Affordable housing a significant issue, says city, non-profit, as new development opens in Calgary

CALGARY – Calgary is getting a new affordable housing development in the Beltline, and while the city and a non-profit are excited by the news, they say more still needs to be done.

The HomeSpace Society and Jayman Bult unveiled a finished $9-million 51-unit affordable housing complex on Friday.

HomeSpace’s Bernadette Majdell says the pandemic magnified the importance of having somewhere to call your own.

“Housing is really the platform that people need to improve their lives. And when you’re not safely and securely housed you’re not able to do that,” she said.

She says Calgary is still lagging behind when it comes to affordable housing, something the manager of affordable housing for the City of Calgary can attest to.

Bruce Irvine says we’re in urgent need of more low-income housing.

“Calgary currently has about 12,000 non-market housing units — those are provided by over 60 providers — including the City of Calgary, but primarily from the non-profit sector,” said Irvine.

“Our challenge is that, that 12,000 represents about 3.6 per cent of the housing stock in Calgary. Most Canadian cities of our size are closer to six per cent, so we are well behind what it would be to be an average city in terms of affordable housing.”

“What that translates to is about 15,000 units needed over the next 10 years,” added Majdell.

In addition, every year the need grows by between 2,000 and 2,500 households, which Irvine says the non-profit sector has the capacity to build.

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“Right now we have 22 shovel-ready projects by our non-market sector ready to go, but what we need is investment from federal and provincial governments to reach that. We’ve only been building about 300 a year since 2016, we need to be tripling that.”

This is part of why Irvine says last summer, more than 40 affordable housing sector organizations developed the Community Advocacy Plan. He says they sought federal and provincial support to address key gaps in Calgary’s housing system in the wake of the pandemic.

“Which could help build 5,400 units in just three years — that would house over 12,000 Calgarians,” he said.

“That’s something we’d really like help with. We’d like to see sustained, and consistent investment from our government partners.”

Irvine says we need to get building, especially being a city with half the affordable housing supply of cities our size per capita.

“By 2025, we estimate there will be over 100,000 Calgary households as forecast to be in housing need,” he said.

-with files from Lisa Grant