Inclusive and Affordable Housing
The province has released its new multi-year housing strategy. This includes initiatives aimed at making housing more affordable and accessible for New Brunswickers. Given the high rates of poverty experienced by people with a disability, access to adequate and affordable housing is a critical and immediate need.
Housing Inclusivity: housing that is safe, affordable, physically accessible, close to activities, amenities, and services and welcoming of all people within diverse and dispersed mixed income developments, structures, and neighbourhoods.
Housing Inclusivity and Housing Accessibility are equally important, but distinct.
Housing accessibility addresses the physical and sensory accommodations that many people have in order to live in community. A housing situation is inclusive when the residence, or the structure of that residence, is a home-by-choice, and not the result of congregation of people in a housing unit, development, or neighbourhood, based on demographic characteristics.
Inclusive housing is safe, affordable, and accessible – but it is also dispersed.
What we are advocating for:
- Commit to adopting Inclusion NB’s proposed definition of housing inclusivity in the implementation of the strategy.
- Develop and adopt policy and programming design to ensure that people with a disability are prioritized in housing programs, including the new initiatives presented in the Provincial Housing Strategy.
- Revise current policies to make Portable Rent Supplements more flexible, including to enable the transfer of Portable Rent Supplements to a direct payment benefit to persons with a disability.
- Support community-based disability organizations and researchers to develop and implement the processes required to assess housing needs for people with a disability, including through the collection of relevant, provincial data related to this population.
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