Fly like an Eagle

Or Steve Miller solved the housing crisis

Recently 6 private member bills on housing have been introduced to Province house, questions are consistently being raised during question period, but one member insists it's an administrative issue that really is at heart of our current backlog.

There are many factors at play here in the province from lack of skilled trades, cost measures and red tape but we need to address this issue from many fronts.

Lorelei Nicoll has a great plan. "Inclusionary zoning is the ability and the tool that gives municipalities within their lands to actually negotiate with developers or private providers for affordable housing." This is fantastic for ensuring that just one type of housing isn't primarily built at the expense of affordable housing. We desperately need legislation along these lines.

I believe that a majority of all buildings going up should be of mixed use, economic status and amenities. There needs to be incentives to private developers to create affordable housing and by legislating the aforementioned mixed development, this could be brought in.

We could see a future where housing was written in to new Canadian and new New Scotlanders immigration package. As there has been "record population growth since 2017" (Ian Munro, chief economist, Halifax partnership) and we are tracking faster-than predicted to 2060 of a 2Million population projection.

The current backlog we are experiencing just in terms of processing building applications is daunting. "We probably have in excess of 1000 condos, apartments and multi-unit residential properties in the pipeline, but we just can't seem to get them through (approval) fast enough" (Ian Munro) This is the one issue that we can *concretely tackle head on. The municipality, the province and all subcontracted related office staff should be able to pick up the slack. We can do this team and we need to act 5 years ago.

We need trades, materials and cost measures addressed as well, but this is a real-world solution to a bottleneck issue that we can solve. It just takes some gust(o).

"Time keeps on slippin, slippin...into the future. Feed the hungry, who don't have enough to eat. I wanna house the people living in the street..." or something like that. Just fly like an Eagle, alright?

Patrick O'Neal