By JASON MOGUS
Last week’s paper held an interesting snapshot of life on Salt Spring in early 2025.
The lead story was how the median home price is now $850,000, which has stayed pretty stable the last three years. Great news for us homeowners, I guess, but it’s worth stopping for a minute and taking that in. What was the average price when you moved here, or your parents did? For me, 11 years ago, it was about half what it is today, and we could only pull off our home with a monster-sized mortgage my off-island job could just barely cover. If you moved here as a hippie, artist or even middle-class retiree from an older generation, would you have been able to afford it at today’s prices?
The second article was a lovely piece by Bryan Young of Transition Salt Spring, on how collaboration, positive organizing and moving beyond division to find unifying issues was bringing great benefits to our community. Transition Salt Spring is a shining light on what a visionary, solutions-oriented yet practical environmental non-profit can achieve when it is centred around both people and the planet. I’m always impressed by them.
Then we get to the letters section, where two of Salt Spring’s leading anti-housing activists felt the need to lay into the recent work of community volunteers and one elected official (it’s always the same one) who work on affordable housing.
Perhaps you’d seen Salt Spring Solutions’ submission, or read trustee Laura Patrick’s in the Jan. 1 edition of the Driftwood. Maybe you learned that almost 700 people had been listened to, including those who work full-time keeping our community running but are forced to live in vans, campers or boats. Maybe you felt some shock or compassion for how so many fully employed people with families have to live here today.
But Frants Attorp and Ron Wright see not careful listening work around an important community issue but deception, another scam in a long snow job plotted by unethical anti-environmental actors. Mr. Wright even suggested a new hidden motive: people working on housing, for in some cases almost a decade, are really doing it to make money. As if social justice work is the new bitcoin, with a big payday just around the corner. A really, really, really . . . really long corner. Sarcasm aside, this kind of character attack hurts, and is kind of cruel.
They represent a small minority, but are a highly organized one. You should know about the groups they help run. Keep Salt Spring Sustainable, Positively Forward, Friends of the Gulf Islands and the Water Preservation Society have done a lot of work on housing: they’ve hired lawyers, threatened trustee Patrick with lawsuits, phoned the Islands Trust staff on a regular basis, organized countless letter writing and town hall stacking campaigns, and as any reader of the Driftwood is aware, written many letters to any news site that will take their submissions, all with the same core message: don’t trust housing ideas, or the people proposing them.
Working people and young families I speak with tell me when they read articles like these, or see policies they were excited about being defeated, they feel unwelcome in this community. Many see something more stark: homeowners who bought cheap decades ago who lack empathy for how the world has changed. Their endless “stop growth” advocacy mask a simple truth — that they’re denying others the same basic rights they have freely enjoyed.
I know there is much more nuance to it than this, and I actually don’t doubt these groups’ intentions in wanting to protect this special place from the ravages of late-stage capitalism. In a free society you are allowed to organize to build the world you want to live in. But how democratic is it that a small group of people can block something that thousands of housing insecure community members and their allies have consistently asked for and voted for?
We are measured not by our intentions but the impact of our actions. Our housing crisis was not caused by local opposition, but local opposition, combined with our dysfunctional form of government, is stopping us from doing anything about it.
That’s the “anti-housing movement” these activists deny even exists, and unfortunately it’s making people’s lives worse.
If you’re worried about our community losing its diversity, if you want to “Keep Salt Spring Weird,” or feel empathy for the struggles of today’s working-class and young people, the thing you can do is stop believing the outdated, black-and-white thinking that is blocking a mature conversation about a reasonable path forward. You can lean in, as many are, to the exciting, intelligent, integrated solutions where environmental stewardship and housing needs can coexist.
These problems are hard, but they’re not going away. At the very least, Salt Spring needs empathy and understanding on this issue, not attacks on the people working to address it.