21 minute read
NOREEM MABIZA FIGHTS FOR JUSTICE AND SUSTAINABILITY
No stranger to a strange land
Noreen Mabiza believes that social justice and environmental sustainability are one and the same, and she won’t rest until she proves it
BY ALEC BRUCE ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROB HANSEN PHOTOS BY BRUCE MURRAY/VISIONFIRE
On her first day in a new country, one hemisphere and six time zones from home, Noreen Mabiza knew she had to be somewhere. It was a typical late-August Halifax day, with the sea-salt smell blowing ashore from the outer harbour and old-man summer sun spreading rumours of approaching autumn, and the Dalhousie university-bound newcomer was late for orientation.
But, at that moment, she didn’t care.
“I was just taken in by the views and everything, so I told myself it’s OK,” she says of that afternoon in 2014, when she decided to get lost along the waterfront. “I thought it was beautiful. I had no map, no working phone. I just kept walking.”
In a sense, Mabiza’s been walking into local terra incognita ever since.
She was born and raised in Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, with its embassies and World Bank towers and 1.5 million residents. But since graduating from Dal in 2018 (with a degree in international development and environment, sustainability, and society), she’s become an advocate of housing reform for low-income folks and energy coordinator for sustainable communities at the Ecology Action Centre in her adopted city.
Now, the fiercely effective, increasingly influential social justice champion is about to embark on a whole new journey through territory both foreign and familiar as the project lead for the EAC’s freshly minted Green Jobs For All program.
“It’s about having conversations with immigrants and newcomer youth and identifying the barriers that they face in entering the green economy,” she says. “I’m really excited to dive into this as the coordinator and also work in partnership with other organizations.”
According to her colleagues, few are better suited for the job. The program had been sitting on a shelf for years until Mabiza ran away with it last year.
“She talked to different people and partners and really formulated an approach,” says Marla MacLeod, the centre’s programs director. “It was like following a trail or connecting the dots, kind of like being a detective, to get the right questions to address. How can immigrant and newcomer youths participate in the world of green jobs? How can we ensure that this group, that we really want to succeed, get to be part of this transition that’s happening in the world?”
MacLeod adds: “Noreen is deeply curious. And to my mind, that’s an exciting quality. She’s a person who finds something interesting, explores it and then brings it about.” Mabiza’s EAC colleague Gurprasad Gurumurthy concurs: “She always brings new ideas to the work. After every single meeting, she goes away and comes back with new perspectives.”
A different way of looking at what could have been an intractable problem propelled her here from central Africa in the first place. She had just finished high school and, as the daughter of an engineer-father and lawyer-mother, she was surveying the international landscape for a suitable institute of higher education to continue her studies. Friends suggested Canada. It was a good country, they said, with an excellent reputation for academic achievement.
She recalls her reaction with a laugh: “No way. You won’t find me anywhere in Canada. It’s way too cold.”
She changed her mind after reviewing the course description for Dal’s environment program. The writeup promised, among other things, an “exploration of the links between complex environmental issues and poverty, globalization, consumption and urbanization.” Studying here, it purred, would give her skills to become “a leader and changemaker” in her chosen career. How could she resist? “I was 100-per-cent determined to go right then and there,” she says.
But it wasn’t just the promise of building her changemaker muscles that intrigued her.
She was genuinely interested in how people can live well, equitably, and sustainably. She was also aware that she was a child of privilege.
“Growing up, I went to boarding school, and I got to do two international trips through school without my parents,” she says. “But really, as part of the regular curriculum (in Zimbabwe), we would go out into nature and see animals and talk to the wildlife rangers. I think it’s really only been within the past couple of years that
I’ve fully realized the big influence those trips had on me. The land, the environment, environmental policy — there’s a relationship there.”
Dal’s program fit her aspirations perfectly and as time passed, she became familiar with the campus and the city, the main streets and side alleys. “I got a map,” she cracks. “My residence was on Morris and South Park streets. So, I had a view of the water from my room. Coming from Harare, it was pretty. It wasn’t big-city rush. It was slow enough that I could find my pace and do what I needed to do. And everyone was really great.”
