City has to balance priorities with affordable housing

By Lethbridge Herald on February 27, 2025.

Leave It To Beeber – Al Beeber

When city council in January gave its divided blessing to new housing projects on 13 St. S., it was both lauded and reviled for the decision.

Those in our community who feel there is a need for more housing, especially affordable housing, felt two controversial projects at the corner of 6 Ave. S. were definitely needed. Others, including a local grocer, made clear their concerns about the available parking at those projects, their belief being there isn’t enough in either building to accommodate renters.

They feel residents of those units will need more than the number of spaces being allotted and their cars will spill into the adjacent neighbourhoods and the grocers’ parking lot, preventing customers from shopping there.

Eighty-five per cent of the units will be market rate housing, and the other 15 per cent will be considered affordable units aligned with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation guidelines. Market rate means rents aren’t tied to an amount of income or income source. So the majority of these won’t fall under CMHC guidelines but they will increase the amount of total housing available to city residents.

Whether concerns of opponents are valid, whether this project with its limited parking stalls, will be a success or a failure, remains to be seen.

And it could turn out to be a project that defines the direction the city needs to be heading in the future with housing.

According to the CMHC, affordable housing means it “costs less than 30 per cent of a household’s before-tax income.” This doesn’t mean affordable housing is rental housing subsidized by government, says the CMHC website.

“Not everyone has the financial means to access or compete in the housing market. The marketplace, too, isn’t always able to meet the unique housing needs of certain groups, such as people with disabilities. In these cases, governments, community organizations, non-profits and the private sector work together to provide affordable housing,” says the CMHC.

The CMHC says that in 2016, the federal government provided nearly $1.7 billion to support more than 536,000 Canadian households living in social housing. The CMHC administers 20 per cent of the agreements with housing projects, while provinces and territories handle the other 80 per cent.

There can be a conception in Lethbridge that “affordable” means “subsidized” but as the CMHC clearly states, that simply isn’t the case.

As inflation and costs increase, renting and ownership of any type of property becomes more expensive, the latter which for many may only now be a dream, not a hope or a goal like it was for their parents or grandparents.

Granted, I had the same fears of affordability when I bought my house at nearly 13 per cent interest. In the early 1980s, friends purchased theirs at interest rates higher than 20 per cent. And we struggled to make ends meet to pay those mortgages. Just as our parents and grandparents did decades before us. Life isn’t easy and as we often worried how to find money to pay for mortgages, utilities and groceries, a lot of sleepless nights were had. So today’s generation of renters and buyers is not in a unique predicament, but it’s a predicament that needs to be taken seriously and addressed.

Interest rates now are lower than they were years ago when many of us bought our first homes, but the cost of living is now higher. So are salaries, but how far does today’s dollar go compared to the dollar 20 or 40 years ago? Or even five years for that matter?

With higher incomes, including minimum wage, many workers should theoretically be in a better position than those looking for rental properties or to purchase a home in decades past. But that isn’t the case.

So housing solutions that enable residents to put roofs over their heads are crucial for any community.

The projects on 13 St. aim to provide that with the assumption being that not everyone is going to need a vehicle, especially those living so close to downtown and with access to transit.

The proximity of a grocery store could be seen as an added bonus but if the owners of London Road Market are to believed, any benefit from such projects could be balanced potentially by renters using their parking lot because there is nowhere else to put their vehicles. And if that costs them regular customers, the market loses.

Parking, David Gurr of London Road Market told me in an interview, is the lifeblood of their business with the store needing parking turnover to be sustainable. I was told it takes 28 of their 30 stalls to keep the store in business with profits being generated by their other two, which is a fine line between staying open and going out of business.

And that brings up the issue of vehicle needs in this city. Lethbridge is a commuter city. It’s not convenient for most to use a bicycle to get to work or to go shopping.

If people could work and do commerce in the areas in which they live, that would be a different story. And housing close to the downtown core can provide that opportunity.

But Lethbridge isn’t a massive urban centre where to a larger degree that is possible. The operative words here being “to a larger degree” because we know how much people still commute in cities like Calgary and Edmonton and elsewhere. Commuting is part of life because of the manner in which cities have been designed and constructed for decades if not longer.

And if the need for vehicles is to be reduced, cities need to be designed in a manner that allows people to work and shop, do recreation and get medical attention in the same areas they have homes.

That’s a utopian ideal and here in Lethbridge, efforts are being made to address how more housing can fit in with existing neighbourhoods. That effort also needs to be put into the planning of future neighbourhoods as well to reduce the need for vehicles so more housing – market rate and affordable – can be built in less space to accommodate more people at a fair cost.

If Canada goes into a recession because of its economic battles with the U.S., costs are only going to increase for everyone, including those who construct housing. And that will put more pressure on cities to meet the housing demands and needs of their citizens, including here in Lethbridge.

Vehicles are a way of life here and will continue to be, whether gasoline fuelled or charged by electricity. There is no getting around that for the majority of residents, so somehow compromises are going to be needed to accommodate commuters and those who desperately need housing.

And we’re not talking about subsidized housing here, we’re simply talking affordable. And one can’t be equated with the other.

How many young professionals with great careers are finding difficulty getting into their first home they can call their own or even a reasonably priced rental unit so they can save for their housing dream? How many seniors living in rental units are struggling to make ends meet as rents increase?

Affordability is an issue, maybe even a crisis, in Canada and the success of projects like the ones here on 13 St. S. could foreshadow the future of housing development in Lethbridge.

We could find out that limited parking doesn’t work in Lethbridge, that it creates undue inconvenience on other residents. We may find that it will, indeed, work for people who are willing or able to live with certain limitations and adapt their lifestyles.

We don’t know yet and we won’t until the residents first start moving into their units on 13 St. and then we’ll begin seeing the impact on London Road-area residents and businesses.

For the sake of all involved, we need to hope these projects work, because they could very well determine how future local governance looks at housing developments here.

And if the economy begins tanking thanks to tariffs, what housing will be built in the near term? Will rising costs put a kibosh on developments of affordable housing? Will rising costs change the CMHC definition of “affordable” Will rising costs limit housing development of any kind?

Nobody knows yet the answers to those questions, but inevitably we’re going to find out.