As the population in Sun Peaks continues to grow, Sun Peaks Resort Municipality (SPMRM) has employed a number of strategies to understand and improve housing, from creating the Sun Peaks Housing Authority (SPHA) in 2017 to hiring a sustainability and planning firm to create an employee non-market housing strategy in 2022. Despite these moves and others, there is still no affordable housing built to tackle the housing crisis in Sun Peaks

SPHA is a limited liability company with SPMRM as the sole shareholder. This model is the same as many other resort communities, explained Deanna Campbell, chief administrative officer for the municipality. While SPHA has a board, it lacks funding, something Campbell is hoping will change with an application to the housing accelerator fund by the Canadian Mortgage Housing Corporation. The funding is provided by the Federal government and administered by CMHA.

“Because we don’t have any funding allocated to the housing authority, we haven’t really done very much with it,” Campbell said.

While the municipality does not know how much funding they would get if approved, some of the money would go towards developing non-market affordable housing, and some funding would go towards operating SPHA, which is responsible for managing any future non-market housing in Sun Peaks. 

Another mechanism the municipality will use to help fund the housing authority is development cost charges (DCCs).

DCCs are charges levied on developments and recent provincial legislation, Bill 44, will allow the allocation of DCCs towards housing initiatives. The municipality is in the process of updating its DCC Bylaw no. 0120 to reflect the new legislative allowance. 

Ideally, SPMRM would hire a staff member to oversee SPHA, according to Campbell. SPHA would still retain board members, but Campbell said it needs staff to operate effectively.

The board is also seeking a member at large for a vacant seat. The municipality’s website notes the time commitment varies depending on the committee, but “most will meet only a few times per year.”

The last annual general meeting for SPHA was in 2021. 

Bill 44 and its local impacts

Enacted in 2023, Bill 44 is intended to boost housing stock by increasing zoning density and requiring community planning for housing to happen more frequently. 

There’s funding for implementing the legislation, with the province allocating a $154,386 grant to the municipality. Under Bill 44, SPMRM is required to complete a new housing needs study, the last of which was done in 2021, and some of the provincial funding will go towards a new study. 

“There’s some guidance on this, using a standard method to be more consistent,” Campbell explained. “And then the main requirement is that we have to be looking at local housing needs currently and over the next 20 years.”

Sun Peaks will pool resources and partner with other communities in the Thompson-Nicola Regional District to hire a consultant who will produce individual reports for each community.

She expects the approach to be the municipality’s best bet, given all local governments are required to produce a study by December 2024.

While the municipality must create a new housing needs study, Campbell said they won’t need to wait for the report to improve the housing authority.

“We’ve identified a long time ago that we are in need of non-market affordable housing for employees and families in the community,” she said. “Some of these initiatives we’ve been talking about for a while, it’s just getting the funding to start actioning them.”

The bill came years after Canada’s population almost doubled from 1970 to 2022, but community housing has not. Funding for community housing in Canada was previously spearheaded by the Federal government but in 1992 the responsibility was placed onto provinces.

Other changes under Bill 44 

Under Bill 44, the official community plan (OCP) and zoning bylaws must be updated every five years, with a 20-year outlook for housing needs. The OCP must have housing policies that are reflective of housing needs identified in the new study. Housing needs studies must be completed every five years.

To update the OCP,  SPMRM will work closely with Sun Peaks Resort LLP (SPR), because the OCP cannot impede the Master Development Agreement (MDA) between SPR and the province. The MDA gives the resort the right to purchase Crown land from the province for development, which significantly impacts how the community grows.

The newly updated MDA plans for 600 units of staff housing in the East Village, but these won’t be realized for years to come.

The zoning changes under Bill 44 will permit a secondary suite or a laneway home in any neighbourhood zoned single-family residential, which is already the case in Sun Peaks. 

Any municipality with a population greater than 5,000 or community within an urban boundary will now be required to update zoning bylaws to permit small-scale, multi-unit housing. This does not apply to SPMRM.

Non-market housing years away

So, what does this mean for previously identified non-market housing in Sun Peaks?

