During Monday's Airdrie city council meeting, council endorsed the 2024 – 2030 Affordable Housing Principled Action Plan.

During her presentation before council endorsed the action plan, Jessica DeVreeze Affordable Housing Strategist for the city underlined that one per cent of the city's housing stock is considered affordable housing, compared to the national average which is around four per cent. 

"A family is in core housing need if they have no options to spend more than 30 per cent of income on suitable adequate housing and they are not overspending on housing by choice. The latest estimate is that 8.8 per cent of Airdrie households are in core housing need which is about 2000 people," she said. 

According to The City of Airdrie's city plan, affordable housing is defined using a 30 per cent of income criteria.

"[It] qualifies the definition further by adding that the price must be affordable to households earning 65 per cent or less of Airdrie's median household income," DeVreeze said. "Using the city's definition, we are focused on housing that is affordable to households. making $71,500 or less. However, there are many Airdrie households that make much less than $71,000 annually."

DeVreeze underlined that it is important to remember that someone who earns minimum wage will only earn $30,000 annually, hence their affordability for housing would be defined as $800 or less per month on rent. She also added that while the plan acknowledges the joint responsibility for housing from the federal and provincial governments, there is a role at the local level.

"The city has the ability to leverage external investments to be applied to our communities' housing needs." 

The plan is one part of a three-part response plan and its target would be to have 300 new homes open or planned within five years including a mix of below-market and low-end-of-market homes. DeVreeze described several objectives of the plan, saying that the first objective would include municipal capacity.

"[It is] to essentially align the Municipal Corporation around affordable housing goals and achieve a higher level of coordination on issues that impact housing initiatives."

The second and third initiatives would drive at how The City could make it easier for nonprofit housing providers, such as Airdrie Housing Limited (AHL) as well as the Rockyview Foundation to increase their presence in the city. 

"Initiative three is growing housing serving Airdrie is labor force. The focus here is how to facilitate creating more lower-cost market homes faster, especially missing middle housing and rental housing," DeVreeze said. 

While she asked the council to consider the framework as a whole, she also added that there we no funding requests attached to the plan, as 2024 is considered a 'formation' year which relies on work that is already underway. 

"Onward years towards achieving full implementation of the plan will require a significant commitment from the city. The resource requests to do this work will come through the annual budget process or if there are resources or decisions that fall outside of the annual budget process; they will be brought forward to council as required."

The second initiative in the three-pronged response would be to set up an affordable housing reserve fund, though it is not one of the components of the Affordable Housing Action Plan. If such a reserve fund existed, it could be used to include purchasing land for affordable housing.

"For example, if we had a [such a reserve fund] at the time, funds could have been applied to the strategic hotel purchase partnership between the city and AHL."

DeVreeze then introduced another avenue of funding through the Canada Mortgage And Housing Corporation (CMHC) Housing Accelerator Fund program. According to her, the Federal government has designated $4 billion in incentive funding that will go directly to local governments by ensuring policy-based initiatives aimed at increasing the housing supply.

"The housing accelerator fund proposes to incentivize municipalities to enact policy-based solutions that will unblock avenues for the private sector, as well as the nonprofit providers to deliver more housing faster. It is important to recognize that the accelerator program applies incentives to increasing all types of housing so this is not just an affordable housing-specific program."

The City estimates that historical under-investment in affordable housing in the community has made it especially difficult for senior women living alone who make up 32 per cent of those who are need in core housing. Single mothers made up 28 per cent of those in need of core housing, while renters made up 20 per cent, followed by younger people living by themselves, people with mobility limitations, and visible minorities. 

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