Although our proposal is in its earliest stages, we are already getting significant pushback from folks who oppose affordable housing.
Their voices seem to carry a lot of weight with the Local Trust Committee. So we are hoping to offset them through expressions of support for what we’re trying to do. You can …
sign the statement further down this page
send a letter of your own to Trustees Sam Borthwick <sborthwick@islandstrust.bc.ca> and David Graham <dagraham@islandstrust.bc.ca>.
attend the community meetings associated with the Denman Housing Action Plan and make your voice heard. The next of these is happening on Saturday July 26, 2:00-4:30 at the Community Hall.
Statement of support
To the members of the Denman Island Local Trust Committee:
I know that there is a longstanding housing crisis on Denman Island, and I have read the Snag Housing Co-op Proposal and/or attended an info session where the proposal was discussed. I am concerned that, despite several decades of consultation and studies, very little has been done to create affordable housing options. The Islands Trust mandate to “preserve and protect … the unique amenities and environment” of the Trust Area is often invoked as a reason to defer action. But as the Islands Trust has itself come to explicitly recognize, the mandate is supposed to be for the benefit of all “residents of the Trust Area and of British Columbia.” If the housing crisis means that people have to leave the island because there is nowhere for them to live, or cannot afford to move here because the only housing available costs millions of dollars, that is also a violation of the mandate.
It is long past time to take concrete action to provide more affordable housing on Denman, as quickly as possible, while ensuring adequate public consultation and attention to preserving sensitive areas. I urge the Local Trust Committee to do everything it can to encourage, support, and absolutely minimize the time that proposals like this take to come to fruition, through innovative strategies like pre-zoning properties for cluster housing, distributed square foot models, and/or adopting projects that provide affordable housing as part of the Denman Housing Action Plan.