When BC Housing finally craned modular units into place at its long-awaited project on Salt Spring’s Drake Road, the province — at almost the last minute — included a small nod to the island’s affordable housing shortage.
Along with 32 housing units for people at risk of homelessness, BC Housing set aside a bachelor suite and three one-bedroom units, according to Lookout Society’s Lee Fox — without those supportive services, but offered with rental costs tailored to working islanders.
Critics who called that a “drop in the bucket” may have understated things.
“We had over 100 applications for those four units,” said Fox. “They were rented out really, really quickly.”
Lookout was among several earnest community groups who gave updates on their housing efforts to Salt Spring’s Local Community Commission Thursday, April 9. And while that body is working to craft its own strategic housing plans, all agreed that lasting solutions to the crisis on Salt Spring will be necessarily costly, collaborative and complex — involving a mix of building more housing and optimizing how existing homes are used.
If the most conspicuous result of Salt Spring’s lack of affordable housing has been staff shortages, the most visible recent effort to reverse that trend has likely been the Lady Minto Hospital Foundation’s (LMHF) Bittancourt Road project, now called Heartwood House. With 18 units on Salt Spring’s busiest road, options range from studios to two-bedroom apartments, all set aside for provincially employed healthcare workers.
The building is also almost completely full.
“Our foundation’s mission had nothing to do with housing, but here we are,” said LMHF chair Julian Clark. “It became very clear that we could spend as much money as we liked on equipment for the hospital, but if there was no one to run that equipment it wasn’t going to do much good.”
The majority of Heartwood’s residents are from Island Health and Greenwoods, according to Heartwood House Housing Society executive director Brett Webb, from registered nurses and health care aides to peer support workers, med students, cooks and support staff — anyone required to run facilities.
“Of the current tenants, six were vulnerably housed [employees] on the island that we’ve now housed at Heartwood, and eight are new staff that have come to the island from Canada, the U.S. and in some cases even further than that,” said Webb. “And if staff already on the island lose their housing, they can come live at Heartwood for a few years — and we won’t lose them.”
Subsidies through the foundation hold residents’ portions of the all-inclusive rents at 30 per cent of their income, when necessary; there are three units set aside for travelling staff — nurses, midwives and doctors brought in to fill temporary shortages on the island.
And all units have a hard three-year residency cap, a policy meant to align with how long it generally takes new islanders to meaningfully access Salt Spring’s “grapevine” word-of-mouth rental market. Even more importantly, according to Clark, that cap multiplies the effect of building Heartwood in the first place — an $11-million project mostly funded by local donations that arguably might’ve just been “dropped in the bank,” he said, with interest used to generate housing subsidies.
“But our purpose in all of this was to decrease the vacancy rate of healthcare workers on the island,” said Clark. “If we’d brought, say, 18 healthcare workers here who never left Heartwood House, then we’d barely have brought that down by a blip. But if we can ‘matchmake’ these fabulous tenants with unrented suites on the island, we can have real success over the long run.”
Clark said the foundation’s push now would be “whatever help we can give or get” to encourage getting those underutilized properties into the rental market. Unfortunately, two efforts along those lines have so far failed to find eager participants on Salt Spring.
The Housing Now home-share program has had some successes on smaller islands, according to Salt Spring’s coordinator Adam Evanik — but not so much on the largest.
“Salt Spring has been the problem child,” said Evanik. “We have plenty of people looking [for housing], but not too many looking to share.”
Housing Now’s collaboration with app Happipad is designed to produce strong lease agreements, facilitate conflict resolution and structure equity-building for tenants. But despite having its own referral program — businesses can “sign off” on reliable employees, Evanik said — it’s been a hard sell.
“We’ve had a lot of issues with homeowners on Salt Spring overcoming the fear of having tenants — what if I can’t get a tenant out? What if they’re a problem?” said Evanik.
Evanik also said Salt Spring property owners seem to be seeking more of what he called a “traditional renter-landlord situation.”
“So [they] have the space, and it needs to make this much money,” said Evanik. “It’s just that traditional structure, and the need for people to rent their suites out for a market rate that helps them, based on their costs.”
Meanwhile, the CRD’s three-year pilot Rural Housing Program’s (RHP) accessory dwelling unit (ADU) stream — which set aside $500,000 for rebates of up to $40,000 for eligible homeowners who create or upgrade discount-rent housing at their properties — is also struggling to find takers.
“We haven’t received any applications yet,” said RHP coordinator Joan Wandolo. “So the focus is now turning toward increasing awareness of access to this rebate.”
Notably, and from a second half-million-dollar RHP pot, the program’s “pre-development” funding stream is awarding $100,000 to the Gulf Islands Seniors Residence Association (GISRA). Much like LMHF, GISRA — which employs 20 staff operating the Meadowbrook independent living retirement facility — found itself stepping into the unexpected role of affordable housing creator.
GISRA’s property on Kings Lane had long been slated for a “Meadowbrook 2” sort of development — but as it turned out, the original had satisfied the market.
“The need for that type of housing for seniors was well-met on Salt Spring,” said GISRA executive director Harry Barnes. “The best use for the property is affordable housing, with ‘workforce’ housing being in the highest need.”
Convincing the Islands Trust to rezone the parcel for affordable housing was an easier task than closing what Barnes said is an $8- to $10-million funding gap to build and operate the project, even supported through future rents. GISRA has already invested some $3 million in the project, but a BC Housing grant application last year was turned down for not being “shovel-ready” enough, Barnes said — and a submission seeking funding via the provincial Community Housing Fund has been sidelined, as the government put that $3.3-billion program on pause for “reallocating.”
“We are in a discussion with BC Housing about some of their other programs,” said Barnes. “We don’t know whether there’s any money there; we’re all waiting with bated breath for some big announcement. But we’re not going to stop; we are going to do this, as far as GISRA possibly can.”