She threw herself into the university community like a long-lost friend, becoming a residence assistant who needed to be “self-motivated, capable of functioning independently and as part of a team, empathetic and fair, and an excellent communicator,” according to the job description. Her college friends remember how thoroughly she ticked all the boxes.
“What drew me to Noreen is a kind of a calmness, which is an odd trait as I don’t see it in a lot of people,” says Margaret MacDonald, a roommate in 2014 and still a close friend, now working for the Workers’ Compensation Board of Nova Scotia. “But she’s just such a relaxed person that I instantly was like, ‘I could be friends with this person.’ The feeling was like, ‘Oh, we’ve been friends for a long time even though we’ve just met.’”
Ramin Nauman, who met Mabiza in 2015 and who is now an engineer in Halifax, says her friend’s generosity frequently blew her away. Originally from Pakistan, Nauman missed her family especially around the Muslim holiday Eid.
“I was here by myself without my family for the first time and we just we went out to dinner together even though it wasn’t her holiday,” she says. “It’s just been a recurring thing. We’ll check in with each other. We’ll do our holidays together.”
For Falayha Khawaja, a graphic designer in Calgary who got to know Mabiza in 2017, it was her discipline that somehow both impressed and charmed.
“I remember many times when she would come into my room just to practice her speeches and pitch her ideas to me,” she says. “I was always in awe of that. Even with all her work at the Ecology Action Centre, she would practise her
speeches with me for her webinars there. She definitely knows what she wants. She works hard. And she advocates for what she believes. And she dedicates the time, and gets it done. She’s so passionate about what she does. I believe that if you’re passionate in your work, you don’t work a day in your life.”
If that’s true, then Mabiza definitely isn’t working. Her passion for fairness, equity and justice sometimes consumes her, she may admit, especially since moving to Halifax.
“We all know that everything is connected, everything is interrelated, and as we call for climate justice, we can’t separate that from social justice,” she says. “You know, I came here as someone who grew up in a community where most people looked like me. I didn’t really have to think about some of the things I was forced to think about suddenly being in Halifax, being a Black immigrant. I think those things just became so much more apparent to me.”
And increasingly more irksome. After graduating, she took a job as a social justice coordinator for the Nova Scotia branch of the national Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). There, among other initiatives, she helped launch a mock food drive in 2018 to “support” the Bragg family, owners of Eastlink — a business that claims it’s too small to provide inexpensive internet to low-income Nova Scotians.
According to her press release for the organization, “ACORN’s Internet for All campaign was launched in 2013, pushing telecom companies to lower the cost of internet for low-income families to $10 to help bridge the Digital Divide.”
A year later, she was at it again, literally pounding the pavement in Spryfield in a tenant action to protest landlord MetCap Living’s housing conditions.
“ACORN Nova Scotia continues an ongoing campaign to get landlords to provide healthy and suitable living for low-income Nova Scotians,” her statement to the press said. “MetCap Living has become notorious for low-quality housing and poor management. Many buildings are infested with bedbugs and in dire need of repairs.”
She loved the work, but wanted to find a way to combine the social justice component with her first love, environmental sustainability. “I didn’t want to spend too long being employed without using my environmental experience,” she says. “So, I would always look for new roles.”
When the job came up at EAC, she jumped at it. Marla MacLeod is glad she did. “Noreen is just so fantastic to work with,” she says. “She brings so many diverse and interesting fields to the work. I’ve gotten to see her both in space of curiosity and in developing a project. And I’ve also gotten to spend time with her in the advocacy world. She and I were the ones who got to go present to the Law Amendments Committee about the Nova Scotia government’s Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act last fall.”
In a press release after the presentation, EAC gave the government its qualified support, noting several positive aspects of the legislation, including: a promise to phase out coal by 2030, an electric vehicle mandate, a commitment to protecting 20 per cent of the province’s land and water by 2030, and a focus on equity as a core principle.
But promises are cheap. Mabiza has her eye on accountability and follow-through.
“We need to ensure we’re not undermining our own progress by continuing with outdated industries, fossil fuel extraction, and unproven carbon capture technologies,” she says. “Missteps here will continue to increase our emissions and threaten our ecosystems. We’ll be watching for meaningful action and specifics on issues like offshore oil and gas, biomass burning, and open net-pen aquaculture ... Consultations on the Sustainable Development Goals Act have shown us that Nova Scotians are ready to get to work on a rapid transition.”
