20% of Salt Spring homes are empty half the year, advocates say, as they call for action to ease housing shortage

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The first question businesses or organizations in Salt Spring Island often ask a potential employee is, “Do you have a place to stay?”

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In the largest of the Gulf Islands, having accommodation can outstrip the skills amid a severe housing shortage for the workers needed for its booming economy from tourism, agriculture and the arts, as well as essential services like its hospital and system. of ferries.

“We’ve always been in a housing crisis,” said Jennie Coles, who runs Barb’s Cafe and Bakery. “But now it’s an acute housing crisis. There’s just nothing here to rent, and if there is, you can have 30 people waiting for something that’s just not affordable.”

Salt Spring Island Cheese Company’s Daniel Wood needs about 60 employees to maintain operations through the summer season, but is short-staffed due to housing shortages. Last week, three workers were staying in a guest room in the family home. Others travel from their homes on Vancouver Island, if BC Ferries has not canceled the trips due to lack of available staff.

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“The housing shortage has been absolutely devastating to a lot of businesses and just about everything else here,” says Wood.

Coles and Wood are part of a growing group of Salt Spring Islanders calling themselves Salt Spring Solutions who are outraged that Finance Minister Selina Robinson did not include the island in the latest expansion of areas subject to the speculation tax and BC vacancies.

The tax, introduced in the February 2018 budget, was created to help deal with the shortage of affordable housing in BC by encouraging owners of vacant homes to rent or sell them. The speculation tax rate is two percent of a property’s appraised value for foreign owners and satellite families and 0.5 percent for Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

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Robinson included Duncan, Ladysmith, North Cowichan and Lake Cowichan in this month’s final round, as well as Squamish and Lion’s Bay, but not Salt Spring, despite islanders’ concerns about near-zero vacancy rates. .

Rhonan Heitzmann, a spokesperson for Salt Spring Solutions, said islanders have expressed an urgent need to expand local housing options since the community of 11,635 people was first exempted from the tax in 2018.

“It’s an extreme housing crisis that has caused hard-working residents to leave en masse,” Heitzmann said, adding that along with service workers and merchants, the community is losing essential service personnel needed for everything, from water treatment systems to schools, the ferry service and Lady Minto Hospital, which also serves all of the surrounding Gulf Islands.

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Salt Spring Solutions estimates that 20 percent of homes in Salt Spring sit vacant for more than six months of the year. “That’s a lot of lost revenue that could be helping Salt Spring Island avoid becoming a community of retirees and empty executives,” Heitzmann said. “No community is complete without a diversity of ages and incomes.”

Heitzmann said the hospital is one of many community organizations that feel the housing problem. He said a new emergency wing is now being built, but the workers building it are from off the island and live in tents and portables.

The hospital also has 35 staff vacancies that are proving difficult to fill.

The “collateral effects” of the housing shortage are everywhere, Heitzmann noted.

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“The vibrant arts and agricultural cultures are not being renewed because the artists and farmers on the island have become elders: the younger generations simply cannot afford to live on the island, and working families and their children are leaving. the island due to the scarcity of housing options. and the lack of economic opportunity,” she said.

Coles said she and her husband and business partner, Jason Coles, are also renters and experience “constant anxiety” about losing their home, and possibly their coffee, if they ever have to start looking for a new place.

“You’re looking at $2,500 a month for a two- or three-bedroom apartment. That’s a lot, and you start thinking: ‘Can I get something in Crofton and travel every day?’ Coles said. “I worry about the staff because a lot of people pay 50 percent of their salary just to rent a place.”

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Heitzmann said the province excluding Salt Spring from the speculation tax area “is really a slap in the face” for those who have been working for years to address the housing crisis.

In a statement Thursday, Robinson said the province wants to see how the recent expansion of the speculation tax to areas like the Cowichan Valley fares before considering any other potential expansions.

Robinson noted that the province has financed 78 homes in Salt Spring since launching a 10-year housing plan in 2018.

“But I know that, like many areas of the province, people on Salt Spring Island and the southern Gulf Islands continue to face pressing affordable housing issues.”

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