Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Home sweet (affordable) home

The Whistler Housing Authority was created in October, 1997. That makes it10 years old. Happy Birthday, WHA. Blow out your candles. Eat your cake. Get back to work. A lot has been accomplished on the employee housing front in the past decade.
1440feature
"In terms of our social lives, we can finally have people over. Four was definitely a crowd before, it means we're here to stay," - Mitch Sulkers and Rita Rice.

The Whistler Housing Authority was created in October, 1997. That makes it10 years old. Happy Birthday, WHA. Blow out your candles. Eat your cake. Get back to work.

A lot has been accomplished on the employee housing front in the past decade. Many would say not enough. It’s a fair comment. But it doesn’t begin to acknowledge the incredible uphill struggle and the resolve it’s taken to get this far.

While the WHA has grown into a gawky adolescent, the fact is it came dangerously close to succumbing to sudden infant death syndrome. Its survival was a pivotal point in the, dare I say, sustainability of this community. But when it was taking its first awkward steps, the chances of ever blowing out 10 candles seemed like a crapshoot.

WHA’s brush with death came on March 9, 1998, months after the council of the day, Steve Bayly and a handful of people with a different vision of how the town should tackle its affordable housing problems birthed it as successor to the Whistler Housing Society.

Mayor Hugh O’Reilly called the public hearing to order. The ballroom at the Chateau Whistler was full. People stood at the back of the room. At the table with Hugh were councilors Ken Melamed, Nancy Wilhelm-Morden, Dave Kirk, Stephanie Sloan, Ted Milner and Kristi Wells. While some of them may have suspected this public hearing was likely to be more spirited than most, none of them really appreciated the fury that was about to be unleashed… directly at them.

At issue was a proposed affordable housing development in Alpine Meadows, the 19-Mile Creek project. The land where that lively, thriving neighbourhood now sits was then scrub. Part of the year a large depression held water; the rest of the year the depression was dry and housed old tires, litter, and furtive teenagers doing what teenagers do in vacant lots with plenty of natural cover. There were only two reasons to think twice about developing the site for employee housing.

The first was the eponymous 19-Mile Creek. A torrent of water in 1981 washed out the bridge on Valley Drive, just upstream from the proposed development. There was concern, some legitimate, some not, for the safety of anyone living in the depression, for the potential liability the town might face in the event residents became reluctant surfers, and for whether insurance could be obtained to ameliorate those risks.

The other reason to question the development was the ugly torrent of outrage and righteous NIMBYism that was about to flood the genteel confines of the Chateau ballroom. Residents of Alpine had been organized against the project for months. Petitions had been circulated in the neighbourhood and otherwise reasonable folks had gone door-to-door spreading fear and innuendo about the “kind of people” who would be living there.

It was a time when “transient” became an epithet. Warnings were raised that drug dealers, paedophiles, and other undesirables would be plunked down in a location right next to the high school. There was concern property values would plummet if those kinds of people were given a toehold at the neighbourhood’s entrance.

Still, the vitriol was shocking. Speaker after speaker cast slanderous aspersions against the sort of lowlifes who would be moving into subsidized housing. They questioned council’s sanity. They threatened retribution at election time. They, well, here’s how councillor Wilhelm-Morden remembers it. “It’s not every day you get accused of sleeping with the developer. We were attacked on all levels. The location was wrong. The density was wrong. The people we were going to let in were the wrong kind of people. We didn’t really need affordable housing. We shouldn’t be intervening in the market. We’d all be voted out of office. All these accusations were being made by people I previously had a great deal of respect for. I mean, I live in Alpine. They were my neighbours.”

There was little support in the room and no love at all. The couple of brave souls who spoke in favour of the development were met with restrained catcalls. Notably absent was Whistler’s business community. With the lone exception of John Grills, not a single business voice was raised in support.

Visibly uncomfortable, Hugh O’Reilly nonetheless thanked everyone in attendance and gavelled the meeting to a close. On the way out, the project’s supporters, in groups of twos and threes, questioned whether the evening’s ugliness would break council’s resolve.

