Salute to grads This is an exciting time of year for Bowen Island students. See our annual celebration of graduates Cape Roger Curtis Property’s owners officially launch sale of the first 10-acre lots on coveted island land FRIDAY JUNE 18 2010 VOL. 38, NO. 20 Watch for more online at: WWW.BOWENISLANDUNDERCURRENT.COM 75 ¢ including GST MARTHA PERKINS EDITOR S tudents who rely on the school bus will soon have to find alternative transpor- tation one day a week. The West Vancouver School Board has decided to cancel bus service on Bowen Islands every Friday starting this September. It’s a cost-cutting measure in response to a “significant” reduc- tion in transportation funding from the province. “I know that the elimination of bus service one day each week will present a challenge for some, but I am hopeful that parents and guardians will work together to make this option work for all families and children,” superin- tendent Geoff Jopson said in a letter that was distributed to fam- ilies on Monday. The decision will affect students at Bowen Island Community School as well as high school who take the bus to the ferry. However, bus service for high school students on the mainland will remain as is. Valek fine homes On time. Guaranteed. tel: 604-947-2366 buildit@valeknehomes.com On budget. Sal u This i s Bowen annua Statistics can’t fully reflect toll on community The quest for affordable housing, part 1 MARTHA PERKINS EDITOR H ere’s the story about affordable housing on Bowen Island in dry, sta- tistical terms: The average cost of a home on Bowen is $725,000. If you were able to provide a 20 per cent down payment, you’d still need a combined family income of $125,000 to be able to afford the mortgage. That leaves out two-thirds of families who live on Bowen. In the last census, the median family income on Bowen was $73,000. Based on the assump- tion that affordable housing consumes 30 per cent of your income, most islanders would only be able to afford a house worth up to $360,000. Such a house on Bowen would be an almost mythical apparition. So if you don’t own, you rent. That’s not easy either because there aren’t many rental units available. Accommodation that’s listed for rent in the Undercurrent is often snatched up in hours. In a market that favours the owner, those rents can be high. The most recent average was $1,085 a monthº even though the median household income for people who rent is $41,000. School board puts brakes on Friday bussing FOREVER FRIENDS – At Aaron’s Run on Sunday morning, Sharon Sluggett was buoyed by the love and affection of many of her late son’s friends. In the back row are Iishan Cruz, James Strang, John Hooper, James Winkler, Devan Plowright (partially obscured), Matt Hogg, Matt Gray and Jeremy Warechen. In the front row are Sarah Boyer, Blake Boyer, Sharon Sluggett and Chelsea Denholm. For story about the first memorial run, held almost a year to the date of Aaron Sluggett’s passing, see page 4. Lorraine Ashdown photo continued, PAGE 8 continued, PAGE 14
Transcript
Salute to gradsThis is an exciting time of year for Bowen Island students. See our annual celebration of graduates
Cape Roger CurtisProperty’s owners officially launch sale of the first 10-acre lots on coveted island land
FRIDAY JUNE 18 2010 V O L . 3 8 , N O . 2 0
Watch for more online at: WWW.BOWENISLANDUNDERCURRENT.COM
75¢including GST
MARTHA PERKINS
E D I T O R
Students who rely on the school bus will soon have to find alternative transpor-
tation one day a week.The West Vancouver School
Board has decided to cancel bus service on Bowen Islands every Friday starting this September. It’s a cost-cutting measure in response to a “significant” reduc-tion in transportation funding from the province.
“I know that the elimination of bus service one day each week will present a challenge for some, but I am hopeful that parents and guardians will work together to make this option work for all families and children,” superin-tendent Geoff Jopson said in a letter that was distributed to fam-ilies on Monday.
The decision will affect students at Bowen Island Community School as well as high school who take the bus to the ferry. However, bus service for high school students on the mainland will remain as is.
Statistics can’t fully reflect toll on communityThe quest for affordable housing, part 1
MARTHA PERKINS
E D I T O R
Here’s the story about affordable housing on Bowen Island in dry, sta-
tistical terms:The average cost of a home
on Bowen is $725,000. If you were able to provide a 20 per
cent down payment, you’d still need a combined family income of $125,000 to be able to afford the mortgage. That leaves out two-thirds of families who live on Bowen.
In the last census, the median family income on Bowen was $73,000. Based on the assump-tion that affordable housing
consumes 30 per cent of your income, most islanders would only be able to afford a house worth up to $360,000. Such a house on Bowen would be an almost mythical apparition.
