; "Rents continue to rapidly climb for Nova Scotia's oldest and most affordable rentals")
Tens of thousands of Nova Scotia’s oldest and most affordable rentals continue to rapidly become less affordable, according to CBC News analysis of data from Canada’s national housing agency.
CMHC data shows that in a single year from 2024 to 2025, the median rents for units constructed before 1960 and up to 1999 increased by about 13 to 18 per cent, depending on the age of the building.
The overall number of units remained roughly the same in both years.
That pace is more than double or triple Nova Scotia’s five per cent rent cap, which does not apply when new tenants move into a unit.
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Nova Scotia Housing Minister John White has framed rental affordability as a “simple supply and demand issue.”
“With more supply, you have no choice but to lower the rent,” White said while speaking with reporters in January.
Nova Scotia has seen record levels of construction in recent years.
However, some experts, including Carolyn Whitzman, say supply can’t be looked at simply as a total number.
“No one ever moved from an encampment into a subdivision,” said Whitzman, senior housing researcher with the University of Toronto’s School of Cities.
She says building housing targeted toward lower-income people has a different impact to creating market-rate units.
“You’re meeting the immediate needs of people, rather than expecting, you know, magical forces of the market to provide,” Whitzman said. “Which is what we have unfortunately been relying on.”
In the last five years, rents for the older rentals in the province have increased by 42 to 58 per cent.
Nova Scotia’s newest rentals are also significantly more expensive than older stock.
Last year, the median rent of two-bedroom rentals built in the last five years in the province was $2,350. That’s, for example, 73 per cent higher than the rents of units built between 1980 and 1999.
White is not available for an interview this week, said provincial spokesperson Jodi Sibley.
In a statement, Sibley wrote, “Research shows the most effective way to reduce pressure on rents — including in older buildings — is to increase housing supply and preserve existing affordable housing at the same time.”
Sibley added the Nova Scotia government has “paved the way” for more than 68,000 housing units to be created.
The CMHC has said higher-income households can purchase or rent newer units, making existing and more affordable ones available to others.
The province’s statement echoes this idea — which some call the “trickle-down” theory of housing — with Sibley adding that the vacancy rate for the lowest-priced rentals doubled last year.
“The question is … how long and how many iterations of trickle-down would it take,” said Whitzman.
To restore affordability just to pre-pandemic levels, a 2025 CMHC report said the pace of construction starts in Nova Scotia needs to more than double for the next decade — similar to what’s needed for Canada overall.
But, with the high need for housing right now, Whitzman argues “we can’t wait the 20 or 30 years that it might take in an ideal market with doubled construction … because it simply is not even beginning to occur.”
Whitzman said it’s important to preserve affordable rents where they currently exist. This can be done, for example, by enabling groups like non-profits to purchase buildings in the private sector that go up for sale.
In recent years, there have been efforts from the province and community groups to do this.
In the last four years, the province has invested more than $288 million in creating and helping groups acquire over 3,000 affordable housing units, said Sibley.
The Housing Trust of Nova Scotia is one non-profit that’s bought existing apartment buildings with help from various levels of government and then renovated them.
“There’s a great deal of value in saving these existing assets,” said executive director Angela Bishop.
When those older buildings change hands in the for-profit sector, “rents may increase … it could be brought to the ground and folks are displaced,” she said.
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Bishop believes the private sector has a role to play in addressing affordability, and says it does provide housing that’s affordable.
“But, they’ve not made a commitment to provide that affordability forever,” Bishop said.
When older buildings are “brought into the non-profit sector, we’re going to maintain the affordability. We’ll maintain these homes as community assets.”
To address housing affordability long term, Whitzman said there needs to be a focus on non-market housing like public, co-op and non-profit housing.
These are types of housing that successive federal governments pulled back on funding decades ago.
Sibley said the province has invested $121 million to help build more than a thousand affordable units. Another $251 million has gone toward building 515 public housing units, of which 289 are underway or complete.
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