A report on strategies that might help deal with the need for housing for workers suggests that establishing a housing corporation in the Cowichan region might go a long way to manage issues around the lack of housing in the area.
Jada Basi, from CitySpaces Consulting, told the City of Duncan’s council at its meeting on Sept. 9 that, if local governments and other stakeholders agree, a feasibility study on setting up a housing corporation could be conducted in the short term so that a possible referendum on establishing one in the region could be held in 2026.
Basi said exploring the opportunity to evolve and empower the existing Cowichan Housing Association is the core focus of this strategy, one of a number that she proposed at the meeting.
Established in 2018, the Cowichan Housing Association’s current mandate is mainly to increase affordable housing options and to reduce homelessness throughout the Cowichan region, but Basi said that transforming the CHA into a housing corporation would allow the organization to take a lead role in the development of housing on behalf of the region in partnership with other sectors.
“We’ve engaged quite a bit with the CHA on this and got some really helpful feedback for these early days,” she told council.
While presenting a draft report, called Cowichan Workforce Housing Strategies, last year to the board at the Cowichan Valley Regional District, Basi suggested establishing a local housing authority could be considered, but the updated report is now calling for consideration of a housing corporation.
A housing authority is an independent, government-owned agency that provides a range of housing services, funding, and programs to help people in the greatest housing need.
Housing authorities are established to play a lead role in the development of housing policies on behalf of local governments, while a housing corporation follows a similar model to a housing authority but operates at an “arm’s length” from local government.
At the time, many local developers expressed opposition to setting up any type of organization that would have some control over the development of real estate in the Cowichan Valley, and said it should be left to private enterprise to meet the local housing demand.
Basi said setting up a housing corporation could potentially have a major influence in terms of addressing housing issues in the region.
“Something that has came up time and time again in our public engagement process is that whenever a solution [to the lack of housing] surfaced, there is a limited capacity to implement them,” she said.
“So by establishing a housing corporation, or at least exploring this, would be a means to address that capacity.”
Basi said the limitations are multi-faceted and cross many sectors, including at the level of local governments where it can take a long time to process building applications, and the increased complexity of responding to calls from the federal level to increase housing inventories and to find opportunistic partnerships in the community to do so can be daunting challenges.
She said there is also limited capacity among the builders and developers in the private sector.
“We’re seeing a pattern in that, while we’re seeing housing units being developed, we’re still falling short of the number of units we need every year, and that is creating accumulative pressure in the supply, particularly the rental supply,” Basi said.
“There’s also limited capacity in the non-profit sector and we’re seeing an increasing need for them to deal with social issues as well as affordable housing, so they’re getting squeezed as well. So the intent is to establish a housing corporation to address these core challenges. The strategy is to explore the opportunities to scale up and increase capacity by looking at setting up a corporation here.”