So if you don’t own, you rent. That’s not easy either because there aren’t many rental units available. Accommodation that’s
listed for rent in the Undercurrentis often snatched up in hours. In a market that favours the owner, those rents can be high. The most recent average was $1,085 a monthº even though the median household income for people who rent is $41,000.
School board puts brakes on Friday bussing
FOREVER FRIENDS – At Aaron’s Run on Sunday morning, Sharon Sluggett was buoyed by the love and affection of many of her late son’s friends. In the back row are Iishan Cruz, James Strang, John Hooper, James Winkler, Devan Plowright (partially obscured), Matt Hogg, Matt Gray and Jeremy Warechen. In the front row are Sarah Boyer, Blake Boyer, Sharon Sluggett and Chelsea Denholm. For story about the first memorial run, held almost a year to the date of Aaron Sluggett’s passing, see page 4. Lorraine Ashdown photo
continued, PAGE 8 continued, PAGE 14
1 4 ❚ F R I D A Y J U N E 1 8 2 0 1 0 W W W. B O W E N I S L A N D U N D E R C U R R E N T. C O M
If those renters wanted to buy their home, the home could be valued at $192,000 at the most. That house is no longer mythical, it’s not even in anyone’s wildest dreams.
The problem is that affordable housing is not about sta-tistics. It’s about people - young families who have had to leave Bowen Island because, try as they might, they can’t afford to buy into the local housing market; seniors who, no longer able to walk the steep stairs up to their hill-side home, have had to leave their long-established social network to move to a condo on the north shore because there are so few alternatives on Bowen; and the small but significant number of people who are willing to live in substandard conditions because such standards can continue to exist on an island where there are too many people looking for too few rental accommodations.
There’s probably not a person on Bowen who can’t put a name or a face to the statistics.
“Everyone can acknowledge that affordable hous-ing is the number one issue on Bowen Island,” says Robin Burger, the chair of the Bowen Island Housing Association. “It’s one thing to be aware that we need affordable housing, but what are you going to do to make it happen?”
The housing association formed in 2005 in response to that question. “Rather than just talk about it,” Burger says, “we wanted to make sure that some of those needs would be met.”
The association has commissioned studies, hosted sym-posiums and written endless letters to try to focus atten-tion on the problem. And while its members have not given up hope that something will be done to ensure that Bowen Island does not become an enclave of the well-to-do, they feel frustrated by the number of roadblocks that are put in the way of actually creating the housing.
“We have a bylaw-creating mentality, not an allowing mentality,” says Richard Best, who also sits on the asso-ciation board. Rules are made to control what type of development can exist rather than provide the framework on which affordable housing can be built.
They use the example of the association’s effort to get the municipality to allow secondary suites. It took five years of sitting through meetings and arguing the case to get the bylaws that made it legal to create an independent living space within an existing house.
But the passing of the bylaw didn’t create a surge in the creation of secondary suites. Instead, it just made the existing ones legal.
“Only 20 per cent of the population cares to have someone else living in their home,” says Best. “Probably Bowen had already reached the 20 per cent.”
Other people don’t want the expense or bother of fol-lowing all the rules to create new ones. The money they’d get in rent doesn’t cover the costs.
Likewise, it’s difficult to build housing units on top of commercial units because of the requirements for park-ing. Land it too expensive to use as parking and under-ground parking is not feasible on an island of rock.
Roger McGillivray is a contractor who is on the asso-ciation’s board. When he and his wife Stephanie Legg moved to Bowen 30 years ago, they rented a cottage for $700 a month. However, since the owners could rent the same cottage for $2,500 a month in the summer, the McGillivrays had to find someplace new to live every July and August. They negotiated with the owner to pay $1,100 a month throughout the year so the owner no lon-ger had to rent to someone else in the summer. As part of the bargain, the McGillivrays agreed to live in the base-ment of his parents’ home for two weeks every summer when the owners arrived. The McGillivrays also bought a woodstove for the cottage because “when the wind blew outside, the curtains moved inside the house.”
But now, the number of cottages available for rent has decreased because more are full-time homes.
