Concerned residents, developers and housing and community development services consultant Alice Sundberg met last Friday (June 11) to discuss the affordable housing situation plaguing Squamish.
"This is a great group of people getting together but some links in the chain are missing - the district and the Squamish Oceanfront Development Corporation," said Eric Andersen, who attended the workshop and presented Squamish Climate Action Network's (CAN) alternative affordable housing plan.
The workshop, hosted by the Housing Options Group and B.C. Non-Profit Housing Association, brought together members of the community to learn about and discuss the issue of affordable housing, and also discuss the steps involved in developing affordable housing in B.C.
Sea to Sky community developer Karen Clarke said affordable housing in Squamish is a huge problem and most everyone who attended agreed. The difficulty, they realized, was determining exactly how huge of a problem it was.
Westmana Development Corporation principal René David attended the workshop and asked for some solid numbers regarding how many people were in need of affordable housing, as this number would be essential to undertaking any sort of development.
Other than the 84-unit Squamish Riverstone Development project, B.C.'s first housing project to be funded by the federal government's Economic Action Plan, Clarke said affordable housing development in Squamish is "at a standstill."
Sundberg said that everyone in the community, especially the district, need to be involved to make any headway.
"A lot of communities have really strong support from the municipality, for example, and there's lots of people from the municipality at the workshop," said Sundberg. "Here there's not opposition but there's not strong support.
"Because we didn't actually have anybody from the district there [at the workshop], we weren't able to link that perspective into the whole picture."
She said "any successful hosing outcome is going to require the support and participation of the local government."
The most recent municipal interaction was in December 2008 when the Affordable Housing Strategy Plan did not pass in council.
Coun. Corinne Lonsdale, who was the head of the affordable housing committee appointed at that time, said council rejected the strategy because it was too restricting and didn't have what developers considered a fair formula.
"There were real issues as to whether we should be requiring the development community to actually provide units or so much per unit," said Lonsdale.
She said not much has been done about affordable housing since that point and she was planning to attend Friday's workshop but couldn't because she was out of town.
Sundberg said she thought the workshop was a success.
"The afternoon really helped people to understand what are the steps that anybody needs to take in order to get to the dream of having housing," she said, "and there's a lot of focus on what the need is and quantifying the need.
"I think people also saw the advantage of being shovel ready- having a plan in place that you can implement pretty quickly. If there is an opportunity for dollars or a piece of land - be ready, have your plan in place."
She said doing an official need/demand study to get a sense of where there is affordable housing need and to what extent is an important next step.
