N.L. will soon look for proposals to transform a handful of government buildings into housing
The Newfoundland and Labrador government will soon seek public proposals to repurpose provincially owned buildings into rental housing.
But there won't be many properties included on that list.
"We have very little excess government buildings, as we did an exercise over the past number of years of reducing our footprint, reducing our leases and [to] consolidate," Infrastructure Minister John Abbott told a legislative committee Friday afternoon.
"So we're pretty tight on the ground right now."
Abbott said officials have identified "maybe a half dozen buildings in the province that might be, at best" suitable.
"We're getting ready to put out an expression of interest for those, and to see if there's any interest," he said.
Abbott said one example is the old Interfaith Citizens Home in Carbonear. Health authority officials announced the closure of that facility eight years ago.
The minister was responding to a question from Tory MHA Loyola O'Driscoll about the status of the initiative.
It was included in the Furey administration's five-point plan, announced last fall, to address what the premier called an "acute crisis" in housing.
"Making housing more affordable for hard-working people in Newfoundland and Labrador is a key," Furey said at a news conference Oct. 16.
One of those five points was the potential use of available government-owned land and buildings for construction or conversion to rental housing.
"There are old buildings — buildings, particularly in some other areas of the province, schools that have for whatever reason been rebuilt or repurposed — that we could use," Furey told reporters at the time.
In November, the province issued a call for expressions of interest on nearly two dozen pieces of vacant government-owned land around the northeast Avalon Peninsula.
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