Update Summer 2025
In spring 2023 Salt Spring Solutions published Homes for Islanders: An Integrated Housing Solutions Framework for Salt Spring Island to provide decision-makers with an integrated approach to addressing the local housing crisis.
To follow up, in the early summer of 2023 we hosted a professionally facilitated workshop to review and discuss how to move forward on the five strategies we recommended, inviting key organizations which have some responsibility for solving the housing crisis. These included the Capital Regional District - Salt Spring Island Office, Capital Regional Housing Corporation, Islands Trust – Salt Spring Local Trust Committee, Islands Trust - Regional Planning, North Salt Spring Waterworks District, and the Provincial Housing Ministry. All attended except the Province. An outcomes report from the workshop was distributed to all the participants.
The following year, in 2024, we hired an independent professional consulting firm with decades of expertise in public engagement to design and execute an equitable community engagement project on the framework. While we had consulted extensively with housing and community planning professionals, environmental experts and local agencies and organizations while writing the report, we were also interested in learning from the people most impacted by the housing crisis (renters, employers, workers, the insecurely-housed) what they thought of the proposed solutions in our report.
We hosted seven focus groups with 42 participants, conducted 12 one-on-one interviews with landlords and developers, and hosted a publicly accessible online survey, which attracted 657 Salt Spring resident participants, in late November 2024. (See highlights here)
In 2025, on the two-year anniversary of the publication of Homes for Islanders, we have evaluated which of the recommendations in the framework have been advanced and which have not and produced a Report Card.
We recognize that North Salt Spring Water Works District has shown leadership in doing the very necessary work to move forward on lifting their water supply moratorium, and to remove other barriers to smaller footprint housing that exist within the district’s authority. Thank you for prioritizing this work over the past two years. We urge you to continue and we encourage other local agencies and the Province to also do their part.