Robin Burger knows first hand how hard it is to remain a Bowen Islander. She has had to move three times in the past year and a half. “The first move was because my place was sold and the new owners moved in. The only place I could find was very small and I had to pay to store half my furniture. When a larger place became available I moved again. Lastly, I moved to my present rental because it was where I started a year and a half ago. It’s rent is similar and it has been totally renovated. It feels like being back home.”
Every time she moves it costs about $1,000.Some renters are living in substandard conditions sim-
ply because they have no choice. There aren’t better plac-es to move to. “If you get something that’s semi-secure,” Burger says, “you make compromises.”
She adds that Bowen’s homeless population is also likely equal to that on the lower mainland on a per capita basis. “Here they’re in the woods or on someone’s couch or on a boat that sinks in bad weather,” she says.
Some of the resistance to affordable housing, the asso-ciation believes, is a fear that it if you build it, people will indeed come and the island’s population will increase. Or
people confuse affordable housing with subsidized hous-ing. Or they think that affordable housing means 100-unit buildings more appropriate for an urban area.
“There’s a stigmitization of what we’re trying to do,” says Stephanie Legg. “We’re not just helping the couch surfers; it’s couples earning $80,000 a year.”
Burger says, “We want people to raise their eyes above their own level and see what else is out there.... It seems to me that we have to be more informed. If you take a narrow point of view you don’t see the whole picture.”
McGillivray says that as a community, “We have to bite the bullet and do what it takes [to get affordable hous-ing.] There’s a very vocal group that comes out and cre-ates obstacles. You have to get these quiet people to come out... You see so often that a good project goes in front of council and the goodness gets diluted down to make it palatable to everyone.”
The McGillivrays are trying to develop a 10-acre lot they own into Belterra, a co-housing community that would provide affordable housing They envision five buildings with several units in each, for a total of 36.
But why the need for density? Why can’t new homes built on their own lots be affordable?
“It’s the land that costs a lot of money, not the hous-ing,” says McGillivray. “You couldn’t build an ‘inexpen-sive’ house today for less than $600,000.”
And if the main cost is the land, it’s more profitable to build an $800,000 house on that piece of land rather than a $600,000 one.
Now the proposed bylaws about density transfers will force the price of construction even higher, they say. Projects that need density will have to buy it from other landowners, and that cost will drive up the cost of con-struction and cost per unit, driving away people who still can’t afford to buy into the dream of owning on Bowen.
But why shouldn’t we simply let the market decide who can and can’t afford to live on Bowen?
“Say hypothetically there is a limited number of people that Bowen Island can support. It doesn’t have to be a mono-culture,” Burger says.
Who will work in stores or provide ser-vices on the island if they can’t afford to live here? Who will volun-teer for all the orga-nizations that rely so heavily on volunteers? How many young peo-ple will have to move away, never being able to afford to return?
If only the wealthy can afford to live here, the entire island is diminished, Best says. “Our prosperity has made us poor.”
BOWEN ISLAND MUNIC IPAL ITY
NOTICE TO PROPERTY OWNERS2010 Tax Notices were mailed on May 28th, 2010. Payment is DUE on or before July 2, 2010 at 4:30 pm.
A 10% Late Payment Penalty will be applied to unpaid current taxes, including unclaimed Home Owner Grant amounts after the DUE DATE on JULY 2, 2010 - 4:30 PM
Payment Options:
Pay in Person - Monday to Friday 8:30 am – 4:30 pm (except holidays) at 981 Artisan LaneAfter Hours Drop Off - Please use the mail slot at the Municipal Offi ce, 981 Artisan LaneMailing Your Payment - Cheques post-dated to the DUE DATE are welcome. Please mail to
981 Artisan Lane, Bowen Island, B.C. V0N 1G0. Cheques should be made payable to Bowen Island Municipality.
Please MAIL IN TIME to be received in the offi ce on or before the DUE DATE. Postmarks cannot be accepted as the date of payment.
Payment via Telephone or Internet Banking Service – is available for most major Canadian banking institutions.
Please remember to include your completed Home Owner Grant application with your payment on or before the DUE DATE to avoid a penalty on the Home Owner Grant portion of current taxes if you are eligible.
DUE DATE JULY 2, 2010 - 4:30 PM
Please visit www.bimbc.ca for more information.
GARBAGE DECAL SALESNew Decals valid July 1st, 2010 - June 30th, 2011
Decals are available for purchase at the following locations:
Outside the General Store from 10am – 2pmJune 19 & 20, June 26 & 27 and July 3 & 4
Bowen Island Municipal Hall — 981 Artisan Lane, Mon.-Fri.
