ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Ep 19 Housing Now

Episode Date: February 10, 2024

Ask Salt Spring Answered talks to Janey Rowland who is the co-ordinator for Housing Now, which is now on Salt Spring and puts people who need housing together with people who have it available.

Music Listening to episode 19 of Ask Salt Spring Answered with me Damian Inwood, I'm talking to Janie Rowland who is the spokesperson for Housing Now, a new initiative on Salt Spring Island, so that we can put people who need housing together with people who have housing. We were in the Ask Salt Spring session, and the guest speaker today was Janie Rowland, who's the coordinator for Housing Now. And Janie, you're based on Pender Island, and I think you said that in the beginning of 2022, you got the go-ahead for a survey of Pender, Maine, Saterna, and Galliano for a home share registry. Is that correct? to do was a little bit of data collection of the community to just see how they were living, affordability, what they were looking for, what they would be interested in seeing in their own home communities as far as affordable housing options. And our first initiative was to start the Home Share Registry based off

of that. And the idea basically is that if somebody has a room or a suite in their home and they'd like some help possibly on their property or whatever, they could rent to somebody who would come in and help them out with various different things. Or just give them a home. combination of registrants that are participating. So some of them are looking for an individual to say maybe help with, you know, gardening, running errands, maybe even cooking meals. And then you've got the other side of it where, yeah, it's just a room in a house with a shared, some shared amenities. Right. Okay. And you started that and I think you said that you've got 26 hosts signed up on the four islands and you've made eight matches so far including a ferry coordinator a ferry worker right yes we're just waiting for confirmation that that all went together but it looks like yes we may have found a place for

someone who works with BC Ferries we We've also housed an apprentice electrician. We've housed a few temporary, like seasonal employees as well for some of the restaurants and that sort of thing. So there's a wide variety of folks that are getting involved. Right. And of course, the exciting part is that now you're moving on to Salt Spring Island, right? That's right. That's right. And you've appointed as a new island coordinator, Ben Corno, who's one of our LCC members, right?

That's right. Yeah. Ben has decided to come on board with us and be our coordinator for Salt Spring. One of the biggest plans of ours as we move forward was having representation from the community. We don't necessarily want to bring this into a community that doesn't have a say in how it's being developed. It's kind of like a bespoke housing registry, if you'd like to call it that. So we can work at making it work for the community we're putting it into.

Right. And I think you said that 19 people have signed up who are looking for homes. Yes, yeah, and we've just started advertising in the last little while for Salt Spring, and we were quite confident that we wouldn't have too much trouble finding those folks looking for places. We will be hosting some community events and being out there to kind of let people know what we're up to. And if they are homeowners or property owners and they want to come out and chat with us, they certainly can. We'd love to meet with them. Okay, and what do you see as the biggest challenge in getting people to sign up as homeowners opening up their homes to people? I think it's probably just the notion that we have all,

it's the single family dwelling concept. We, a lot of other cultures around the world, believe in multi-generational housing. They believe in people living, young people, old people. It's a symbiotic relationship. And I feel that that is probably the biggest thing is just getting people to kind of make that switch and think about how they can best support their community. And if that means they have a room in their house that they're willing to share,

then that's one way that they can support and make sure that their local services are staying, you know, accessible, local services are staying accessible, that stores are staying open, your daycare has staffing, whatever that looks like for each community. Yeah. Now, one thing that was talked about considerably by Gary Holman was about aiming this towards worker housing. Right. Is that a focus or is it much more broad than that?

