support Group Facebook group, said tenants had no trouble finding rentals two years ago. But images of long lines of potential tenants waiting their turn to view a house have recently started circulating on social media.
“I would say specifically in the last year we’ve seen a lot of posts in this group where people are desperately looking for a place,” Flight said.
“People are really struggling, compared to the past, to try to find something.”
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