Those seeking insight from a provincially mandated report on housing needs within the Islands Trust should prepare for disappointment, according to local trustees.
An interim Housing Needs Assessment Report (HNAR) for each of the Trust areas is now publicly available on the Islands Trust’s website, prepared by Vancouver-based Urbanics Consultants — but despite meeting the province’s requirements and a six-figure price tag, trustees roundly criticized the report as confusing and unrealistic.
On Salt Spring Island, the report estimated 821 new housing units needed within the next five years, and 2,525 total in the next 20 years; yet to achieve a three per cent rental vacancy rate in the same timeframe, the HNAR estimated a need to add only 16 new rental units.
“We were kind of shocked at this,” said Salt Spring local trustee Laura Patrick in remarks before the island’s Local Trust Committee (LTC) meeting Thursday, May 8. LTCs received the report in advance of its official receipt by the Trust’s Regional Planning Committee (RPC) the following day.
“And the report says [Salt Spring needs] ‘two,’” said Patrick, “which I think they accidentally copied from another island. I mean, we all know that whether we provide two or 16 rental units over the next 20 years, that’s not going to meet our housing needs.”
Regulations surrounding the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act directed all LTCs to update their HNARs to align with the bill’s new requirements, with an “interim” report due by January. The province accepted a delay and this report was completed in April.
While the interim report included a housing needs questionnaire, it resulted in 893 responses — a high response rate, according to staff, but not a scientific survey. Of those, six indicated they were members of a First Nation whose territory included islands in the Islands Trust area.
“The questions were perhaps not as targeted as they could have been,” said planning services director Stefan Cermak. “It was never really designed to be policy-specific to an individual Local Trust Area. And the number of people that were engaged was significantly less than the number with contact information we had given the consultants.”
HNARs follow a provincially regulated methodology provided to the consultants last summer, which staff noted seemed to project a local area’s needs simply as a percentage of those in a larger area. For example, Thetis Island’s housing need projections were approximately 18.5 per cent of those calculated for the larger Cowichan Valley Regional District Electoral Area G — and Thetis residents represent about 18.5 per cent of that area’s population.
The calculations for Salt Spring’s HNAR were based on the 2021 census — noting 960 rental households — and assumed the island’s population growth and housing needs would follow along at the rate of the Capital Regional District. Current rental vacancy rate data for the assessment was drawn from the CMHC’s Primary Rental Market 2021 Vacancy Rate data, according to the HNAR, which itself is based upon a survey of purpose-built rental landlords — with the explicit assumption that “the whole market, including rented condominium units, rented houses and other small-scale residential landlording operations follow similar trends.” CMHC does not collect rural rental market data.
So on Salt Spring, according to the HNAR, the local rental vacancy rate was assumed to be the provincial average — 1.4 per cent.
“This doesn’t even begin to help us,” said Patrick. “We really need customized data; we know we’ve got 1,000 people living in RVs right now, today.”
Patrick told the RPC May 9 growth assumptions that continue to favour single-family dwellings suggest an opportunity to remind LTCs generally that there’s nothing wrong with revisiting their “1971-era” zoning bylaws.
“We should be horrified by the number of houses this indicated we should be building, to supply some demand and growth,” Patrick said, “when our very own hard-working people are living in tents.”
“It just doesn’t feel human to me,” said Denman Island trustee David Graham. “It feels very mechanical, the numbers don’t make sense, and it’s so sad that we spend taxpayer dollars in an exercise that provides absolutely no benefit to us.”
The Islands Trust received $127,000 in funding from the Ministry of Housing in 2023 to support updates to its HNARs, according to the RPC staff report, which also indicated those funds were used to complete the interim HNAR.
“Staff will consider and assess lessons learned in the development of the interim report to inform potential improvements for the 2028 HNAR to more fully reflect unique island circumstances,” read the staff report.
The RPC elected to receive the report and advance it to the Trust’s Executive Committee, but also attached a resolution expressing its lack of confidence in the data or its usefulness, as well as its concerns about the potential harms of the report’s findings.
“People who say that we do not have a housing problem in our communities may use this report to say, ‘look, there’s hardly anybody in need,’” said Gabriola Island trustee Tobi Elliott. “We can’t have a public conversation with the vulnerable people in our community, of which there are far more than these reports indicate, because they are vulnerable — and putting this kind of report out there just is going to further drive them into hiding.”