A new report forecasts the need for more than 4,500 units of housing and related support on the Sunshine Coast over the next five years.
Cover the Coast’s Social and Housing Needs Assessment for the Sunshine Coast released last week paints a stark picture of not only the Coast’s housing crisis but the social supports necessary to alleviate it. The report digs “behind the wall of crises,” says the organization’s regional housing coordinator, Kelly Foley. The 149-page report and 24-page executive summary break the housing crisis into four priority areas – seniors housing, prevention and pathways out of homelessness, workforce housing, and lone-parent housing – and for each breaks down the current resources, current needs and investments necessary to meet said needs.
Ultimately, the report shows that residents of the Coast need to embrace change, said Foley. “The change is going to affect people’s vision of the Coast and their lifestyles but we have to embrace the change and that means different types of housing.”
Foley points to the statistic that 64 per cent of the need for workforce housing is for studio or one-bedroom units while that type of housing represents 11 per cent of the inventory. “We have a huge inventory of single detached houses, which are infrastructure hogs,” she said. “They’re not energy efficient, usually, and they’re certainly not affordable or suitable for the people…that we want to encourage to live here.”
The workforce participation rate – or the percentage of people above 15 who are working or seeking work is below average (54.1% versus the B.C. average of 63.3%) and trending downward because the housing inventory is only affordable to older, wealthier people. “And so we’re not going to get young people who are going to be part of our workforce that are going to be working in the hospitals, working at the RCMP, working in our local businesses, unless we have the type of housing inventory that is suitable for them and affordable.” The lack of workforce housing reverberates in services – like health care for the growing senior population – unable to find staffing and compounds as needs like affordable child care aren’t met.
Foley points to the opportunities for gentle density near infrastructure and services, in community centres, and notes that Cover the Coast is working on a land use evaluation – assessing the suitability of available lands for housing.
Another aspect Foley highlighted was that in assisted living for seniors, there’s a net 20 beds coming available with the opening of Trellis seniors care facility and the closing of Shorncliffe and Totem Lodge and nothing new planned. When Trellis is open, there will be 278 units on the Coast and the report estimates the need for 500 assisted living units over the next five years, not including the current inventory. The report estimates a total of 1,800 new units are needed for seniors over the next five years.
For those for whom addiction is contributing to homelessness, there are no detox, treatment or recovery centres on the Coast – though shíshálh Nation is planning a treatment centre with 20 beds. To address pathways out of homelessness, an estimated 1,140 units of emergency and non-emergency supports (supportive housing, diversion and rapid rehousing, complex care, treatment and recovery, transitional and other such supports) are needed over the next five years. Foley noted that the Coast has classically been focused on emergency response to homelessness, where much deeper and wider support is needed to give people a pathway out of homelessness.
Cover the Coast partnered with consulting firm HelpSeeker Technologies to pull together the report, research for which included focus groups and interviews with social service providers, health care providers, elected officials, housing providers, seniors, people at risk of homelessness, and people with the lived experience of homelessness, said Foley. “We really tried to cover a broad net, to capture and really better understand how to how to read the data,” she said.
Much of the data referenced in the report is from Statistics Canada’s 2021 census. (This led to some interesting skewing in terms of poverty and income as that year people were benefiting from COVID-19 relief payments.)
Where the report identifies four priority areas, the Housing Action Table (which oversees Cover the Coast and brings together politicians, housing organizations and other related entities to work on the housing crisis) is focusing on three: pathways out of homelessness, workforce housing and seniors housing and bringing together expert working groups to implement the recommendations.
“The housing crisis is a human rights crisis if we accept that there is a fundamental human right to housing,” said Housing Action Table chair Colin Stansfield. “This report lays bare where we are failing in the provision of that to those who are most vulnerable in our community. It forces all of us to think about the new ways in which we might need to recognize our own vulnerability.”
Said Foley, “Now we know what we need to do. And we have the research that supports that. And now [with the Housing Action Table], we have the right people in the room to do the work that actually has to get done.”