A 109-unit employee housing project endorsed by SPMRM in 2022 has yet to break ground. The land was sold to SPMRM below market value by SPR, with the caveat that 40 per cent of available units be set aside for rent or ownership for resort employees.

While it was supposed to break ground in 2023, the land is still vacant. According to the municipality, there currently isn’t capacity within the wastewater treatment plant for the build.

The wastewater treatment plant upgrades are happening in phases over multiple years.

In terms of capacity issued within the wastewater system, Campbell hopes those should be solved by the time the municipality develops non-market affordable housing.

“Our hope is that by the time we have these developments up and running, we will have addressed our capacity issues.”

One immediate approach that doesn’t rely on waiting for the wastewater treatment plant upgrades, or the time and cost it takes to construct new housing, would be SPMRM opting-in to parts of recent provincial housing legislation or implementing their own long-term renter requirement.

B.C.’s Short-Term Rental Accommodation Act introduced big changes to regulating STRs. One of the biggest regulations goes into effect in May, 2024. Called the principal resident requirement, the legislation requires the owner to live in the property.

The goal of the principal resident requirement is to prevent entire homes being used for STRs. The requirement doesn’t apply to Sun Peaks, because the population is less than 10,000 and SPMRM is a resort municipality relying on tourism for the economy.

SPMRM is not deciding to opt-in, according to Campbell.

A different but similar approach is to require a long-term tenant in STR properties with secondary suites.

The idea was first floated when bylaws regulating STRs were developed by SPMRM. However, the municipality said they chose not to implement the requirement because of pushback from owners.

Some want to use a secondary suite for STRs, while others like to have their property to themselves when they aren’t renting it out.

SPMRM recently updated the STR bylaw this summer, but Campbell said they will likely revisit the long-term renter requirement when reviewing the bylaw in spring 2025. 

Renters and STRs

Renters SPIN spoke with said they are often shuffled from one rental unit to another because their housing goes on the market for STRs for part of the year — something they want to see changed.

Kate Culos experienced the shuffle this fall. After her first winter season was spent in staff accommodation, she and her partner secured accommodation in a property that was set to become an AirBnb during the winter season.

“It was very strict: ‘You can only stay in here until Dec.10 [2023] at the latest and then you have to go because it turns into an Airbnb,’” Culos said.

By the summer of 2023, she started looking for winter accommodation. By mid-September, she still hadn’t found housing and was “panicked,” she said.

“We were about to pack up and go stay with family. We actually looked into purchasing our own house to see if that was a cheaper alternative,” Culos explained. “It’s quite hard when you’re in your 20s and you think that buying a unit is better off financially than renting.”

Culos eventually found housing after spending months searching on local Facebook pages.

Rob O’Toole, SPMRM council member and co-owner of Vertical Cafe, agrees that the housing shortage is a community-wide responsibility.

Responsibility extends beyond SPMRM, SPR or business owners to people who run STRs, and they all need to work collectively, he said.

“You’re essentially running a hotel. It might be a micro-sized hotel, but it’s a hotel, and your business impacts the community’s need to have a workforce,” O’Toole said. “I agree you shouldn’t be responsible at the same level as somebody who has a 100-room hotel, or a 200 seat restaurant, but you should play some sort of role in providing an infrastructure that helps to provide housing.”

According to a memo from SPMRM, there were 427 properties with business licences for STRs as of Dec. 19, 2023. 

However, vacation rentals alone aren’t the whole picture. One contributing cause is the population boom noted in the 2021 census. Between 2016 and 2021, the enumerated population grew by 127.9 per cent. The number of private dwellings occupied also increased in the same time period by 114.5 per cent.

Considering the tourist-nature of a mountain village, imposing a strict long-term tenant policy would reduce the number of tourists visiting, and in turn could reduce the number of needed staff — an economic decision that is unlikely. 

However, without housing, staff won’t be able to help the village run effectively, and guests could end up going elsewhere, O’Toole said.

“It’s only in your best interest to ensure that there’s enough staff in the community to service that guest. If they leave frustrated because they had a poor stay, because restaurant lineups were too long or businesses weren’t open seven days a week, they’re just not going to come back and stay at your property.”