Dennis Smith, housing and facilities manager for Sea to Sky Community Services, has a job that is at times both rewarding and gut wrenching.
On the one hand, he gets to tell people they finally have an affordable and suitable home. On the other, he often has to tell people there is nothing available.
“The sense of relief, especially when we rent to a young mom, a person with a disability and is only making $900 a month and is now living in their parent’s trailer in one-bedroom and they have got two kids, and it is just a real struggle. So when we can offer [a unit] to those people, that is a big joy for us,” he said. “Unfortunately we can’t do it for everybody.”
Smith is manager for the two Squamish Sea to Sky Community Services complexes: Castle Rock Family Housing is made up of 40, two, three and four-bedroom townhomes and all rent is according to income.
At Castle Rock, residents must have family living with them at least 40 per cent of the time and must move out when the child turns 19.
There is a 10-applicant waitlist, and an internal waitlist of two tenants who need to downsize or upsize within the complex and those internal applicants get first dibs.
Riverstones is a mixed housing complex which has 83 apartments – 30 are rent geared to income, 53 apartments are market rent. The units are one and two-bedroom units for $850 and $900 per month.
“We are required to be a certain percentage below what a similar priced unit would cost in the real market,” Smith said.
There is a waiting list of 10 for market rents, and Smith doesn’t advertise units available, he said.
But the waiting list for rent-geared-to-income units has 70 applicants.
It hasn’t always been this way, Smith said.
“When we first opened we were actually struggling to fill this building,” he said.
Riverstones opened in 2010, a year and a half later the complex was at 50 per cent occupancy. The subsidized units went quickly, Smith said, but the market rent units were tougher to fill.
“We actually had to drop our rates,” Smith said, noting rents were originally $875 and $925.
“All of a sudden the Olympics went away, and now our building is open and there is nobody to rent,” he said.
But then units started to fill, and quickly.
Riverstones reached 100 per cent occupancy about halfway through 2012 and has stayed filled since, Smith said.
“We had a suite come available and it turned over in a day,” Smith said.
The anticipated Centrepoint, a downtown Sea to Sky Community Services complex, is expected to be complete in the next couple of years and will offer 32 affordable housing units, which will take some of the pressure of the waitlist.
The mayor also said that there are more developments in the district hopper that should also help alleviate the need without creating a glut such as after the market.
“As more and more people are choosing to move to Squamish, that demand is now driving renewed interest in development projects that were previously off the table,” Heintzman said. “Over the next few years, supply will catch up. The challenge is to manage this growth in a sustainable way to avoid the boom or bust scenario.”
