HALIFAX—Rising rents, high demand and low vacancy rates are making it more difficult for Haligonians to afford rental housing, and a new report suggests single people living on the peninsula are feeling the housing crunch more than others.

The latest Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) Housing Market Insight report shows 40 per cent of the people in Halifax are renters, up by 24 per cent a decade earlier.

CMHC used 2016 census data and rental market surveys from 2016 and 2018 for the report.

Of those renters, 44 per cent were one-person households with the lowest median incomes, which means they are “even more prone to affordability challenges,” according to the report.

With a median before-tax income of $2,449 a month, and bachelor apartments going for a median rent of $880 a month and one-bedrooms for $1,095 in the south end and downtown Halifax, one-person households would pay more than 30 per cent of their income on housing.

Housing is considered affordable if a renter spends 30 per cent or less of their before-tax income on housing.

“Even if you compare that median income to bachelor units and one-bedroom units across many different submarkets, it wasn’t necessarily meeting the mark to be considered affordable,” Katelyn MacLeod, Halifax-based senior analyst of economics at CMHC and the author of the report, said in an interview.

In seven of the municipality’s 10 submarkets, including the two that cover the peninsula, one-bedroom apartments aren’t affordable for one-person households.

The peninsula south submarket, including the south end and downtown Halifax, contains 50 per cent of bachelor units in the municipality.

“This limited supply of smaller units in other submarkets may be additionally constricting the mobility of one-person renter households and thus confining these renters to units that are unaffordable,” the report said.

Single-parent households on the peninsula are stretched thin as well, with incomes too low to afford the median price of most one-bedroom apartments, let alone two-bedrooms.

“What we are seeing in this report is the downside of growth,” Halifax peninsula south Councillor Waye Mason said in an interview.

He’s glad people are moving to Halifax and the city is growing, but he’s worried about the consequences of rent increases outpacing income growth.

“It seems that if steps aren’t taken ... you’re going to end up with what we see in a lot of other cities, where you don’t have a mix of incomes, you just have one kind of people living in the centre and it’s people who have a lot of money,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s something that anybody in Halifax has ever wanted to see. We want to see mixed-income neighbourhoods.”

In November, CMHC reported the vacancy rate for apartments in Halifax was down to 1.6 per cent — lower than it’s been since CMHC started tracking this data in the late 1980s. That decline pushed up the average rent by 2.1 per cent across the municipality to $1,066 in 2018 from $1,027 in 2017.

Neil Lovitt, senior manager of planning and economic intelligence at Halifax real-estate consulting firm Turner Drake, said at the time that the trends here could quickly turn into a “crisis.”

“Really if we don’t get back to a higher vacancy rate, we could start to see some of the price increases that we’ve seen in other markets like Toronto and Vancouver, which spells trouble for a lot of the existing residents,” he said.

The downward trend in vacancy rates appears poised to continue.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The latest CMHC report said the number of rental units under construction reached a new high in March 2019 at 4,020 units, but demand is also high due to strong migration.

According to the Halifax Index, an annual report looking at people, economy and quality of life, the city saw a 2 per cent population increase last year to 430,512, with nearly 65 per cent, or 5,405 people, due to international migration.

“With this strong population growth coming from international migration, interprovincial migration, we’re still seeing a large demand for rental units, even as that supply starts to trend upwards,” CMHC’s MacLeod said.

Read more about: