The true cost of Kelowna’s tiny homes for the homeless
BC Housing and the City of Kelowna are working hard to get about half the people sleeping rough this winter into tiny home shelters but those are coming in at a pretty high cost, especially compared to more permanent housing options.
The so-called tiny homes are two clusters of essentially 60-square-foot bedrooms without plumbing that are expected to provide temporary shelter for this winter, with operating funds being provided by BC Housing for the next three years.
Normally, as winter’s cold descends on the city, emergency shelter beds are opened up for a few months.
But not this year.
“What I can confirm, at this point, is funding has been approved through a partnership with BC Housing for extreme weather response warming buses,” Colleen Cornock, the city’s social development manager, told iNFOnews.ca. “BC Housing is funding warming buses for shifts in the extreme weather. We will complement that with the distribution of warming supplies.”
While there will be more warming buses this winter compared to last winter, she’s not aware of any indoor shelter spaces being provided.
That’s where the two clusters of 60 tiny homes each – one on Crawley Avenue and one on Highway 97 north of Leathead Road – come in.
While they are tiny, they are expensive for their size.
It is costing $9.3 million to buy the housing units and set them up on city-owned land. That includes $30,000 for paving and fencing on the Crowley Avenue site after lead was detected in the soil.
Each site comes with things like daily meals, laundry and shower facilities along with support staff that will be onsite 24/7, 365 days a year. That comes at a cost of $5.4 million per year.
That brings the total cost over three years to $15.5 million, or $212,500 per unit.
By comparison, the most recent BC Housing affordable housing project in Kelowna was the 68-unit Hadgraft Wilson Place, which opened last spring. That is also on city-owned land.
According to a BC Housing news release, that project got more than $12 million in funding from three levels of government, which works out to about $176,500 per unit, ranging from studio suites up to two-bedrooms.
That makes the tiny homes, in terms of cost per unit, more expensive than the Hadgraft Wilson Place where residents have permanent homes and pay 30% of their income to offset those costs.
On the down side, it took years to get Hadgraft Wilson built, whereas the tiny homes will be done in three or four months, although BC Housing is finding it's taking longer than expected to get an agency to operate those sites.
On the commercial market, Millennial Developments is currently marketing its Revo Kelowna condominiums in the Capri-Landmark area of the city.
These are micro-suites with prices starting in the high $200,000s for studios of 400 square feet.
READ MORE: Kelowna builder making home ownership more affordable by going small
For, say, $75,000 more, BC Housing could be buying condos and in theory recovering its money by renting them out for 30% of what low income residents are able to pay.
The City of Kelowna says 25% of new housing in the city over the next 10 to 20 years needs to be affordable (that is, costing no more than 30% of occupants’ incomes).
In a report on the recent $31.6 million grant from the federal Housing Accelerator Fund, the city forecasts only 5.6% of new homes will be in that category over the next three years.
READ MORE: $31M from feds will do little to deal with Kelowna's housing affordability crisis
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