New group on affordable housing to pick up where others left off
The Bowen Island Affordable Housing Facebook page hosts daily, and often lively conversations. Members of the group do their own research, post insights and articles showing parallels in other communities. Several members of the group are now preparing to launch a group to bring these voices together in person to facilitate concrete action. Once it gets going, this committee will be building on years, and thousands of dollars worth of work done by similar groups that came before it.
“We’ve been through this before,” says Richard Best, a former member of the now defunct Bowen Island Community Housing Association (BICHA). “In 2006, a lot of people were in very dire situations. There were people living out in the bush. There was no where for seniors to go.”
Best says he started working with the BICHA because he believed housing was the fundamental issue affecting the health of Bowen’s community.
The group held a symposium on housing that was attended by Senator Larry Campbell, they presented to council, and they fundraised. The community donated $40 thousand to BICHA and much of that was put towards two studies: the Affordable Housing Needs Assessment and the Affordable Housing Strategy.
After the publication of these reports, council created the Affordable Housing Working Group. This took some of the membership of the previous group, and set out to come up with a plan to tackle the issue focusing on the use of community lands.
Tim Wake was on both committees. Prior to purchasing a home on Bowen in 2006 he worked with the Whistler Housing Authority.
“The aim of the Affordable Housing Working Group was to replicate the work of the Whistler Housing Authority, which in 12 years created more than 1200 units of affordable housing,” says Wake. “The Bowen working group managed to come up with a game plan to make it happen, and council voted in favour of it so quickly my jaw dropped. I’d say this was our biggest success. Then, we worked with successive councils to get it off the ground and we were just not embraced. In 2012, we gave up and the group folded.”
Wake has forged on independently, establishing Foxglove Community Housing Trust, a non-profit whose aim is to create affordable housing for working individuals and families in Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
On Bowen, he has proposed a comprehensive plan to create multi-family dwellings on Lot 3 of Bowen Island’s community lands (on Miller Road beside the RCMP station) and has also come up with a plan to build such housing on land that is currently owned by Metro Vancouver. He has received extensive support from the public, but no official support from council.
He says he is supportive and excited about the proposal by Robyn Fenton to create a new group bringing together the people who have voiced concern about the issue of affordable housing in recent months.
“Obviously I’ve been a supporter of the work done by those previous committees, but we’ve learned a lot since then,” says Wake.
Fenton has lived on Bowen for two years as a renter, and says on a month to month lease, she could be forced into a challenging housing situation herself at any moment. She’s also an architect who has done work for BC Housing.
“I’ve read a lot of the back information, and there is definitely a lot of good information there,” says Fenton. “I know that many of the people who worked on those committees are probably burnt out, but I am not and I am a big believer in getting people in the same room together to get things done.”
She adds that she is planning a kick-off event for the group towards the end of September that will aim to explore what diverse housing on Bowen would actually look like.
“When I think about diverse housing, I’m not just thinking about affordability, but also secure rentals, and more homes that are market value,” she says. “I’m not committed to a name or structure for this group but, I see it as being grassroots. When I first moved to Bowen, someone came to my door with a petition to sign against building an LNG terminal in Howe Sound. Maybe that’s the kind of action we need. All I know is that this is the start of something.”
