Nanaimo council approves letter of support for Habitat for Humanity Mid-Vancouver Island

Jeff Krafta said this will be the largest project they have ever done in Nanaimo. Photo courtesy of Britt Collins

At a Nanaimo city council meeting on Monday, January 15th, council voted in favour of writing a letter of support to Habitat for Humanity Mid-Vancouver Island for a future project in the city.

Jeff Krafta, executive director for Habitat for Humanity Mid-Vancouver Island, spoke to council about the request for the letter. He said the letter would be to support a 26-until muti-family affordable housing complex at 5915 Metral Drive on the newly purchased land.

“This is going to be the largest project that we have undertaken here and the largest project on the island for Habitat for Humanity,” He said. “It's going to be the litmus test for us for a brand new housing model, which is going to increase our overall capacity and impact between eight and 10 times our normal model.”

He said this letter is one of the additional ways they are trying to help them achieve increased funding for their projects.

“So you can probably understand, over the last few years with increasing costs, increasing coding requirements, we've seen our impact not just here, but nationally, dramatically be reduced,” He said. “So we're looking at new ways to try and increase our impact again, and we're losing, we're losing the battle here on affordable housing. So we're trying to figure out ways to increase our impact overall.” 

He explained to the council that the request for this letter is to help support the group in conversations with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and BC Housing when looking at their financing packages for the construction.

“BC Housing is more of a tertiary participant, we don't have any current funding opportunities with BC housing,” Krafta said.

Krafta does mention that there may be additional asks for partnership opportunities with the City of Nanaimo but for now, he is just requesting a letter of support in principle that the city council supports this project as a whole.

During the question period, Councillor Janice Perrino asked if Habit for Humanity would be using volunteers for the build. Krafta responded that those days of having volunteer working on projects are a bit different now.

“We could do a lot of the build with volunteers, realistically now with the coding requirements and expertise requirements, especially for things like seismic, we need to have trained professionals on-site to do the builds,” Krafta said. “That said there are still opportunities for volunteers. There's framing, trim, paint, landscaping, those are great opportunities for volunteers.”

He also explained that they are working with the Vancouver Island University carpentry program on projects, as they have in the past. This allows the students to build on the sites and get real-world experience.

In a letter sent to the council from Krafta he said the expected timeline will be two years for construction once permitting is complete and the financing package from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has been approved.

Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.