Glenn McLean: GN leases create serious problems

SEAN McKIBBON

IQALUIT — Government lease agreements with real estate developers in Nunavut are creating a “serious problem” for low to middle income wage earners trying to find housing, says Baker Lake MLA Glenn McLean.

“I inquired about the cost of renting a house in this community and it’s anywhere between $2,600 and $3,000 a month for a three-bedroom house and quite frankly I don’t know how anybody could afford that,” McLean said Tuesday during a meeting of the committee of the whole in the Nunavut legislature.

McLean said government leases with developers are artificially inflating the price of accommodations in Iqaluit and that he asked the Nunavut Housing Corporation to do something about it. He said that even MLAs would have trouble affording the prices charged to tenants in Iqaluit.

“To me what we’re creating here is two groups of renters — the haves and the have-nots,” he said.

McLean said the lack of affordable housing would eventually hamper the government’s own hiring efforts.

“If we’re going to bring people from outside Iqaluit from other communities how on God’s earth are they even going to survive in this community? It is Nunavut and I think the dream of Nunavut was to create opportunities for jobs for people in Nunavut. One of the biggest problems people have outside of this centre is coming in here and finding affordable housing?”

McLean questioned whether there was anything the housing corporation could do to address the problem.

But while Pam Hine, the president of the Nunavut Housing Corporation, said her organization would take the problem into consideration during the development of the corporation’s five year plan, she said the NHC’s mandate had more to do with social programs and not the private market.

“It is also something we can talk to other departments to try to find a collective means to address this issue,” she said. But she also said that developers face a number of high costs in Nunavut.

But McLean said he felt prices do not reflect true market pressures.

“I did a few inquiries around town again and houses that were built seven years ago with a selling price of $97,000 are on the market today at $200,000. To me I know that the bank and interest rates haven’t gone up this much. What I’m getting at is that most of the developers in this town, not all of them, have guaranteed government leases. Which is nice. I’d love to have that type of arrangement in a boom town,” he said.