When he opened Fish & Sips with his wife in 2015, Paul Feather found hiring to be one of the many challenges of running a restaurant with long hours on the main street of Collingwood, Ontario.
But after the COVID-19 pandemic hit and house prices in vacation hotspots soared, the 49-year-old who throws cod and squid saw staffing as his biggest hurdle, largely due to part to the scarcity of affordable places for workers. rent.
“It’s affordability, but also availability. There’s not enough rental stock for people to choose from,” Feather said from the dining room of the restaurant, which is now undergoing expansion.
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Her last rented kitchen couldn’t find a place in the city and she commutes by car, another hurdle when gas prices are through the roof and regional public transportation is delayed.
Feather is increasingly relying on high school and college students for front-of-house _ “they’re already living at home” _ but those under 18 are prohibited from serving alcohol and limited to hosting, takeout or work at the cash register.
“It’s so incredibly difficult,” he said.
Businesses in tourist hotspots far from big cities are feeling the need for affordable housing as smaller communities struggle to attract workers amid a labor shortage and rising rents.
Rentals.ca, a Canadian website for apartment rental searches, said the average rent for all Canadian properties listed on its site increased 10.5 percent year over year to $1,888 per month in May. The national median home price topped $700,000 last month, up 41 percent from two years earlier, as the size of mortgages soared from Vancouver Island to Atlantic Canada, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. Estate.
The rural countryside of Ontario was no exception. In South Georgian Bay, which includes Collingwood, the median price of a single-family home increased nearly 28% in 2021 from a year earlier to $881,000, according to a report by Royal LePage. Prices rose 49 percent in Ontario’s Muskoka region, 29 percent in Quebec’s Laurentians and 26 percent in eastern townships.
The trend, which affects rental costs, shows no signs of abating. Re/Max Canada expects average home prices in Canada’s “recreational” regions to soar 20 percent over the rest of the year, the brokerage said last month.
Meanwhile, the falling unemployment rate is exacerbating labor woes for small-town retailers and tour operators, falling to 5.1 percent in May and marking three straight months in which the key metric hit a new high. historic low.
“The problem has been so bad this year that many of the employers have gone back to buying RVs to house their staff,” said Colleen Kennedy, executive director of the Gros Morne Cooperative Association, which works with Newfoundland’s Gros Morne National Park. Others go out of their way to build or buy units for themselves.
Bilingual employees _ key to a federally run park _ and specialty chefs are particularly hard to find as property prices and rents exceed the youth medians, Kennedy said.
“It’s not a small problem, it’s a big problem. Because how do you grow the industry without access to the human resources you need? In general, we are finding it really difficult this season. And it’s not going to get any better; we expect tourism to grow.”
Short-term rentals like Airbnb’s complicate things, further reduce availability but also increase tourism numbers.
“When people buy these properties where they would have had long-term tenants, they are putting them on the Airbnb market because they can earn in a couple of weekends a month what they would with a full-time renter there. ” said Ellen Timms, spokeswoman for the Wasaga Beach Chamber of Commerce.
“The staffing shortage is very real,” he said, which also means workers are “going crazy.”
Later in Collingwood, where short-term rentals are illegal, roughly 300 such properties were found on platforms including Airbnb, Flipkey and VRBO, according to a recent report from the city’s licensing and enforcement officer.
Things aren’t much brighter out west.
In the counterculture enclave of Nelson, BC, the mountain town faced a rental vacancy rate of 0.6 percent in October, according to the Housing and Mortgage Corporation of Canada. On Vancouver Island, surfer’s paradise Tofino saw a 51% increase in median home sales price to $1.72 million in the first three months of 2022 compared to a year earlier, according to a report from Re/Max on “cottage and cottage” trends.
A decade ago, a prolonged housing shortage in the ski and hiking retreat of Banff, Alta., led Nancy Myles to establish Banff Accommodations, a for-profit company that rents common spaces for three to six month periods to workers parachuting for a gap year job.
Large employers like Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, the Sunshine Village Ski Resort and the Banff Center offer some accommodations for staff, “but they don’t have enough,” Myles said.
“Anyone who lives in Banff is working in the tourism industry, which isn’t really historically high-income — people aren’t bankers, they usually have minimum-wage jobs,” he said. Hence the need for housing that caters to “transient” residents.
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Nearby Collingwood, the pandemic and inflation accelerated labor and housing affordability issues associated with outside real estate investors. But it also exposed a lack of child care services, insufficient public transportation and local planning that failed to encourage rental units “in favor of outdated single-family development,” said Andrew Siegwart, president of the Blue Mountain Village Association, a community organization. marketing for the ski resort of the same name and local businesses.
Siegwart calls for municipal planning that offers a more diverse housing stock and provincial policies that support smaller tourist spots, noting inclusive zoning _ a regulatory tool that allows municipalities to require that a certain portion of new construction be affordable to low-income residents _ does not apply to low-density areas.
“Affordable housing and related infrastructure has been our biggest file for five years,” he said.
It doesn’t look like it’s going to fade any time soon.
© 2022 The Canadian Press