It didn’t.

But it could have. Easily. And if it had, we can only speculate whether any of the progress made since then toward reaching the goal of housing 75 per cent of Whistler’s employees within municipal boundaries would have been made.

It got personal. It’s still personal.

* * *

It’s personal to Mitch Sulkers and Rita Rice. Mitch was looking for a place that was “small and out of the way where I could wander around the trails,” when he moved to Whistler in 1975. He’d also developed a skiing habit his last year of high school. Rita moved to Whistler in 1987 because she hated the rain in Vancouver. “If it’s going to precipitate, better it be snow.”

Sitting in the living room of their new Nita Lake townhome, luxuriating in the warmth of sun shining through the window and marvelling at having so much space, their housing stories follow a pattern all too familiar to anyone who doesn’t hit town with either a trust fund or a sizable bag of savings.

Mitch, a teacher at Whistler Secondary, bought property in Brio in 1981 with some friends. Working construction at the time, he planned to build a duplex but bailed when interest rates climbed past 20 per cent. Some of his housing experiences over the years include a stint in the SFU Outdoors Club cabin and a duplex in Alta Vista with see-through walls.

Rita, working her way through almost every job at the Delta, shared a house in Emerald with friends and lived in a “cabin, a squat really, at the end of Alta Lake.”

After they got together and saved a down payment, they bought into 588 square feet of paradise. “We actually coped well as a couple living in a small space,” Mitch remembered. “But we had to be creative and rely on friends to let us store our stuff. We didn’t have any room at all.”

They nearly left town, a story achingly familiar among people who finally manage to get into WHA housing. They considered Pemberton but had no desire to commute.

So what’s it mean to them to finally qualify for non-market housing? “In terms of our social lives, we can finally have people over. Four was definitely a crowd before,” says Mitch. “It means we’re here to stay,” adds Rita.

What’s it mean to Whistler? It means retaining one full-time teacher and another working part-time. It means retaining two more people who are active in community organizations in a town that relies heavily on volunteers.

It also means whoever buys their place when they decide to leave — “Never,” says Mitch — will have the opportunity to buy into still affordable housing.

* * *

That was the lesson of the Whistler Housing Society.

Without delving into too much history, reference should be made to the Whistler Housing Society’s efforts to wrest the affordable housing dragon to the ground. Indeed, by the end of 1997, Whistler’s non-market housing stock stood at 750 units though, to be fair, that number includes all of Whistler-Blackcomb’s staff housing and several projects the society had a hand in but wasn’t the driving force behind.

Two accomplishments of the society should be noted though. Both laid the groundwork for things to come. Both were lessons learned on a field trip to Aspen.

Garry Watson was a director of the all-volunteer society. As he tells the story, “We copied the works & service charge directly from Aspen. They were assessing such a charge on new developments and the funds they raised were ploughed into social housing. Our timing was fortuitous. Village North was just going ahead and would prove to be a main source of funds. The biggest mistake we made was setting the charge at $5,000 instead of the $20,000 Aspen was charging. But there was no political appetite in the mayor’s office or on council for that.”

The Employee Service Charge Bylaw Garry referred to was enacted in 1990. Under its terms, developers of commercial properties were required to either build employee housing or contribute to what would become the Housing Fund. The fund had grown to over $6 million when the WHA was established in 1997.

The other lesson was a resale price cap. Finding not only no support for the idea but fierce resistance, Watson quit. “I went head-to-head with (municipal administrator Peter) Kent and (Mayor Ted) Nebbeling over the price cap. It was clear to me if we didn’t have a resale cap we’d only be creating what I call top hat housing, housing that would end up being owned by business owners, not employees, affordable only to the first one in. But there was no support on council. Their thought was we’d create a submarket restricted to employees and that would be enough.”

