Nunavik’s housing crunch continues

KUUJJUAQ — Imagine a locomotive rolling downhill and you’ll get an accurate picture of Nunavik’s deteriorating housing situation.

“It is kind of a moving train,” admitted Watson Fournier, director of the Kativik Municipal Housing Bureau.

“Slowly it does respond, but so far we haven’t made much of a dent.”

Efforts to build more social housing, encourage private home ownership and recoup the millions of dollars that Nunavimmiut owe in back rent haven’t had much impact, and Nunavik still needs 400 new homes.

Despite financial incentives to boost home ownership, the construction of private homes is still seen as an unattractive and expensive alternative to low-cost social housing. Only five new private homes are going up this year in Nunavik.

Meanwhile, last year’s five-year, $50 million pay-out from Quebec and Ottawa continues to fund the construction of 255 new social-housing units in the region. This year, 16 two-bedroom duplexes will be built in Kuujjuaq. Six more will go up in Akulivik, and four each in Umiujuaq and Kangirsuk.

Makivik Corp., which will manage the social-housing project, wants to employ local workers to build these units.

But a plan to use local labour from start to finish bombed last year due to problems with Makivik’s contractor.

And this year the scheme is off to a rocky start, too. One day last week only four of the 10 construction workers being trained for the jobs showed up at the job site.

“Booze,” explained a site supervisor.

An additional problem plaguing Nunavik’s housing situation is the fact that a quarter of renters don’t pay their rent.

The Kativik Municipal Housing Bureau has collected only $450,000 of the $5 million in back rent that is owed to it. This amount will eventually be matched by Quebec’s housing bureau and used to build new housing.