A cross-jurisdictional attempt to sort a list of possible actions toward improving housing attainability on Salt Spring painted a picture of two island governmental bodies eager to work together — and likely still some distance from consensus.
Almost exactly two years after the two groups first met jointly in June 2024 — and nearly a full year since work began on developing the Salt Spring Island Integrated Housing Strategy (IHS) action plan — on Thursday, May 28 the island’s Local Community Commission (LCC) and its Local Trust Committee (LTC) took their first run at the aptly-named Long List of potential actions.
That Long List, according to project coordinator Isha Matous-Gibbs, is the product of a review of nearly 20 years worth of documents related to housing and urban planning on Salt Spring — and almost a year of talking to renters, housing providers, employers and people with lived experience of housing insecurity, taking all the suggested actions identified during that process, narrowing them to those within the scope of the LCC and LTC and then circulating them to planning staff for both, to confirm they’re even possible.
The result was a list of more than 30 possible actions, ranging from broad data collection efforts to very specific legislative changes; and while it might be tempting to hope solving Salt Spring’s affordable housing shortage could be as simple as endorsing everything on that list, it’s not quite that simple.
“I know a lot of the actions read like they’re policies,” said Matous-Gibbs. “They’re not; they’re what we heard from the community through the process.”
And despite being an LCC initiative, both that commission’s members and local staff emphasized the purpose was not to position either body as the sole decision-makers. The goal, according to Matous-Gibbs, is to identify a set of actions they all agree align with an overarching vision — and then take those actions back to their respective agencies to advance them, within the context of the IHS.
“So we know, for example, the LTC has the authority to consider [actions] that read like land use policies, through their Official Community Plan and Land Use Bylaw review,” she said. “And we know that in doing so, they will do all kinds of engagement and further refine specific language and details. So it is iterative, and it’s a bit of an onion.”
But just sorting the Long List was the goal of the day — prioritizing, hopefully, but also ensuring the “winners” reflected the needs of the community, increasing access to affordable and adequate housing. A first effort was tackled through a computerized voting process; trustees and commissioners were invited to choose where to place each proposed action on a contextual graph — imagine “effort” on one axis and “impact” on the other — with the tabulated votes hopefully visualizing consensus on low-effort, high-impact “quick wins” they could start with.
The resulting plots did indeed often cluster, but there were several that did so toward the centre of the matrix — a pattern that suggested less agreement than might’ve been hoped for.
“Which, to me, is striking,” said LCC member Brian Webster. “I think that we’re going to require a few more iterations before there’s something that everyone’s comfortable with.”
Webster suggested some of the proposals were simply controversial — meaning someone who disagreed with an action would be expected to rate it low impact and high effort, with the reverse true for someone in support. And local trustee Laura Patrick pointed out there were also stumbling blocks in language; someone might oppose putting a “planner” on a particular action, for example, but might be in favour of a volunteer facilitator.
“Some of them just need to be parsed further,” said Patrick. “There are some things that will be taken care of just by talking to the parties involved.”
Mattous-Gibbs said her team would take the plotted results of the polling back to see what consensus could be teased from the data.
But whether through directly changing regulations at their respective levels, or via advocating up to senior government — or, indeed, finding funding locally or through provincial or federal programs — all seemed to agree that increasing the attainability of housing on Salt Spring would need to come through implementing multiple strategies, not just one.
“There’s no panacea,” said LCC member and Capital Regional District director Gary Holman. “There’s no single action that will resolve the housing crisis.”
And there was also at least a tacit agreement with IHS language around the overarching goals of the project: that residents “new and old” can find appropriate housing they can afford, year-round; that development be focused in Ganges and other serviced village areas; that people be provided with the tools and supports they need to be part of solutions; that development be planned based on data; and, finally, that the work be “actionable” — in this context meaning the LCC and LTC should be working together to reduce delays and regulatory barriers.
“It’s most important to get it right, as opposed to fast,” said Webster. “Although I really hope we will have an Integrated Housing Strategy signed off by the LCC, not [only] left for the next LCC.”