The City of Revelstoke gave the Revelstoke Community Housing Society $100,000 at the beginning of April to go towards development plans for the society's next affordable housing complex.
"Amazing, wonderful, thrilled," is how Kira Wolf, the operations manager of of the society, said she felt when she heard about the money.
Wolf and Michael Brooks-Hill, a co-chair of the society, says it costs money to get a proposal ready to request money for a housing development.
"A lot of money, actually," Wolf said.
Cheques have already started to go out to pay for an entire architecture plan for a new build, a site survey, a site evaluation, an economic survey, a cost analysis, and for an application to their "funding partner," said Wolf.
"B.C. Housing or any of our funding partners, they won't give us a blank cheque, we need to come to them with the plan to build a house," she said.
It takes months for societies to hear back about funding after applying for grants to pay for development plans. Getting this money up front will hopefully expedite the project.
The housing society is hoping to build on land adjacent to a build they already completed on Oscar Street. The units will be two and three bedrooms, geared towards families this time, Wolf said. There will be 21 or 22 units. They're hoping to be able to lease the land very cheaply from the city. But the city requires the society to present them with a plan to even do that, Wolf said.
The city got the $100,000 to give to the housing society from the Provincial Rural Economic Diversification and Infrastructure program. In total Revelstoke got $500,000 from what's called the Forest Impact Transition Stream. In an email the city's director of community development Ingrid Bron said, "The single biggest impediment to business development currently is a shortage of workers, which in turn is directly attributable to the lack of affordable housing for staff."
The $500,000 has to be spent on construction of infrastructure to support workforce, business, and industry development, retention and expansion.
Specifically, in its application, the city requested funds to pay to develop land off Oscar Street for affordable housing. The money to the housing society was for "capacity-building for the non-profit housing sector to access external funding for construction of further affordable housing units," Bron wrote.
The $400,000 that didn't go to the housing society will be spent on master plans for the land, survey, design and engineering, site planning and putting in services like water, sewer and electrical.
This is the land behind the ambulance station adjacent to Humbert and Oscar Streets.
The housing society won't have to wait for the city to complete a master plan of Oscar St before it moves forward with its development.
"The intent of the proposal was to conduct master planning and servicing of the Oscar St. lands while concurrently separating off additional lots adjacent to the current housing project and servicing those to enable the RCHS to pursue additional funding to support development of further housing units," Bron wrote in her email:
The housing society has developed three housing complexes. They were completed in 2010, 2016 and 2022. Wolf pointed out there is a six year gap between them, and said, "We don't have six years to wait for the next one."
She doesn't have a timeline for when the units will be finished, because they don't have money for construction yet. They plan to apply for that money this summer, and money from the city went towards that.
Paul Simon, the city's lead planner, said that by email that it's on his list to put out a tender to hire a consultant to support the city develop the land off Oscar Street. It's too early to give a timeline for its completion, he said.
The Revelstoke Community Housing Society is holding its annual general meeting on Thursday, April 19. Anyone is welcome to become a member and learn about housing development in Revelstoke. Register here.
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