Firebrand, advocate, champion. Sure. But consensus builder? Sound-bite maker? That may be in the cards for Mabiza as she pilots Green Jobs For All and, in the process, assumes a bigger role for herself in Nova Scotia’s slowly evolving social, economic, and environmental landscape.
“A year from now, if I were having this conversation with you, I would be hoping that I’d grown a network of folks who are concerned about these issues and are coming together to talk about them,” she says. “I’d be hoping that the immigrants, themselves, are in the conversation. In the long run, my hopes are that we all identify where the push needs to be. Where are the places that change needs to occur?”
In other words, she’s taking another long walk through Halifax, even perhaps along its brisk, sometimes achingly beautiful, waterfront. She’s no longer a stranger in a strange land and she’ll keep walking, just as she did on that first outing six years ago. Who knows where she’ll end up? But lost? No, not this time.
BY LOREM IPSOMIn the
trenches
DEVELOPERS, BUYERS, ADVOCATES, AND REALTORS — MEET THE PEOPLE ON THE FRONT LINES OF NOVA SCOTIA’S FRENZIED REAL ESTATE MARKET
BY JANET WHITMAN
Anthony Winston III, his wife, and their two young daughters swooped into Halifax from Southern California for a few days of house-hunting in early January.
It was their first time in Canada, let alone Nova Scotia, and their real-estate agent took them on a tour of their preferred neighbourhoods for a more laidback lifestyle and some acreage close to nature.
With listings scarce, there wasn’t a single suburban property on the market that met their needs in Kingswood North in Hammonds Plains, Fall River’s Schwartzwald, Westwood Hills, or Bedford’s Ridgevale subdivision. But they found something further afield, near the airport in Oakfield, that was within their $700,000 budget.
“We got lucky,” says Winston, who’s opened a subsidiary of his engineering consulting business here to ease his family’s immigration path. “Most people aren’t looking for homes during the holiday break. They got our offer and accepted it.”
The Winstons are part of an unexpected influx of newcomers who have been helping make the Halifax housing market feel more like Toronto or Vancouver over the past two years.
Photo by:
Looking for a home “more liberal and more accepting” than the United States, the Winstons came to Halifax in January to build a new life
Demand from new immigrants, people moving here from other provinces, Haligonians choosing to stay home, along with Airbnb and other investment purchases, are showing no signs of letting up.
In a market that remains short on supply, prices are poised to keep rising, putting a house or condo further out of the reach of many first-time homebuyers. Renovictions are continuing with landlords offering cash for tenants to move out so they can bring in new ones and raise rents. The city and province can’t move fast enough to grapple with the growing number of unhoused and precariously housed people. Developers are scrambling too.
NO SILVER BULLETS
One big reason for the housing shortage: no one anticipated the population boom.
Kelly Denty, who heads up planning and development for Halifax Regional Municipality, remembers working on the amalgamated municipality’s first regional development plan as a staffer in 2006, when one-per-cent population growth targets were considered “pretty ambitious.”
— Mickey MacDonald
But for the past six years, the population’s been increasing at two per cent annually, a gain last year that was the equivalent of adding a nearly 10,000-person town. “Looking backwards now, what really changed was the federal immigration policy in 2016,” Denty says. “And there’s of course the COVID factor. (We became) this hot growth spot in the past two years. ‘If you could work here, why wouldn’t you?’ ” With immigration and migration from other provinces expected to continue, Denty and her team are reviewing the regional plan to look for new tracts for development and possibilities to add more housing in sites already developed. The 34-year municipal land development veteran also has a seat at the table with the new housing taskforce set up by Premier Tim Houston to cut red tape and speed up development decisions. She says the taskforce meetings are focused on ways to streamline efforts, not override the municipality, though that’s within the panel’s powers. Denty, who took over as chief planner in 2017 from her ousted predecessor Bob Bjerke, says her job is never a black and white exercise. “Everyone wants the silver bullet and there is no silver bullet,” she says “That’s the difficult part to try to explain to folks. Every piece of land is different. The context is different.