Recreation Centre — Below BICS, Mon.-Sat.
ANNUAL $79SECOND CAN $119
HALF YEAR (July - Dec.) $46
Cash and cheques accepted at all locations, please make cheques payable to Bowen Island Municipality.Debit accepted at BIM and Rec. Center only.
Thanks to the BIRD Volunteers for their help distributing the garbage decals outside the General Store!
Association builds foundation for affordable housing on island
Working to make housing more affordable on Bowen Island are Richard Best, Tim Rhodes, Robin Burger, Roger McGillivray and Stephanie Legg. They admire this affordable housing complex created by Wolfgang Duntz below the municipal office. Martha Perkins photo
continued from PAGE 1
BICS count downTwo long-time teachers are retiring and many volunteers are honoured
For the love of rugbyErik Hunter-James earns honour of being first athlete of the year five years in a row
FRIDAY JUNE 25 2010 V O L . 3 8 , N O . 2 0
Watch for more online at: WWW.BOWENISLANDUNDERCURRENT.COM
75¢including GST
MANY HANDS, LIGHT WORK - There’s a lot of fence around the meadow in Crippen Park. Bowen Island Horse and Owners Association members were delighted when students from Island Pacific School volunteered to chip in to help repaint it. These girls sang their way through the hard work of scraping off the old paint - Morgan Franz, Leora Pearl-Dowler, Elsa Heath and Isabella Perroni. Martha Perkins photo
The island’s future was neatly laid out on bulletin boards placed along the walls of the municipal
office on Saturday.But how all the ideals and goals set
out by the Official Community Plan update committee become a reality will be an even more interesting process.
The committee revealed its draft document online last week and hosted the public open house on Saturday so people could drop by, read what’s being proposed and ask questions. There were also two presentations by contract plan-ner Dave Witty and Sue Ellen Fast, the chair of the steering committee which has been working on the draft since last June.
At the morning presentation, about
35 people listened as Witty and Fast provided a brief overview of the process thus far.
“OCPs don’t mandate council but they give directions to council,” Witty said. “It’s a checklist of things that need to be done.”
There’s a difference between an OCP update, like this one, and a comprehen-sive review, he said. However, “this is the most comprehensive update we’ve ever seen.”
Asked if there were any losses between the original OCP and the update, Witty said the update was more of an advance of ideas spelled out in the original OCP. It takes into account new legislation and regulations, and simpli-fies the language to make the document more accessible.
continued, PAGE 11
The quest for affordable housing, part 2
MARTHA PERKINS
E D I T O R
Wolfgang Duntz takes out his calculator.
He’s just been told that some people think that when it comes to his two latest development plans, he wants to have his cake and eat it too.
After all, he wants to take density from his Parkview Slopes subdivision
and transfer it to his Cowan Point devel-opment. But then, once he’s effectively rendered the Parkview Slopes property into one large lot, he wants to be able to build affordable housing on it.
Here’s his math.Each of the 24 lots on Parkview
Estates could fetch $300,000 to $350,000. That’s a total value of $8 to $9 million.
continued, PAGE 12
Developers need incentives to lower costs: Duntz
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Bowen Youth Centre Society
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All interested members of the public are invited to attend.
“The Gathering”Island Pacifi c School 15th Anniversary Alumni ReunionFriday, July 2 – Sunday, July 4
IPS graduates, parents, staff and community volunteers are invited to celebrate 15 years of Island Pacifi c School over the July 2-4 weekend.
Friday, July 2 6:00-10:00 BBQ at Ted & Dyan Spear’s HomeSaturday, July 3 10:00-2:00 Ultimate on Crippen Field 5:00-7:00 School Tours at IPS 7:00-11:00 IPS Reception (The Gathering) –
Cates ChurchSunday, July 4 11:00- 2:00 Brunch at D.G.’s House
More Info: www.ipsalumni.ca • Facebook: Island Pacifi c School Alumni
It’s hard to make the numbers add up for affordable housing
By transferring the density allo-cation - and, therefore, also the lost monetary value - of those 24 lots to Cowan Point, he’s left with one 20-acre property on which only one house could be built. That makes the land worth about $1 million.
“Now we have land on Parkview Slopes with compara-tively low value and because it has low value, it’s possible to build affordable housing,” Duntz says.
