The City of Fernie has a long history of supporting affordable housing, adopting its first Affordable and Attainable Housing Strategy in 2007. However, in the time since the adoption of the Affordable Housing Strategy, a number of factors—including demographic changes, community and regional growth, development pressures, and changing market conditions—resulted in significant housing affordability challenges in Fernie. Within this context, the City of Fernie engaged CitySpaces to update its Affordable Housing Strategy in 2016.
The update to the Affordable Housing Strategy was developed in four phases. An initial phase involved the creation of a Housing Indicators Report to provide a baseline understanding of housing need and demand in the City of Fernie. As part of this assessment, our team researched housing indicators, including current housing mix, tenure, rental prices, resale values, and household income.
The second phase of the project involved stakeholder and community consultation, in which findings from the Housing Indicators Report were shared with the community. Members of the public were invited to an open house, focus groups were convened with local residents, and key stakeholder interviews were conducted to augment the data outlined in the Housing Indicators Report. The CitySpaces team also designed, administered and analyzed an online questionnaire to gauge residents views about housing issues.
Following analysis of this qualitative and quantitative data, the third phase of the Affordable Housing Strategy process led to the creation of a report that identified key housing gaps in the community and priority groups experiencing significant challenges finding affordable and suitable housing. Specifically, the analysis found that single-parent families, renters, moderate-income working families, and single people of all ages with low or fixed incomes are challenged with housing affordability, and there was evidence that the lack of affordable housing impacts employee recruitment and retention.
Feedback from the community was used to inform the fourth phase of the development of the Affordable Housing Strategy, in which strategic actions that respond to the unique housing needs of Fernie were identified, as well as a set of actions and timeline for implementation. Fernie’s Affordable Housing Strategy will provide the community with a roadmap of short-term and long-term actions that can be implemented to respond to the community’s unique housing needs.
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