You try to be sensitive to that and fair and provide something predictable to the community and the developer and council.”
The toughest part is balancing expectations. “We tend to say if everyone’s a little bit uncomfortable, you’ve probably gotten it right,” she says. “If one group’s really happy, you’ve really messed up something.”
THE LONG GAME
Mickey MacDonald has been sitting on a prime downtown development opportunity since 2007. That’s the year the serial entrepreneur bought high-end department store Mills Brothers on Spring Garden
Road and the Chickenburger fast-food restaurant around the corner on Queen Street.
He tore down the Chickenburger building in 2012 with plans to demolish Mills and partner with Halifax-headquartered apartment behemoth Killam to build on the sprawling site that borders on Birmingham Street.
Bruce Murray/VisionFire
AN INFLUX OF NEWCOMERS IS FUELLING HIGH HOUSING DEMAND IN HALIFAX
THE SUPPLY OF HOUSING ISN’T COMING FAST ENOUGH
MacDonald tells Unravel Halifax the timing was right, with housing demand set to surge as the federal government awarded J.D. Irving’s Halifax shipyard a multimilliondollar contract to build naval ships. But the development deal fell through.
MacDonald says he needed more time to buy neighbouring properties. “Rather than building out a half or three quarters of the block, it was more economical to do the whole thing,” he says.
He’s since bought the last pieces, including the former home of popular haberdashery Duggers Menswear, and found a new partner: seasoned developer Danny Chedrawe, who owned the now-demolished building on the Queen and Spring Garden corner of the block. “Danny has the knowledge and the connections,” says MacDonald, who’s worked on smaller real-estate developments in Bedford. “We’re riding on his coattails.”
The $100-million-plus, mixed-use eight-storey complex, dubbed The Mills, will have 190 rental apartments, a parkade, commercial space, and pedestrian promenade.
“I ended up playing the long game to get the whole block and it worked out great,” says the high-school dropout, who made his first millions from a business he started by selling cellphones from a car lot in Bedford in the late 1980s. “It’s in the centre of the city. We want to build a legacy building, something that will be there for a couple of hundred years.”
TOO LITTLE, TOO SLOWLY
While developments of all sorts are under construction in the city and its suburbs, the supply of housing isn’t coming fast enough to help many.
Michelle Malette, executive director of the communitybased Out of the Cold Association, is worried someone living outside this winter will freeze to death.
“In the last couple of years, things have gotten much more desperate,” she says. “Housing costs have gone up so much and there’s so much scarcity.”
In her previous job as a housing support worker with shelter and housing non-profit Adsum for Women and Children, Malette was able to help most people in need. In the last two years there, before her volunteer job at Out of the Cold turned fulltime, she was finding it increasingly difficult to find spots in shelters or affordable housing for people.
Buildings with apartments that used to rent in Dartmouth North for $600, for example, have been bought and renovated and now go for more than $1,000, she says.
At the same time, successive federal and provincial governments have failed to build adequate affordable housing, she says.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the situation by reducing the number of beds shelters can offer.
The Nova Scotia Affordable Housing Association estimates Halifax has more than 475 homeless. “That’s the number of folks that we know of in shelters and couch-surfing,” says Malette. “But there are so many more. Some folks don’t always reach out and there’s much more stigma around using a shelter or being unhoused. I have no idea at this point how many people are living outside.”
Malette never imagined the homeless situation in Halifax would get bad enough to see her volunteering lead to a paid job at Out of the Cold, which formed in 2007 after the closure of low-barrier shelter Pendelton Place. The grassroots outfit got funding from the federal government’s Reaching Home program, which is aimed at reducing chronic homelessness.
In the middle of the pandemic, Mallette spearheaded an effort to transition Out of the Cold from a shelter with several beds in a community centre gym into a hotel, all while managing a growing staff and handling frontline work.
With a new $2.7-million contract from the province, Malette and her team have pivoted again. Out of the Cold will now provide support services for residents of the emergency modular units municipal council ordered to shelter dozens of homeless in Halifax and Dartmouth. The first occupants have moved into the downtown Dartmouth units near the waterfront on Alderney Drive, with space for 26. The modular units planned for the Centennial Pool parking lot in Halifax, with 38 spots, have been delayed. The municipality is spending nearly $4.9 million on the initiative, $1.2 million more than anticipated.
