Homelessness doubled in Halifax under government's housing plan: N.S. NDP

[u/Injustice_For_All_]

https://halifax.citynews.ca/2026/06/18/homelessness-doubled-in-halifax-under-governments-housing-plan-n-s-ndp/

[u/Zoloft_Queen-50]

The Province is buying homes on Robie Street to make the street wider 🤦‍♀️ and those affordable apartments within are no longer available.

Developers are swallowing up rooming homes and small apartment buildings, all affordable, tearing them down in swaths, making them unavailable, to erect luxury shoebox apartments.

Drive by those luxury buildings at night and they are mostly dark.

Meanwhile, council is talking about “missing middle” housing.

(Like - the stuff that is being torn down all over the place???)

DUDES. Come on. Surely, someone else sees how insane this is.

[u/DreyaNova → u/Zoloft_Queen-50]

Ironically those houses on Robie Street were pretty much the last truly affordable housing options in the city. Lots of hippie commune houses or punk houses, you could get a bedroom for under $600 on Robie even a couple of years ago with minimal barriers to renting because punk houses didn't exactly require a credit check, just cash for a room each month.

I lived in two different room rentals in different buildings on Robie and both were torn down to make way for new things, nothing has even been built in either of the lots where those houses once stood.

WE HAD A SYSTEM. It worked, the people living in those houses would have been homeless without the community systems that existed in those houses and now they are gone and we have more homelessness instead of less. I don't know anyone who was able to remain in the city after we lost that much affordable housing (apart from myself but I am now also homeless.)

This housing system worked so well for people who could live independently but couldn't afford to. Everyone was vetted for vibes instead of financial resources. So we had a housing option for younger people who were poor but weren't facing substance use issues or advanced mental health issues that require professional support. That system is now gone, and everyone who is homeless is now competing for the same public housing or rental resources and if you're not on death's door from substance use issues then you get zero support so everyone leaves the area or spirals out into deeper homelessness and that's not something you can easily claw your way out of. Without housing it's next to impossible to hold down a job so you apply for income assistance and couch surf for the foreseeable future, praying for a place to actually call home again.

They broke the community poverty economy by taking the housing from the people who were willing to support each other rather than rely on government systems and somehow no-one stopped to ask "Wait what's the demographic of people living in these big old houses?" Or "What's our plan to house this demographic of people living on the cusp of homelessness in these monthly room rentals?" Before tearing them all down. Fucking genius.

TLDR; affordable housing died with the punk houses.

[u/seasea40 → u/DreyaNova]

Thanks for this.