SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Change is coming for public housing tenants across the territory.

The government announced last week it will transfer responsibility for income assessments back to the NWT Housing Corporation. The switch means that, starting in April 2011, tenants will have their income assessed and pay their rent at their local housing corporation rather than through the Department of Education, Culture and Employment.

When the department took over administration of the rental subsidy program four years ago, it was meant to become a "one-stop shop" for tenants, said Housing Corporation spokesperson Stephen Pretty. Instead, it became more of an inconvenience for tenants to go back and forth between ECE and their local housing office.

"Certainly one of the most important reasons why we're making this change back to the Housing Corporation is the fact that we've had a lot of complaints from MLAs, from tenants, about a number of aspects of this change and how it impacted on them," Pretty said. "There was a bit of a perception out there that this had some impact on personal dignity, in that people weren't really happy with the idea of having to go to income support to get assistance when they weren't on income support otherwise, so that was certainly an issue."

Another issue was that local housing offices were losing money because some tenants weren't having their incomes assessed and were going into arrears, he said, so the administration switch is also coming into effect to "ensure that our local housing organizations are stable from a financial perspective."

Apart from an increased workload on local housing corporation employees, Pretty couldn't say what the outcome of the change will be. But he said the Housing Corp. is working with the government, tenants and members of the public over the next year "just to see what will become of the Public Housing Program once we take the improvements that were made under ECE and grow on them and build an even better program."

The announcement of the impending change coincides with the release of the NWT Bureau of Statistics' 2009 community housing needs survey.

The results of the survey, released in January, showed that public housing accounted for 33 per cent of residences in NWT last year, while about eight per cent of those had affordability issues - meaning rent and utilities cost more than 30 per cent of the tenant's income.

The report also found that about 19 per cent of all dwellings in the territory were considered to be in "core need" - they weren't affordable, they were in need of repair and they didn't have the appropriate number of bedrooms. The Deh Cho region had the highest number of "core need" housing last year, while 25 of 33 NWT communities reported increases in the percentages of residences who needed major repairs.