Rents in New Brunswick increased 4 times faster in a year than target set by province
CBC
Ten months after the New Brunswick government unveiled a plan to rein in high rent increases in the province for tenants, figures show the escalation has been worsening, not improving.
That is adding pressure on the province to attack the issue more aggressively, with New Brunswick's minister in charge of housing already acknowledging measures taken so far to combat rising rents are not helping tenants enough.
"We are discussing everything related to rent," Housing Minister Jill Green said in the legislature last week.
"There continues to be more options and things that we're looking at."
Green was responding to a report earlier this month that new housing starts in New Brunswick, especially new apartment building developments, were not hitting provincial targets and lagging well behind projects under construction in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
More bad news followed this week.
On Tuesday, Statistics Canada reported that average rents in New Brunswick in April were up 10.8 per cent from one year earlier.
That is the second-largest increase among provinces, behind Alberta, over the 12-month period and triple New Brunswick's overall rate of inflation of 2.9 per cent.
It is also the most rapid escalation in rent that tenants have experienced during the province's four-year-old housing crisis.
Rents in New Brunswick increased 6.9 per cent during the previous 12 months, ending in April 2023, and by 7.3 per cent and 6.1 per cent in the two years before that.
Last summer Green unveiled New Brunswick's housing strategy, which included a goal of lowering annual rent increases in the province to "an average of 2.5 per cent."
Instead they have risen to four times that level.
On Tuesday a series of questions to the province about why rent increases in New Brunswick are higher than most provinces, and what the province might do to reverse that, went unanswered.
In an email, a spokesperson wrote "more time" was needed for a response.
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