Two developments laid waste to that idea: Tapley’s Farm and Lorimer Ridge. In the former, all restrictions were eventually lifted and in the latter, while the restriction to employee occupancy is still in place, whatever mitigating effect it’s had on market price is moot. Homes built there have escalated in value well beyond even today’s stretched definition of affordability.

But in 1996, affordable housing was the issue all candidates had to address when November’s municipal election rolled around. Three things were clear. Demand was growing much more rapidly than supply. Current society efforts weren’t going to deliver what was needed. And, there was going to be a new mayor and a reconstituted council since Mayor Nebbeling was leaving for Victoria and no fewer than three sitting councilors — Max Kirkpatrick, Hugh O’Reilly and Thelma Johnstone — were vying for the empty mayor’s chair.

What wasn’t clear at all was what kind of affordable housing was needed. Many thoughtful people believed the most pressing need was for large, dense, dormitory-style housing, preferably down in Function Junction. Others favoured the low-density, townhome housing being constructed at Millar’s Ridge, though they voiced concerns about the lack of available land and the ever-present, rancorous NIMBY phenomenon.

* * *

There were no outraged neighbours blocking Brian and Abby Finestone’s new home. Even good planning benefits from good luck and as luck would have it, there were — with one lone exception — no neighbours to disturb when Nita Lake was approved and built. Brian, Abby and son Finn qualified for a two-bedroom home earlier this year.

Brian came to Whistler in 1992 after deciding if he was going to spend more time in university skiing than attending class he might as well be in Whistler as opposed to Thunder Bay. Abby arrived in 1997 with an Aussie work visa after being convinced by a friend she should bail on Big White and give Whistler a go. Replaying a familiar story, Whistler turned out to be her second and last stop on a planned world journey.

Since arriving in Whistler, Brian’s worked construction, been a liftie, ski patroller, raft guide, mountain safety manager, has co-authored two guidebooks to skiing Whistler and Blackcomb and just finished guide books for the area’s bike trails and hiking trails. Abby’s worked in food and beverage at Araxi’s, Sachi Sushi and others. Separately or together, they’ve lived in a converted school bus at the old campground, a condo that was rented to two different tenants at the same time, a houseful of people with such toxic relationships they were using avalanche rods to mark which dog deposit belonged to whom and finally, a wonderful one-bedroom and den suite where the owners were like “having your grandparents upstairs.”

They also spent a season in Fernie thinking it might be a viable alternative to Whistler but were disappointed with the experience.

After rising to the top of the waitlist and accumulating enough strikes to go down to the bottom again, they qualified for exactly the space they were looking for at Nita Lake. Sitting in their living room, with a rainbow forming between us and Creekside, Brian mused on what it meant to them to finally have a home of their own. “Even though the place we were living in was nice and affordable, moving here means it’s ours. No one can roll us out of here. It’s security. We’re taxpayers. We’re part of the solution.”

* * *

The newly elected council in 1996 — the same ones who would suffer the slings and arrows of righteous indignation at the 19-Mile Creek hearing — were committed to wrestling the housing monster to the ground. Hell, they’d all promised to lick the problem.

Two initiatives ultimately led them to form the WHA. One was another field trip to Colorado in 1997 to see how resorts with a longer track record were attacking the problem. Notwithstanding the efforts the town of Aspen had made over the years, councillor Wilhelm-Morden’s chief impression was of what was missing. “We were in Aspen two-and-a-half days before I saw a kid! People just didn’t live there. They were closing their schools down because no one lived there.”

The other was commissioning CitySpaces to flesh out some of the problems and some of the options. The resulting report, “Housing Functions and Organizational Approaches” gave them a lot to ponder at their next strategy retreat. Under the previous council, proposal calls went out for people to develop affordable housing as, more or less, a variation of the market model. With $6 million sitting in the housing fund, there were no end of proposals. But the CitySpaces study turned that theory around and recommended the RMOW take the lead in delivering housing. There were finally enough votes on council to embrace that model and the WHA was formed.