I feel that the genius thing about the registry is that it gives us many avenues. So there is that perspective of the worker housing. There is also the perspective of being able to age in place for our senior population. So the registry itself can kind of address a couple of different community issues in my mind with proper nurturing and development. So right. And there was, I think you said you can mold it to the community. Yeah. And that's what's really, that's what's really cool about this. Cause each community that I've

been going into there, we're all very similar, but yet we have differences and that's what's really cool about this, because each community that I've been going into, we're all very similar, but yet we have differences. And that's where this is kind of an interesting thing, because we can say, okay, well, Salt Spring really is feeling this way about this particular item. Whereas Maine or Pender might not have that same feeling, but they need a different type of processes put into place. place okay tell me about the funding where where the money is coming from for this well just I am with the southern Gulf Island Community Resource Center which is obviously in the southern Gulf Islands and we received seed funding from the see the southern Gulf Island Community Economic Sustainability Commission. And we also received funding from CRD. And in the last few months, we've received funding from the Southern Gulf Island Tourism Partnership as well. Okay. So a wide variety of supporters for sure.

And do you have like individual donors and things like that too? We have been discussing that. We don't at this point, but that is definitely something that we're looking at going forward dependent on how things kind of... So people could get involved that way. Absolutely. Or if they wanted to volunteer, if they wanted to be, want to, you know, get out there and do some community engagement, that would be okay too. Okay. And so if people want to sign on for, you know, to offer their homes for somebody like that as a home share, how would they go about that? So basically we have a, on our SGICRC website, we have got a landing page for the, for the project itself and for the registry. So you head over to the registry and there's a host link, a guest link, there's links for

businesses. So you just hit whichever one is appropriate and just follow the prompts. And basically we ask you some pretty straightforward, simple questions. And then we do our best to connect people that look like they might be viable candidates for each other. So is that website called Southern Gulf Islands Community Resource Center dot CA? Is that the name of the website? Community Resource. Okay.

Yeah. But you can go to our link tree. It's link tree backslash SGI housing. We're also on Instagram and Facebook. Okay, great. What else was I going to ask you? Oh, yeah. Obviously, this is good for people who also are struggling a little bit

with a fixed income and stuff like that. They can get a mortgage helper or just an income helper, really. Exactly. The cost of being a homeowner is increasing, and if that's something they're open to doing, it can definitely have its benefits. All right. Now, I think there was some discussion, too,

about the sort of exit strategy for people if they found it wasn't working for them. And we talked about the restorative justice system as being a possible place for dispute resolution. How does it actually work if you decide, you know, after a few months that it's not a good fit or whatever? Can you actually, you know, get the person to leave, or do you have to go through a process for that well I think each you would have to look at that on a case-by-case basis it ultimately depends on what the circumstances are if you've just decided that you you know we're not getting along with

someone then obviously you'd have to give them you know that's why we're kind of developing it so that we can we can talk things over before it gets to that bad point, right? The good thing about the registry and the support staff that are available is that we're there to help guide. We're there to help, you know, get people access to resources, that sort of thing, so that they can make the best decisions for them. Right. But yeah, there's definitely lots to consider there for sure. But in reality, if we do our due diligence going forward, we shouldn't hopefully have as many issues on the exit.

Because I know that that's probably one of the biggest holdbacks for people who have property. There's tons of it on Salt Spring that could be rented, and some people have had bad experiences or heard of bad experiences and they're a little bit leery of it. So I guess that's one of your challenges. It is one of the challenges. But again, like I mentioned in the meeting, it's been pretty frequent when I've asked people, you know, they had a bad, you know, landlord tenant situation. And a lot of times people just, they don't bother to make the agreements.

They don't have those conversations in the beginning. So once it's all laid out and you both know where you stand, it's a lot easier to navigate that terrain if you are deciding that, you know, you want to part ways. Okay, and what's the timeline for it sort of actually picking up here on Salt Spring Island, do you think?

Well, as I said, the registry itself is already functioning, so we're already getting people signing up from Salt Spring. We are planning on doing a meet and greet, hopefully here in October, so we'll be opening it up to community members to come down, talk to the support team, and see what we can do. So yeah, we're kind of already happening. It's just get the advertising and the community engagement and now that we have Ben on board, that's going to be great.

Right. Okay, great. Well, thanks for coming in and talking to us. Yes, thank you so much. Okay, this has been Ask Small Spring Answered on Gulf Islands Community Radio, cheer.fm.