For rental housing, the island most needs one-bedroom units for singles or older couples and three-bedroom units for young families. Construction costs these days hover around $150 a square foot. (That doesn’t include servicing costs.) The average cost to build one unit would be $150,000. Add $30,000 per unit for soft costs such as permits and financing and another $20,000 for sewer and water.
The average cost per unit for the developer has reached $200,000.
Now let’s factor in the revenue side.
“How much is an affordable rent,” he asks. “I would not have the courage to ask $1,200 or I would be missing the objective of affordable housing.”
So he punches $1,100 into his calculator, multiplies it by 12, and is confronted with $13,200 a year per unit for rental income. Take away 25 per cent of that for such things as amortization and the net income per unit is rough-ly $10,00 a year.
Meanwhile, the mortgage costs to fund the construction are like-ly $12,000 per unit. Factor in the $10,000 in rent and that leaves
him with a net annual loss of $2,000 per year.
“And that’s when the land is free,” he says. Imagine how much money you’d be losing if you were still trying to build on prop-erty that was worth $9 million?
Duntz says everyone, including the municipality, says they want affordable housing but it never gets built because it’s too expen-sive. The problem, he says, is that most people are not aware of how much projects like this cost.
“The unawareness has to slow-ly be turned to awareness,” he says. “People like pre-conceived ideas rather than reality. They think ‘developers are rich and greedy - the world is in order.’ I’m not complaining, that’s human nature....
“I’m not even a pro-developer. We’re just stuck here trying to do the right thing.”
And the right thing, he believes, is to make it possible for young families to be able to live on Bowen Island. Right now, housing costs are prohibitively expensive for most young people, or most people for that matter.
That’s why he thinks Bowen Island municipality should not be throwing up as many roadblocks to new housing, which drives up the costs and discourages anyone from taking on new projects. It’s also why he thought the recent council debate on density trans-fers “surreal.”
“Density transfer is a term that shouldn’t be used on Bowen. It’s a red herring that’s used to create expectations but it doesn’t work here. It’s only doable in urban settings. The best example is Coal Harbour and old Expo lands and the industrial lands on 1st Avenue. The Vancouver planning department had certain goals
and to achieve them they created incentives for developers.
“On Bowen Island, a) we don’t really have planning goals and b) I haven’t seen any incentives.”
One of the problems he sees with density transfers is assigning a value. Let’s say, he says, that you own 40 acres and someone wants to buy seven or eight den-sity entitlements from you. If you split your property into five-acre lots, you could get $450,000 per lot so the property is worth $3.5 million in development potential. Is that what someone has to pay for the density rights? “There’s no stock exchange, no mecha-nism to set the value.”
But let’s say that owner of 40 acres is willing to accept $1.5 million in exchange for never being able to subdivide the property. That $1.5 million cost has to be added to the value of the property that the developer wants to build on, which drives up costs even more. And would a $1.5 million offer even be accepted?
“Density transfers only make sense if you transfer it from a low-value area to a high-value area,” he says.
He says that council doesn’t understand the financial impli-cations to a developer in part because council hasn’t asked developers for input.
“[Density transfers] never worked anywhere without sub-stantial incentives provided by the planning department,” he says. “You induce parties to do it. You have to understand the financial implications.
Council recently voted in favour of using the density allo-cations as set out in the land use bylaw instead of the Official Community Plan. The density
values assigned in the bylaw are often much less than the values assigned by the OCP.
“The OCP has the correct val-ues but it’s like saying the public owns the right to free speech - we can tell you when you can speak. It’s collective delusion. They need to know the truth. That’s what I have in my sights - to inform people about reality.”
The reality is that while there are rich developers, no developer has gotten rich on Bowen Island. Most of the neighbourhoods have either bankrupted developers or left them close to it.
“I’ve lived with no security for 30 years,” he says.
It’s with fondness, however, that he tells the story of how he and his wife Hedda sold every-thing they owned in Germany and moved to Bowen Island in 1980. The recession hit a year later. “Every second house was for sale and no one was buying.” Yet there was the sense that “if you couldn’t afford anything else there was still Bowen.”
The Duntzes had very little but were very happy. Because every-one was in the same financial straits, people got together and created simple but fun activities which strengthened the sense of community.
“That was probably the most wonderful time in our lives and we were broke. Now you have people [on the island] with more money and more options. The coherence of the community is getting corroded.”