Malette says when she first started working at Adsum and volunteering with Out of the Cold 10 years ago, she had a charitable outlook. “My views on what people need in housing definitely have changed over the years,” she says. “It’s about solidarity and making sure people have what
— Pam Cherington
Bruce Murray/VisionFire they need. It’s all those things about redistributing wealth and how a small number of people have a large amount of the wealth, and we allow people to be unhoused and live outside. Those things are not OK.”
HERE TO STAY?
Realtor Pam Cherington believes Halifax was destined to one day be a hot spot for “come from aways,” but the pandemic has amped things up. “None of us have ever seen anything like this in our careers, unless we were in Vancouver or Toronto,” says the owner of Red Door Realty. “When you’re living in a big city you kind of expect that stuff. But in Halifax, it’s overwhelming.” Properties that in a more normal market would take a month or two to sell are snapped up in days, sometimes with a dozen offers or more. Homes that sat around for years have all been sold. “The lack of supply is the result of all the people who want to live here,” says Cherington. “That’s the difference. Halifax’s small size didn’t work for us in the beginning and now it is working for us.” Many of the new arrivals have more money to spend on housing, a big part of the surge in home prices over the past two years. “It’s hard advice to say, ‘I really think you need to offer $220,000 over the list price,’” Cherington says. “Those are words that not everyone can hear. They’re like, ‘What?’” It’s not only a tough time for buyers. Cherington says one of her agents came to her saying she felt bad after talking clients out of buying a house. “It was so much money and it had gone so over (the listed price),” she says. “Now they probably won’t be able to buy a house, because that’s how much the market’s gone up in four months.” Making things that much trickier to navigate, as many as a quarter of real-estate agents have less than a year of experience, says
Cherington. The Nova Scotia Real Estate Commission says new realtors accounted for 17 per cent of all licences in the province in 2021, up from 10 per cent in 2020.
“It’s very daunting for anybody who has any sort of a moral compass,” she says. “It’s your job to get your clients a house. You have to sit back and say, ‘I did what I could.’”
Cherington arrived in Halifax in 1984 from Calgary after spending her early 20s “chasing booms” across Canada.
While the current market might be the most challenging in her nearly 35-year real-estate career, Cherington is optimistic.
She isn’t sure the market is worth losing sleep over, as she did when the award of a $25-billion shipbuilding contract started a North End home-buying buying frenzy in 2012.
“People were spending $400,000 on prefabricated homes. I was worried they were losing their shirts,” she says. “Now they’re up double. All that worked out just fine. And this will work out just fine too.”
For buyers nowadays, it’s all about “where you set your bar,” she says. That might mean adjusting expectations and looking at less expensive properties so they can afford to bump up their offers.
The biggest issue for sellers is “if they’re going to buy, what are they going to buy?” she says.
What’s next is tough to predict.
“Is it here to stay? I guess it is. I don’t know,” says Cherington. “I don’t think it can go down.”
WORKING OUT
Halifax wasn’t Winston’s first choice after the police killing of African American George Floyd got him thinking about leaving the U.S.
He and his wife applied for visas for New Zealand and considered Mexico. When those options didn’t pan out, they decided to try Canada. They were looking at Toronto when his wife, physical education teacher and cheer coach Erin Nicole Winston, stumbled upon Nova Scotia.
“It just fit the lifestyle we wanted. It’s a lot more green … and much more liberal and more accepting than the U.S.,” he says. “What really attracted us was learning about the history in terms of American slavery and reading about how a lot of the southern slaves escaped to Nova Scotia. As an African American, it really struck a chord with me.”
The couple and their daughters, five and seven, visited Africville during their house-hunting trip. “It felt really powerful being there,” he says.
The Chicago native says his consulting business, Winston Engineering, has always operated virtually so opening an outpost here was no stretch. He’s already licensed to practise as an electrical engineer in the province ahead of his family’s plan to relocate in June.
“Personally and professionally, things are working out pretty well,” he says.
