State of the City: Housing development

The need for much, much more in the way of housing stock for the community made for one of the longer segments for the June 28th State of the City presentation from Prince Rupert Mayor Lee Brain.

During the housing portion of the night, the Mayor noted of the challenges that the city has found in enticing developers to the community to take on the construction of homes for what is anticipated to be a growing population  as port facilities expand.

"Next Challenge, Huge challenge, Housing. 

So ..  I have a lot to say about housing, I'll try to be quick.

Let me tell you about our challenge, Rupert's challenge with Housing is that we don't have ready, available, developable land. 

We have muskeg as our foundation and it costs, huge costs to dig up that muskeg and in some places you're digging down thirty feet to find rock and it can cost upwards to a million dollars just to clear a site and make it flat.

So when people are like what Terrace is doing ... well Terrace has ready available land and they have a huge sprawl. We are not like that, we are an Island, we are a coastal community and we have that other issue.

That is the number one issue for developers, that is the number one issue for why it's challenging to build housing here. 

We hosted a Developer conference in October 2020 we brought a bunch of developers around the province and even from  across Canada toured them around sites, showed them the opportunities. 

And even the developers are like you know what, we see the opportunity, but for them to mobilize a crew up here, because there's no workers right now FYI, there's no one to work in this community anymore, everyone is fully tapped and we'll talk about that after.

To get materials up here and for them to make some income on top of that, it's a big risk for them.

The themes of a shortage of workers and the need to develop housing to support industrial development provide for the next bridge of the presentation.

So part of us, our job as a community  is to de-risk housing so that developers will want to come here and develop.

Prince Rupert needs 2,000 to 3,000 new housing units by 2030, if we don't start developing, you know a couple of hundred units per year, there is no growth, the Port is not going anywhere, these projects will not expand, there is nowhere for people to live.

They will be flying in their workers and that is already happening, there are workers coming in from Terrace, from Stewart to work at DP World. 

They've already cannibalized  the entire workforce of the town there's no one else to tap, we're actually in a bad problem that way and unless we massively expand housing to be able to recruit and retain new people to the community as well as the existing people in the community we're going to be stuck on the expansion process. But there's solutions but we're going to show you that here in a moment. 

To address those risks and challenges, the Mayor outlined the measures that the city is considering towards alleviating the situation, highlighting plans for new subdivisions.

"So, these are new areas where we've identified as new housing areas, we're talking new subdivisions, massive strokes of land in the Westview Area, by Seal Cove area and the Infilling of the downtown area.

What we've been able to assess is that downtown alone can actually fit 1,000 new residences infilling the downtown and the idea is to actually infill and not expand out and so we've put a lot of housing properties up on the market now, the city has. 

In fact we're putting like as many properties as we possibly can up on the market now. We've transferred these big subdivisions to our Legacy Corporation, Legacy has more flexibility in giving option agreements to developers to  be able to give them an opportunity on a long term plan for building housing.

See when developers come here, their gonna to want like have the opportunity to say well do I have a five year plan for Rupert I don't want to just come here for a month and  then maybe, or maybe not make money and then leave right They still need to make money"

A synopsis of the recent housing measures adopted by City Council followed, with the Mayor outlining their work in some areas of the city on tax exemptions, waiving of permits and building fees, creation of secondary suites for every zone now to increase housing options, as well as a fifteen point  housing strategy and the blanche towards protections for tenants on renovictions, while addressing concerns of building owners.  

Some of the housing the City is hoping to see developed includes that for Seniors to try to keep them in the community and areas of affordable housing.

"We've been focusing on affordable housing, we know we need seniors housing in this community, so some of the projects we're looking at is a place for Seniors to own smaller condos where they can sell their homes, many who have homes on Graham Avenue that type of thing. 

Be able to downsize and be able to retire in place, something that is not set up for Prince Rupert. So when you're talking to folks who are Seniors they either have the option of moving somewhere else, or we need to create an option for them to stay in this community.  

So that's something we're looking at, we're looking at building family homes, affordable homes and supportive housing as well.

Towards what's on the way in the form of future  housing in the community, Mayor Brain outlined the scope of units that are in the process of be developed to date.

"So right now, currently what's on the docket is: 

We have 192 units at McKay Street that are going to be redone there, we have 28 units going at Drake Crescent, 60 units at the new Digby Towers which is almost complete,  we just approved 70 units at Lax Kw'alaams housing on 11th Avenue, we're just about to complete with Silversides and build 28 new homes in a subdivision  up on Silversides and then we have helped with the Crow's Nest Lodge and the Raffles building, which will be 84 supportive housing units.

And Raffles as well will be a 24 hour a day open event there so people don't have to leave anymore when they leave the shelter ... I think that will be a good solution for the community .

So we're tackling the entire housing spectrum all at once and right now we can confirmly say the number is about 460 units are currently under way for Rupert and if you think oft it at 3,000 is the mark then that's where we are at right now, we are at 460 of 3,000 that needs to be built.

It's going to be a couple of hundred at a time, a couple of hundred at a time and then what happens is we're going to create a natural market for the community where it will just make sense to come to Rupert.

Banks won't even give developers loans to build in Rupert because there's no benchmark for them to place it from because wen haven't built any home since the early 2000's or late nineties. So developers can't even get funding so we need to be creative and work with places like the Credit Union for example to be able to give out loans to these developers  to come and do that"

Mr. Brain then closed the circle on the discussion of housing with a return to Muskeg and what to do with it.

"The other challenge is we have nowhere to put the muskeg, when you dig up that dirt it's massively expensive to get rid of. 

The City, I'll give credit here to Councillor Niesh, his whole thing was we need to find a hole and we need to be able to fill it in a hole with Muskeg, and I think we're on to that now, Mr. Pucci our Director of Operations we found a site, we're doing some assessments, if we can open up a dumping ground for soil that will massively accelerate the opportunity for housing.

So, what we need to try to do as a community, with partners from industry, partners from you know wherever we can find them is to try to start prepping these land.  Start clearing them and getting them ready and serviced and flat. 

Because that's more enticing to build and it's much cheaper to build affordable housing when it's ready to go. 

And I'll give you an example, Crows Nest Lodge which is out on the highway, next time you drive out on Park Avenue Crow's Nest which is beside the Women's shelter take a look at the foundation. 

Take a look at how big the mound is to put that modular housing on there, it's something like a million dollars it cost to dig deep and get that foundation set just to put modular housing on there.

That's how expensive it can be to build housing that was a BC Housing project with partnership with the City, but it's done.

So those are some of the macro issues with housing, I think we've been working with developers who are very keen to come up here and I think we're going to be hitting the mark and we already have these projects underway. 

And I know probably past this term but you'll be hearing some more announcements soon about housing on many fronts"

The Overview of the housing elements of the presentation can be viewed from the City's Video replay of the Sate of the City Presentation.

The review of the Housing themes start at the 36  minute mark

Over the years, many of our past items of note on the housing concerns and what steps have been discussed by City Council in the past have been relayed through our Housing Archive.

Our Full overview of the State of the City Presentation can be reviewed here.

We also have created an archive of the elements from it, that compilation is available here.

( some of the above images come from screenshots of the video presentation)