It’s the desire to recreate the sense of community that they enjoyed so much when they first moved here that has made Duntz such an advocate for affordable housing.
“The health and the future of any community depends on young families,” he says. “Two things that Bowen Island right now faces are a) the lack of affordable housing. We won’t have younger families living here; b) there are no incentives for a local economy. There’s just a local market. Your local economy
lives out of Bowen Island.”
When he bought the land for The Cottage Farm, a com-munity that’s being created for people with men-tal illness, on the Sunshine Coast, he says the reac-tion was so differ-ent than anything he’s experienced on Bowen. “They said ‘wonderful, how can we help you?’
“Here it’s ‘How can we say no?’”
continued from PAGE 1
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MARTHA PERKINS
E D I T O R
Anne Lagasse is one of those people who thought she’d never get old.
“Until I was 80 I was trotting around Europe, alone, a couple of times a year to paint,” she says.
That’s why it caught her by surprise that Bowen Island was no longer an idyllic home. When a winter’s night arrived at 4:30 in the afternoon, she didn’t feel safe walking to stores or social events on roads that don’t have street-lights. There was no taxi service. She had to hire people to do the chores she used to be able to do herself and those handymen were sometimes hard to find. Parts of her house were rotting; not only did repairs cost thousands of dol-lars, it would take months for a contractor to find the time to do the work.
“When seniors are looking for options, that takes money. Many seniors don’t have loose money - have you got $20,000 to $30,000 sitting in the bank? Most of our money is tied up in our housing,” she says.
Her main source of income would come from the sale of her house in Deep Bay but there was nothing smaller, or more conveniently situated, for her to buy on Bowen. She could rent a smaller place but she didn’t want to deplete her savings by rent-ing. What she really wanted was to buy into a housing complex that provided her with a modest living space, small garden, stor-age for all the things she couldn’t yet bear to part with and a com-munal area where she could get social, mental and physical stim-ulation.
She also didn’t want to leave Bowen. It had been her home since 1979 and she loved it here. She had friends and a vibrant social life and a sense of connec-tion with the community. She knew people and people knew her, especially through her art.
At the age of 79, however, she had no other option than to leave.
“It’s not one element, it’s all of the elements put together that make a difference,” she says from her townhouse in Sidney. “For seniors, it’s the total problem, not just the housing problem.”
Dee Elliott meets lots of peo-ple like Lagasse. “When you’re young you want to be off in the trees where it’s quiet but when you get older, you want more people around and you don’t want to feel isolated,” says the long-time Bowen realtor. “People want to stay here but there isn’t anything for them.”
Whether it’s a generational thing or a practical motivation, seniors who downsize still want to own where they live. “They see renting as money down the drain,” says Elliott. On Bowen, there are no options. There are no condos, no townhouses, no places with any assisted living.
Noreen and Stuart Allan just sold their house on the west side of the island with Elliott’s help. Noreen is 80 and Stuart is 81. They lived here for 19 years but health issues have made it diffi-cult to be a ferry ride away from the majority of medical services.
“It’s time to move before we have to move,” says Noreen, who dropped by the Undercurrent to place an ad for a garage sale. “We’ve had a lovely time on the island and everyone’s so friendly but it’s time to go.”
She’s thrilled with the two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo they’ve bought in Lynn Valley. It’s got everything they need and they’re close to family. If they had wanted to stay on Bowen, there’s nothing as convenient and affordable as their new condo.
“We all go through these dif-ferent age stages,” says Elliott. “You need someplace that suits your needs. It’s recognizing that there’s a need to do something for seniors.”
Right now there are two proj-ects in the planning stage. One is Belterra co-housing, a mix of affordable and market value housing units situated on a hill overlooking Island Pacific School. Richard McGillivray
and Stephanie Legg own the 10 acres on which they want to build Belterra; they want to donate half the land as parkland to the municipality in exchange for building high-density hous-ing units. Right now, McGillivray and Legg are envisioning five buildings, each with six to eight units, for a total of 36 units. (See Undercurrent, May 7, 2010.)
The other project is Abbeyfield House. It would be one of 1,100 residences for seniors overseen by an international organization. Its website, www.abbeyfield.ca, says “Abbeyfield offers a warm, family-style house and a balance between privacy and companion-ship, security and independence, combined with the special caring element provided by dedicated volunteers and the consistency of a single house manager.”
