Housing and affordability considered to be Whistler’s biggest problems
Housing and affordability are the major stumbling blocks in Whistler’s search for social sustainability, say two municipal managers.
Whistler Housing Authority general manger Rick Staehli told Pique Newsmagazine that the average Whistler resident spends one-half of his or her gross income on housing, while the national average is one-third.
"The million-dollar question is ‘How much of a person’s income can go to shelter?’" he said rhetorically.
According to Staehli, the municipality’s self-imposed cap of 54,000 bed units is to blame.
"It’s driving prices through the roof," he said in an interview earlier this week.
Other affordability issues – ranging from the price of gas to groceries – also have an effect on the resort’s social sustainability and quality of life for its year-round residents.
"There’s no doubt that there are a number of issues related to Whistler being a resort community," said Resort Municipality of Whistler community services manager Bob Kusch. "It’s very clear that our main industry is tourism and we rely heavily upon it.
"The high cost of living here is directly related to the tourism industry."
According to the National Post , the most expensive houses on the real-estate market in Canada are located here in this mountain valley.
The country’s top residential sale last year was a $7.9-million Whistler property, which was purchased by an out-of-town buyer.
Some empty lots are priced at $2-million, and the average house built on those lots is expected to sell for $5-million to $6-million.
In recent months Whistler’s problems have also grabbed the attention of Maclean’s magazine and the Globe and Mail .
Earlier this year Maclean’s columnist Allan Fotheringham, one of Canada’s pre-eminent cultural commentators, wrote that "the bloom is off the rose" at Whistler.
"A town that has 9,600 permanent residents and tries to milk 45,000 (tourists) over the holidays has stretched itself too thin."
But Fotheringham says "the real sadness of Whistler is the Yellow Pages." Whistler’s phone book – which includes Squamish and Pemberton – only contains 79 pages of residential listings, compared to 478 pages of business listings.
In the Yellow Pages are 35 real-estate companies, consultants and appraisers; more than 20 bars, nightclubs, lounges and pubs; six security guard and patrol services; and, as Fotheringham notes, 10 towing companies.
Globe and Mail
columnist John MacLachlan Gray wrote early in the new year that Whistler is "an extended shopping mall designed in what I would term Disney Alp" and is as exclusive as a "gated community."Members of Whistler municipal council are also perplexed by Whistler’s social sustainability issue.
"One thing we need to do is work with the planning department on the sustainability of the resort," said Councillor Kristi Wells, who is also chair of the housing authority.
But Councillor Ted Milner said council hasn’t come to grips with how big the resort should be in terms of numbers of employees.
Meanwhile, housing and affordability problems have driven some service-industry workers to live elsewhere in the Sea-to-Sky corridor and commute between 70 to 90 kilometres per day.
"There is a high percentage of people commuting," said Staehli. "Whistler does have a spill-over effect on Pemberton and Squamish."
But, according to Whistler’s head housing honcho, there is a solution to Whistler’s woes: more employer-subsidized housing that would make living here somewhat affordable for the average Joe or Jane.
"We do believe a large number of core employees should be living here," he said, adding that people, not the Gap or Starbucks, are what make Whistler a special place.
Kusch is trying to help solve the resort’s problems as well. He oversees a community group –the Whistler Healthy Community Committee – that was formed to address social sustainability issues.
"It’s a variety of people from a variety of backgrounds who get together to talk about various social, community and health issues," he said.
WHCC just completed a workshop which produced a consultant’s report that will, according to Kusch, try to address those issues.
The report, written by the Vancouver-based M.G. Bach Management Group, is making the rounds through Whistler’s municipal hall and will be released to the public in the next couple of months.
The RMOW is also adopting the Natural Step – a scientifically based planning framework – to address its growth and sustainability issues. The Natural Step approach, however, is geared more towards environmental and economic sustainability than social issues.
Whistler, of course, is not alone – other resort towns are also wrestling with the same housing and affordability problems. In the Canadian Rockies, Banff is facing huge challenges in providing basic and essential services – such as banks, gas stations and grocery and retail stores – for residents because they are being crowded out by tourist-oriented souvenir shops and expensive boutiques.
Nearby Canmore is facing shortages of affordable housing as that mountain community develops into an upscale tourist haven.
South of the border, resort towns such as Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Ketchum, Idaho, are scrambling to address a shortage of low- and middle-income housing for residents and service-industry workers.
Whistler and many other resort communities are one-industry towns and their raison d’etre – tourism – could very well be their downfall, according to an American academic.
"Tourism offers great promise," says University of Nevada-Las Vegas professor Hal Rothman, author of Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the 20 th Century American West .
But, according to Rothman, there is a downside.
"Tourism divides communities… into winners and losers," he says. "The beneficiaries constitute a small segment: the growth coalition, the landowners, developers, planners, builders, real estate sales and management interests, bankers and brokers.
"The capital that puts stars in their eyes comes from elsewhere and changes local relationships and the values that underpin them."
As tourism-based communities grow, corporate dollars and corporate control move in and provide capital not locally available to build high-speed chairlifts, golf courses, five-star hotels and resort complexes.
According to the UNLV history professor, tourism is neither good nor bad, "yet it is not a panacea.
"Tourism brings unanticipated and often irreversible consequences: unexpected and unintended social, cultural, economic, environmental and political change that communities, their leaders and their residents typically are unprepared to face," says Rothman.
