Jasper needs more housing for residents and essential workers, recovery team says

The Joint Recovery Co-ordination Centre is still trying to find living accommodations for essential workers, officials told Jasper's mayor and council Tuesday.

In the aftermath of the July wildfire, efforts have been ongoing to find appropriate housing for residents who lost their homes and for essential workers who need places to stay so they can work in the townsite.

Eighty-five per cent of essential workers have now found housing or have been provided housing by the recovery command centre, but more space is needed, Andy Esarte told council.

"The fact at the moment is we don't have sufficient accommodation secured for the list that we have," said Esarte, who works with the recovery command centre. 

"So though we expect more coming online pretty quickly here, we're still in a point in time where we have to be very judicious with the available stock and are focusing on those core functions."

Officials have planned two stages of housing: temporary until Nov. 30, and then interim housing until the rebuild is complete.

Most of the people who still don't have housing in Jasper are medical workers and education workers, Esarte said.

He said there is no secured funding for interim housing at this time, and a needs assessment is only 90 per cent complete.

Esarte said the JRCC sees three options for interim housing:

• Pre-fabricated housing.
• Making use of existing housing and accommodation that already exists in Jasper.
• Looking at accommodation and housing that may exist in outlying communities. 

The municipality has issued a request for an expression of interest in providing prefabricated housing in and around Jasper. 

The expression of interest is not a competitive process, according to documents posted on the municipality's website. 

The town said it wants to understand:

• Potential options for the provision of ready-to-move workforce accommodations, or camps, to sites in and around Jasper.
• The industry's capacity and availability to produce modular housing.
• Temporary housing configuration options, scale and variation, which could be provided to maximize flexibility of use.
• Which utilities, such as power and water, would be needed to enable the temporary housing solution.

A cost analysis, which is 30 per cent complete, assumes people will be paying market rents for interim housing.

Esarte told councillors that the town will need to look at accommodations that are usually reserved for visitors, even Airbnb.

It's possible people might be provided housing in a place like Hinton and be able to use a regional bus service, he said.

Communication concerns

Coun. Wendy Hall brought up concerns around communication and housing during the meeting. 

"We're having long-term residents being told to go to shelters," Hall said. "These are people who have never lived in a shelter, and I don't think losing your home and your job due to a wildfire, I don't think that's where you should be sent."

She said she worries that people were falling through the cracks. 

"How well a community takes care of its most vulnerable, to me, is a very important piece of a community," she said.

Many challenges lie ahead for Jasper as it tackles the rebuild. In total, 358 of 1,113 structures in the community were lost when the fire entered the townsite on July 24.

"There isn't a clear path to building housing. Housing was a challenge before the fire," Esarte said. 

"The idea that we can somehow create enough housing to address a significant portion of the current need in the next few months just isn't realistic."