Summerside to build more than 100 homes with federal funding

The federal government and City of Summerside have reached an agreement that will provide the city with $5.8 million from the federal Housing Accelerator Fund to fast track 132 housing units in the next three years.

The agreement was announced Tuesday afternoon in Summerside.

"We want to make sure that people have a place that they can live, that their kids have a place that they can live, that their parents and their grandparents have places they can live in and afford," said Mayor Dan Kutcher. 

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"One of the things we can really do as a city is increase our housing supply to address affordability." 

But the money won't be going directly into creating new buildings. Instead, it's used to help eliminate barriers to speed the process up. For example, updating the city's official plan and bylaws along with creating grants for certain types of developments. 

"It's a little bit different than a here's an amount of money for a shiny project or a big building and we can connect one dot to the next," he said. 

"The dollars get spread over a variety of different things, some for infrastructure support, some for incentivization, some for partnership programs with other levels of government."

'No-brainer for us'

The funding is part of a longer-term plan for 725 housing units over the next decade.

As part of the agreement, Summerside committed to 14 initiatives, initiatives that were laid out in letters from federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser to mayors across Canada about the Housing Accelerator Fund.

The commitments are focused on higher housing densities in cities, including allowing four units per residential lot as-of-right, reducing barriers for additional dwelling units on residential properties, such as basement apartments and in-law suites, and creating incentives for the creation of multi-unit buildings.

"[The agreement] will ensure that Summerside has more of the kind of homes we need to tackle the housing crisis," Fraser said in the news release.

"It was a bit of a no-brainer for us. These are things we were gonna be doing anyway," said Kutcher. 

"We're moving as fast as we can. We've got still a long way to go, but this really helps finance and subsidize some of these programs and accelerate some of the things that we're doing." 

'Have to be aggressive'

The City of Charlottetown balked at some of the conditions in Fraser's letter on the Housing Accelerator Fund. In particular, Mayor Philip Brown objected to allowing four-unit residential developments anywhere in the city.

"We're at a stage where the country is growing, provinces are growing and housing is struggling to keep up," said Egmont MP Bobby Morrissey.

"So we have to be aggressive, but to be aggressive you need municipalities that are prepared to step up and be aggressive as well."

The housing situation on P.E.I. has been described as a crisis since 2019.

The apartment vacancy rate has regularly been the lowest in the country. One housing researcher estimates the province needs 5,000 more homes immediately to end the crisis, and the province estimates a need for more than 2,000 new housing units a year to keep up with the rate of population growth.

As of Oct. 31, Statistics Canada reported about 176,000 people living on P.E.I., an increase of 6,700 or 4.0 per cent over the previous year.

"Summerside is a dynamic city. It has a mayor and council and administrative staff that stepped up to the plate and met the requirements of the Government of Canada, as other municipalities have," said Morrissey.

"So those municipalities that do that will receive the funding required."