The province’s Stronger Foundations Affordable Housing Strategy, which launched in 2021, focuses on improving and expanding affordable housing, while building a sustainable system that provides flexible, fair and inclusive housing options well into the future. It outlines the thoughtful changes needed to provide safe, stable, affordable housing for an additional 25,000 households – an increase of more than 40%.
The need for affordable housing is at an all-time high provincially and, consequently, many not for profits are striving with their limited funds to create partnerships to enhance the availability of affordable housing. Unfortunately, there is no direction or clarity from the provincial government on key affordable housing priorities and initiatives.
Approximately half of the 25,000 units targets are for increases in rent subsidies in a shrinking rental marketplace. Landlords continue to sell off inventory to capitalize on housing values, or higher interest rates or inflation are impacting their bottom line resulting in the investment being sold.
Westwinds Communities has benefitted from the operational funding increase to grow the number of households served monthly from 165 to 265 over the past year. Westwinds has also increased its eligible funding to clients, resulting in increases of up to 58% as clients experience rental rate increases of up to 100% over the past year. Unfortunately, in the Foothills region, the Rental Assistance Benefit program has limitations. Westwinds continues to approve clients for funding who are unable to find rental accommodation in a marketplace that has had a 0% vacancy rate since 2021. We are not the only organization serving communities experiencing these challenges. Now is the time to evaluate if the rental subsidy target is attainable given an increasingly expensive rental market. We do know that the subsidy is proving to be insufficient in assisting low and modest income households as they still are paying on average 50% of their income towards rent even with a subsidy.
The province has completed two capital funding rounds for the Affordable Housing Partnerships Program (AHPP) program, and it’s time to fine tune the program. The province is commended for making strides in linking both the provincial and federal governments’ funding into one application process, which is reducing expenses to grant recipients and saving time. At the same time, there are significant competing priorities and extensive resources being allocated by not for profits, associations and private sector partners as they compete for a limited pool of grants funding.
The province could benefit from creating designated capital grant streams specifically for shelters/transitional housing, supportive housing, and affordable housing to allow providers to better respond to provincial funding priorities. Currently the program is too open-ended – so much so that valuable resources are wasted on non-profits trying to address aging infrastructure, underutilized assets, assets at the end of their lifecycle, product market relevancy, and community demand for generalized affordable housing and specialized housing and support services.
The province knows that not for profits, private sector and provincial housing management bodies are expending significant financial and administrative resources on capital grant development applications. The province could be better positioned to develop a pre-screening in-take process for applications to reduce unqualified applicants and target government priorities for intake (similar to Federation of Canadian Municipality Seed funding). For example, during the last round of AHPP intake, the Premier announced in January 2024 that rural communities and indigenous were priorities for funding. Unfortunately, the announcement was made two months after the intake for applications closed. There is a valuable takeaway for the provincial government and applicants – alignment with government priorities is crucial for success but depends heavily on being informed of the provincial priorities.
Consequently, Westwinds Communities unproductively spent $8,500 and countless administrative hours in developing an application for 38 desperately needed affordable housing units for Okotoks, only to be told that these units were not a government priority in the last grant funding round. We were not alone. The government must communicate how their priorities are identified and how applications will be ranked so that, applicants can better focus resources, save their limited funds, avoid increased red tape, and better utilize provincial resources for processing applications for capital funding.
Westwinds, too, will persevere and continue to advocate for resources for our communities, with time and patience we will see more affordable housing developed.