Housing Committee hopes to pick up the pace on housing issues in the New Year

Towards the close of Monday's marathon City Council meeting, Mayor Lee Brain provided an update on the latest developments with the Housing Committee that has been tasked to review options for the community's affordable housing issues.

Mayor Brain noted that there has been some progress on those issues in recent weeks, with a number of initiatives now underway once again, added on to their work on the housing issue is a process which is now incorporating a number of social service requirements, such as mental health concerns and addictions into the overall theme of housing needs in the region.

That latest approach to addressing those housing issues in the community is known as The Housing Pilot Project on Community Services and Affordable Housing is being led by Shauna Wouters at Hecate Strait Development Corporation.

The City of Prince Rupert is working with three other groups: Hecate Strait, North Coast Transition House and Prince Rupert Aboriginal Community Services, as well as agencies from the Provincial government to work towards developing a proposal that integrates the social service needs as part of a housing project in 2016.

The group will assess models from other communities and try to determine which one of those that they will review will work best for Prince Rupert.

The Mayor added that he has been named as Chair of the Group and that they have two meetings planned for this month, with a hopeful eye of having an affordable housing development proposal in place by the deadline of the pilot project of March of 2016.

Mayor Brain also noted that it's the hope of the group to have something off the ground sometime in 2016.

Calling the latest efforts on the housing front as "Good Traction and Good News" Mayor Brain also observed as to some of the other issues related to the housing situation that the committees have taken on, making use of recent City of Prince Rupert studies into housing need and lot availability in the community to name a few.

You can review the full presentation to Council from the City's Video Archive it starts at the two hour fifty one minute mark.




For further background on housing issues in the community see our Housing archive page here.

While more items related to City Council discussions can be found in our Council Archive section.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review