The municipality of Bowen Island has donated land for Abbeyfield near Bowen Court and the land has been rezoned. However, the local Abbeyfield Society has not yet gone through the subdivision process.
“We have found that, the financial market being what it is, we’ll have to do it in stages,” says Graham Ritchie, the chair of Bowen’s Abbeyfield Society. “Rather than aim for 22 units, we’re aiming for 12 as the first stage.”
He says that in the last four years, 45 seniors left the island in search of suitable accommo-dation. That means they had to leave friends and an established social network behind.
“They are abandoning friends and neighbours at a fairly criti-cal time. It’s not as easy to make new friends and moving is a tir-ing business,” he says. He knows Lagasse and says Bowen is lesser for her absence. When seniors are forced to leave the island because there’s not appropriate housing for them - and that’s as much an issue about different types of housing as it is about affordable housing - “it affects the warp and weft of the com-munity. It leaves a hole that shouldn’t be there. It’s not a sus-
tainable community if you have to export your seniors.”
As a whole, we are staying healthy and able to live inde-pendently for a lot longer. The average age of an Abbeyfield resident used to be 75; now it’s 80-plus. While some people want to downsize for health reasons, often it’s just that they no longer want the hassle and responsibil-ity of owning a house. “It’s not major medical issues, it’s the daily stuff - I’m too tired to go grocery shopping, I don’t want to cook for myself... You need some cushion,” Ritchie says.
Initially, there was thought of building something more akin to a nursing home but “the prov-ince made it really clear that’s not going to happen.” Now the plan is for a type of supported living. People would have their own living space. Meals would be provided and there would be someone on staff 24 hours a day to keep an eye on things. There
would be no nursing services on site but having a group of seniors living within such close proxim-ity would make it more feasible to offer services at Abbeyfield for outside agencies. For instance, a visiting nurse who has to spend an hour on the road to visit cli-ents could now spend that time seeing more clients who are down the hall from one another.
Ritchie says that at present there are 400 seniors living on Bowen. By 2027, that number is expected to double. Considering how long it’s taken to get Abbeyfield House to the place it is now - with not a shovel or hammer to be seen - it’s impera-tive that we do more today to plan for the future.
Anne Laggase knows that she should have started advocating for affordable housing a decade ago. “You need to get people before they have the needs that I have - you needed to engage me [in the issue] 10 years earlier.”
Affordable housing series, part III
Seniors are Bowen’s top export
Anne Lagasse loved her life on Bowen but when she wanted to sell her Deep Bay home and buy something smaller, nothing was available. Now she lives in Sidney on Vancouver Island.
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Many people who are waiting for affordable housing on Bowen
Island are renters. Not only are rental accommodations hard to find, but rents can be high compared to income.
The BC government has a program called the Rental Assistance Program. It reim-burses part of the difference between a set percentage of your total income and your rent. The program has a slid-ing scale that gives the most money to people with the least income. The amount of assis-tance is calculated taking into account your household size, income, rent, and where you live.
Eligibility criteriaYou may be eligible if you
meet the following criteria: * Some or all of your annual
household income must come from employment.
* You have a gross annual household income of $35,000 or less.
* You have at least one or more dependent children.
* You have less than $100,000 in assets.
* You file an annual income tax return.
* You pay more than 30 per cent of your household income towards rent for your home, or pay pad rental for a manufac-tured home (trailer) that you own and occupy.
* You have lived in British Columbia for the full 12 months immediately preceding the date of application.
* You meet the residency requirements for the program.
You will not be eligible if:* You or your fam-
ily receive income assistance under the B.C. Employment and Assistance Act or the Employment and Assistance for Persons with Disabilities Act (excluding Medical Services only).
* Your annual gross house-hold income is over $35,000.
* You have more than $100,000 in assets.
* You live in subsidized housing.
* You live in co-operative housing and are a shareholder.
* You or a member of your family do not meet the resi-dency requirements or came to Canada under a private spon-sorship agreement that is still in force.
* You own a home that you do not live in.
All of the forms and more information are available at http://www.bchousing.org/programs/RAP. For more infor-mation on how to apply for the Rental Assistance Program, call BC Housing at 604-433-2218, or 1-800-257-7756 outside the Lower Mainland.
Rental assistance available
MARTHA PERKINS
E D I T O R
Nineteen years ago, when local contractor Roger McGillivray bought 10
acres of mountainside overlook-ing the Howe Sound, he had no idea it would become a retire-ment project - that is, he might be retired before anything was built on it.
