New Challenges in New Brunswick’s Rental Housing Market

This report provides evidence of the rental housing situation in New Brunswick. It was part of the NB Coalition for Tenants’ Rights submission to the New Brunswick government’s 2021 review of the rental housing situation in the province. The report recommends urges quick action to preserve the stock of affordable housing, currently being eroded by new corporate landlords entering the New Brunswick real estate market.

Corporate landlords are increasingly targeting New Brunswick’s under-regulated, multi-family residential housing sector. This has a significant impact on housing affordability for New Brunswickers. The report highlights corporate strategies of ‘repositioning’ rental units to satisfy growing demand for rentals from higher-income groups. Units that are affordable for lower and middle-income New Brunswickers are being moved ‘up-market’ much faster than they can be replaced, leading to acute housing shortages.

The report was prepared by Dr. Matthew Hayes, Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Global and International Studies. Dr. Hayes has been studying global housing markets as part of his work on transnational lifestyle migration and has published in leading international academic journals on social geography, including Urban Studies, and Area. He is the author of Gringolandia: Lifestyle Migration under Late Capitalism with the University of Minnesota Press (2018). You can find his published academic work here. In addition to being a member of the NB Coalition for Tenants Rights, Dr. Hayes is also a regular contributor to the NB Media Coop, where he has written on policy-related problems in transportation, climate change mitigation, and housing. You can find some of this work here.