Thank you, Mr. Chair. Vacancies play a large role in how we determine where we allocate our capital dollars. Obviously, you have got one community that has more vacancies and they can be vacant for a number of different reasons. I’m just trying to find the numbers here as to our vacancies across the Northwest Territories. Fifty public housing units that are vacant and available for occupancy, and again the local housing organization could be in the process of allocating them right now. We have approximately 135 units that are under repair, and once those are done they will be allocated.
The concern we get in a lot of the communities, and I have touched on it when I spoke to Mr. Yakeleya’s question before, was we have a lot of units that have outlived their usefulness. They are boarded up and we really don’t have any use for them. We try to work something out with the communities. We have a number that are slated for demolition, but then now with the HAZMAT requirements, that has added extra costs on. We had a fairly aggressive plan a few years ago, but we’re having to deal with the HAZMAT material. That has slowed us down a bit, but we still want to get that work done and have a lot of these units written off, demolished and removed, and then we can move forward from there. There are a number of different vacancies.
A few years ago we had 135 vacant HELP units, I think, across the Northwest Territories, but that was because the corporation had access to all that federal money. We were the only jurisdiction that matched it in the country and we put a number of units on the ground anticipating that we were going to get clients for them and realized, at the end of the day, that we overestimated our ability to get clients. So we converted a lot of these into public housing units; we rented some out to different professionals in the community. So we found a way to deal with all those vacancies, but there’s always going to be a vacancy rate. We have 50 units that are ready for occupancy and another 135 that are under repair.