Apart from a rudimentary gravel road winding up the hill behind Island Pacific School, the land looks pretty much the way it did when he bought it. The trees are taller, the bush is denser, but there’s no sign of the houses that he’d envisioned all those years ago.
But the one benefit of having so much time pass is that he and his wife, Stephanie Legg, think they have an even better idea for how best to use the land.
They’ve come up with the Belterra co-housing project. It’s no longer just a glint in their eye but the builders still have quite a hill to climb before construction starts.
Right now, the McGillivrays own a beautifully secluded home amidst four and a half acres of Bowen forest. They love the serenity and natural beauty. But they know the day will come when they don’t want the responsibility of taking care of such a large house and prop-erty. And they think Belterra will be a perfect option. Judging by the people who have already expressed an interest in buying
into Belterra, they even know they’ll like their neighbours.
Belterra would work roughly like this. It would be a strata development with half of the 10 acres donated to the public. This public land includes the forest that Terminal Creek runs through, allowing the creek lands to be virtually untouched all the way to Snug Cove.
On the other five acres, McGillivray envisions five build-ings, each with six to eight units, for a total of 36 units. The units will range in size from 600 to 1,200 sq. ft. and because they’re relatively small, more than half the five acres will be dedicated to common lands, which will include trails, gardens and a community building. This build-ing would house a kitchen and dining area, workshops, a media room - basically any type of shared use that the co-housing members envision.
The design of the units is also subject to the wishes of the own-ers, once the co-housing project is approved by council. The land, which would have to be rezoned, is sloped, which will determine some of the design.
Of the 36 units, 14 will be des-ignated for affordable housing. The buyers of those units will pay for the unit, but there will not be a land cost. Instead, that land cost will be shared by the owners of the 22 other units.
Based on today’s building costs, the price of an afford-able housing unit would start at $168,000.
In exchange, the people who buy the affordable housing units will sign a resale covenant. When they sell their unit, they cannot sell it for market value if the mar-ket value exceeds the increases in the consumer price index. For instance, if market value for the unit has increased 10 per cent, but the CPI has increased only two per cent, then the unit can only be sold for two per cent higher than the price at which it was bought.
McGillivray is a member of the Bowen Community Housing Association, as well as being a director of the advisory planning commission. He’s acutely aware of the need for not only designat-ed affordable housing but hous-ing that’s in a price range that young families can afford. His son is a contractor on the island but the only property he could afford was a condo on the North Shore. He commutes to Bowen every day on the ferry and would love to one day live here.
McGillivray notes that his first piece of property on Bowen cost him $16,000 and “it was tough in 1976 to buy that. It took every-thing I could do.” The property next door to it in Tunstall Bay recently sold for $360,000.
That’s 20 times what he paid. Since 1976, a contractor’s wages have gone up only four times.
McGillivray says, “Everyone supports affordable housing but when it comes down to the things that enable it, everyone has their own little thing they don’t like.”
Based on current zoning, he’d only be able to build one house on the 10 acres, which he thinks is bad planning. It’s not good for the island if some level of density isn’t allowed, he says.
“If you don’t keep an open mind [about development], it tends to stop everything, the good and the bad,” McGillivray says, putting Belterra on the side of the good. “You can’t blanket oppose increases in density; you have to oppose how it happens. Right now, opposition to den-sity is making it difficult to do it properly.”
He says the Walkable Village concept acknowledges the geo-graphic limitations of building in Snug Cove. You can’t build to the north because it’s park land. To the east is the ocean and to the south the topography is almost all cliff. The Valhalla housing development may only be half a kilometre south of Snug Cove as the crow flies but the long and twisting road takes 45 minutes to walk down.
“The only place that Snug Cove could expand is to the west,” he says, and that’s where Belterra is.
“When you take all of the units, it would be the perfect way of answering everyone’s needs. Co-housing has to have one of the softest touches [on the envi-ronment.] You couldn’t put 36 families into five acres more gen-tly than in co-housing. If you put 36 families in any other form of housing, it would be a lot more invasive.”
Standing near the top of the 10 acres he owns next to Island Pacific School, Roger McGillivray can easily imagine the Belterra co-housing project that he says will help address some of Bowen Island’s affordable housing needs. Martha Perkins photo
