Just what does “affordable housing” mean, and who would be eligible for it is one of the issues a new Gabriola housing task force is wrestling with.

About a dozen Gabriolans gathered in the lounge at People for a Healthy Community (PHC) Dec. 10 to continue a discussion about providing for a wide range of housing needs on the island.

The task force grew out of a response to an Affordable Housing Needs Assessment commissioned by the Local Trust Committee of the Islands Trust. The researchers interviewed 15 island residents about their thoughts about affordable housing, and held a community meeting to discuss the suggestions raised by those residents. Attendees widely endorsed the need for a community group to investigate the issue of housing on the island.

Gabriolan Nancy Hetherington Pierce compiled a “backgrounder” for the Dec. 10 meeting in which she noted that the task force wants to develop a housing society on the island, either through an existing non-profit such as PHC, or by establishing a separate society.

Hetherington Pierce said that the task force had agreed to focus its work on four broad categories: seniors, special needs, bylaw reform, and affordable housing. She said that working groups had been established for each category to review how the recommendations from the LTC sponsored report could be addressed.

Hetherington Pierce also thought the group should focus on preparing a presentation on housing needs for an upcoming Official Community Plan (OCP) review. Islands Trust Planner and task force member Patricia Maloney said that there would be plenty of opportunity to make submissions to the review, and passed on a note from task force member Linnet Kartar, who was one of the authors of the housing report, that the housing report had a number of suggestions that did not require any changes to the OCP.

Maloney said the OCP does not define “affordability”. She noted, however, that accommodations that cost up to 30 per cent of income are commonly thought to be affordable. She supposed that housing costs at 30 per cent of a minimum wage, would provide a possible definition.

Maloney noted that there are grants available to go towards funding affordable housing projects. She also noted that once the housing is built, a housing society can regulate rent prices to make sure they don’t escalate.

Task force member Michael Mehta said that such housing runs on a continuum from housing for those making minimum wage, to housing for the homeless. He thought that the group should focus on helping people with low incomes become home-owners, rather than providing low rental housing units. He noted that in such a case money would need to be found not only to build the housing but to provide loans to people to buy the homes.

Participants discussed the feasibility of a number of approaches towards creating affordable housing, and agreed that strata housing – where homes are owned by residents, but the land is held in common or by a foundation - was the most feasible. Other suggestions for making housing more affordable, included combining services such as septic and water to reduce prices, and special land-use districts that would allow for secondary suites. Maloney acknowledged that this would increase density but also would also create units that could be more affordable.

Mehta thought that increasing the density of the island would be a “hot potato”, and asked what the best strategies would be regarding this issue. Maloney said that the Trust mandate of preserve and protect means that “we can’t just open up density completely”, and noted that some of the reasons for that had to do with the environmental impacts of septic systems on groundwater.

She thought houses with larger septic systems than what were actually needed by the residents could be rented as secondary suites.

Asked if the rules about density could change if ways to eliminate environmental impacts could be found, Maloney said: “Potentially it could environmentally increase the ability to have more units”.

Molloy said that PHC has put in a big grant proposal to do a study “to find out who is at risk of homelessness, and who is homeless so we can get an idea of numbers and what the need is and then to hopefully set up a crisis line and a crisis fund so that people can access that for damage deposits or utilities hook-ups, or if their utilities are going to be cut off because they can’t afford it, or to help in those sorts of ways”.

Members set their next meeting for Jan. 21 at 4:30, and were encouraged to bring work-ups of the ideas they had for affordable housing.