With Steve Bayly acting as interim manager, six million bucks and a mandate to build housing, the question was, “Build what?” They decided the biggest bang for the bucks was going to lie in building employee-restricted rental housing. Why rental? It solved an immediate need for a type of housing no developer was going to build. More importantly, done right, the money would go farther and the resulting cash flow would not only service the mortgage debt but provide funding for WHA itself.

Between 1997 and 2002, the fund was used as seed equity and leveraged up to build 144 units, providing 330 beds, a positive cash flow and some small measure of relief.

In the meantime, with Rick Staehli having come on board as general manager and Tim Wake as assistant manager, WHA set about determining what it needed to do. One of the first things they did was replace the lottery draw with a waitlist for potential renters and purchasers. That move gave people some level of comfort that their patience might be rewarded without having to leave everything to chance. They also launched a regular housing needs assessment process to get a more accurate picture of just how much and what kind of housing was required.

And, they developed the first resale price control formula.

E=MC 2

It’s important to note at this point that Whistler was wandering into terra incognita . That the first formula — and the second for that matter — didn’t work very well is not indicative of careless planning or wanton disregard. It seemed like a reasonable, if complicated, formula. The fact that Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin had more resolve to reign in the reckless deficit spending that defined the Progressive Conservative government they replaced surprised everyone. When it became clear that a mechanistic application of the formula would mean no increase in value at all, everybody put their thinking caps back on and came up with a replacement.

Okay, strike two. But anyone who says they “knew” the historically mercurial Vancouver market — to which the new formula was tied — was going to go up like a rocket, resulting in unsustainable price increases and the need for yet a third formula, ought to be buying lottery tickets, not affordable housing.

* * *

Lisa Canjar isn’t too concerned about the resale formula. Her home is not for sale. It’s where she can indulge her cooking jones in a kitchen stuffed to the ceiling with equipment to feed her passion. It’s where her visiting nieces can create crayon art right on the walls… of the storage crawl space. It’s where an outsized mission-style easy chair she just had to have occupies place of pride in her living room.

She moved to Whistler in the fall of 1995 to ski. She needed a break from cutting hair in Vancouver. With a liftie job on the mountain and a winter to look forward to, housing wasn’t really much of a concern.

It was more of one after she’d spent time living in a camper on someone’s property, living in the old campground and in staff housing. “I finally lucked out,” she said. “I lived with a nice family for a couple of years who knew my family and then moved into a suite friends had built at Barnfield.”

But when the chance came to move into a one-bedroom place of her own in Spring Creek five years ago, she didn’t hesitate. “It was very exciting. I’d been on the waitlist for five years, saved up a down payment and now I had an opportunity to buy a place. We all want to have someplace we can call home.”

From liftie to ski patrol, snowmaking to lift maintenance and ultimately to her long-time spot cutting hair again at the Blackcomb Barber Shoppe, all Lisa wanted was a way to stay in Whistler. “I didn’t have a Plan B,” she says.

* * *

Whistler Housing Authority has, by necessity, had to have Plans B through Z. While the trajectory has been upwards, there have been stumbles along the way, retreats along with the successes: fires, floods, lawsuits, covenants breached, communication botched and resistance to policy change. Each is important for the lessons learned, the political reaction — and sometimes over-reaction — and the educational opportunities both seized upon and missed.

But two interesting things happened along the way. The student became both student and teacher. And the community climbed aboard and began to share the vision.

Cleo Prellwitz, managing director of Canmore’s Community Housing Corporation, says she’s learned a lot from looking at the Whistler experience. “Whistler is where we got a lot of information when we began to tackle our affordable housing problem,” she said.

Just up the highway, Dougal Forteath, Banff’s chief administrative officer, also felt very fortunate to have been able to work with WHA in evolving Banff’s best practices to address their affordable housing needs. On a trip to Whistler, Dougal was impressed with one of the tangible benefits he sees arising from our efforts to house such a large percentage of our workforce in town. “When you are committed to having so much of your population stay in town you end up with a resident base that serves the community. Those are your volunteers as well as your workforce. If you don’t establish those goals, organizations like WORCA — their turnout for your weekly races blew me away — can’t exist.”

