This is the first in a series about the challenge of providing affordable accommodation on Vancouver.

Here’s the story about affordable accommodation on Vancouver in dry, statistical 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 assumption 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 month even though the median household income for people who rent is $41,000. If those people 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 statistics. 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 hillside home, have had to leave their long-established social network behind 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 housing 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 accommodation 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 symposiums and written endless letters to try to focus attention 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 continue to be put in the way of actually creating the housing.

“There are so many obstacles,” says Burger. “You have to remove those obstacles.”

“We have a bylaw-creating mentality, not an allowing mentality,” says Richard Best, who also sits on the association. Rules are made to control what type of development can exist rather than provide the framework on which affordable housing can be built.

Take 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 following all the rules to create new ones. The money they’d get in rent doesn’t cover the costs of creating the secondary suite.

Likewise, it’s difficult to build housing units on top of commercial units because of all the requirements for parking. Land it too expensive to use as parking and underground parking is not feasible on an island of rock.

Roger McGillivray is a contractor who is on the association’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 longer had to rent to someone else in the summer. As part of the bargain, the McGillivrays agreed to live in the basement of his parents’ home for two weeks every summer when the owners took over the cottage for their annual visit. 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 or homes available for rent has decreased because more cottages are now 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 simply because they have no choice. There aren’t better places 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. “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 association 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 housing. 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 housing.] There’s a very vocal group that comes out and creates 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 on the hill overlooking Island Pacific School. They envision five buildings with several accommodation 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 the costs a lot of money, not the housing,” says McGillivray. “You couldn’t sell an ‘inexpensive’ 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. For a project like Belterra to go ahead, the McGillivrays will have to buy density from some other landowner, and that cost will drive up the cost of construction, driving up the 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 services on the island if they can’t afford to live here? Who will volunteer for all the organizations that rely so heavily on volunteers? How many young people 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.”

The pressures on Bowen’s housing market first started to be felt in the 1980s. As other parts of the accommodation market began to heat up in the lower mainland, people’s attention turned to Bowen. Instead of moving as far away as Abbotsford to find a house you can afford, what about that dark mass of land across the Howe Sound?

Vancouver Accommodation

At the time, accommodation prices were much less than they were on the north shore or Vancouver and for those who couldn’t afford to buy, there was the small but tight-knit Orchard cottage community right in the heart of Snug Cove. The cottages were owned by the Greater Vancouver Regional District and life there was fine until the GVRD decided that the cottages needed proper septic systems and that tenants had to pay to put them in. Most tenants either wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to and the GVRD closed the cottages. (As the result of a community fundraising campaign, two of the cottages have been refurbished and will soon be available for short-term rental.)

Meanwhile, more houses were built on Bowen to satisfy the growing market and there was some semblance of balance between the cost of accommodation and the ability of people’s wages to keep up with it. but it wasn’t until five years ago – some people link it with the housing boom that followed in the wake of Vancouver being chosen as the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics – - The association funded the study that came up with all the statistics that prove the lack affordable housing threatens to unravel Bowen’s social fabric.