And Peter Grosshuesch, director of community development at Breckenridge, brought that town’s planning commission and several members of council up to have a look at what Whistler was doing a couple of years ago. “You ought to be pretty proud about what you’ve accomplished up there. Your affordable housing is tucked in with market units in a lot of places. We couldn’t tell which was which in some cases.”

And as WHA enters its second decade of operation, demand still far outstrips supply. The waitlist currently has 705 names on it, representing in excess of 1,000 employees. Turnover in existing projects is virtually non-existent; once people get housing, they stay. Projects are once again being completed, planned and debated.

There are still stumbling blocks. “It will never cease to astound me when I hear people talking about our ‘subsidized’ housing,” exclaims current councilor and former WHA general manager, Tim Wake. “We’re not building social housing or subsidized housing. We’re building non-market housing. It’s an important distinction. Whistler taxpayers aren’t subsidizing the WHA or the housing we help create. The people who purchase are paying the costs.”

* * *

Duane Hepditch and Sara Leach have paid that price. Not once, but twice. With their children Julia and Ben, they’ve recently moved out of a two-bedroom townhome at Spruce Grove and into a spacious, four-bedroom duplex at Nita Lake, underscoring the importance of the effort WHA has put into developing a wide range of housing options for Whistler’s wide range of housing needs.

Duane is the only accidental Whistlerite I know. He and a friend ran out of money in Whistler on their way to Banff. He got a job as a janitor at Myrtle Philip school. The rest of the story is what you hear when you talk to anyone in this town. Couch surfing, monthly rentals, a suite with serious mould problems and finally, having paired up with Sara, who escaped Vancouver to live in the town where she grew up skiing, won the lottery.

Literally! “We were crowded into the basement of the conference centre watching them pull names out of an oil drum for a chance to buy into Spruce Grove,” said Sara. “We won the chance to buy a two-bedroom townhome. We also signed up for the waitlist as soon as it got going because we knew we were going to outgrow that place; we knew we wanted two kids.”

Between them, their resumes read like a compendium of the Whistler lifestyle: teacher, muni employee, graphic designer, writer, professional organizer. And now, with the space they wanted for their growing family, they’ve given up on giving up. “We were probably six months to a year away from leaving,” Duane explained. “But when we got here ,” Sara quickly adds, motioning to her new home, “we knew we could stay.”

* * *

The WHA’s inventory currently stands at 1,408 units amounting to 4,200 employee beds; 1,956 are rental, the rest owned by employees who have bought in and are here to stay. Those numbers are measures of success but it’s the people living in the housing who are the real story. Sticks and stones may make buildings but people make homes. And it’s people who make towns — especially resort towns — work.

Whistler has set its sights on housing 75 per cent of its workforce in town. According to Marla Zucht, WHA’s current general manager, it is… right now. But a significant chunk of that total currently lives in market housing. Some rent; some own. The ones who rent face challenges because rents escalate and suites frequently disappear when houses sell. Those who own are, well, aging in place. When they sell, chances are it won’t be to a local employee.

That leakage of market-housed employees means, “we have a need to keep moving ahead, to keep bringing projects online,” says Gordon McKeever, councillor and chair of the WHA. “Post 2010, it gets easier. We’ll have the athletes’ village, we’ll have the legacy lands, construction costs will hopefully moderate. But we have to keep moving ahead, whittling away at the waitlist.”

So who lives in non-market housing? Well, Gordon for one, as does fellow councillor Ralph Forsyth. And like everyone else interviewed for this story, it means the same thing for Gordon and Libby it means for the others. “It meant we could stop living like gypsies. It means we’re staying here.”

It means I’m here to stay too. My Perfect Partner and I joined the instant neighbourhood at Nita Lake last February. So until global warming turns this place into a non-ski resort, you’re stuck with me. Try not to hold it against the WHA; they’re just doing their job.



Comments