Last year, Margie, a 24-year-old educational assistant, moved from Toronto to Grey County, a region in southwestern Ontario on the shores of Georgian Bay. With its historic main streets, orchards, and craggy landscapes, the county is a getaway for city dwellers, a hotspot for winter sports and farm-to-table dining, and home to the province’s only year-round resort and spa.
But Margie had another reason for decamping. Frustrated with the high prices and competition in Toronto, she hoped to find cheaper rent in a smaller community. But since moving, she’s been plagued with much of the same: limited supply coupled with requirements for a higher salary or longer rental history than she can claim. This has left her bouncing between short-term rentals and precarious month-to-month accommodations in the Town of the Blue Mountains and in nearby Collingwood, where she works.
“There are so few [rentals]; I can count them with one hand,” says Margie, whose name TVO Today has changed to protect her anonymity.
With a salary of $40,000 a year, Margie has few options to live within a reasonable commuting distance. Without access to a car or reliable public transit, Margie relies on taxis or coworkers to get around.
Local officials fear the tourism industry will suffer if essential workers can’t find housing. In August, the Blue Mountains council declared a housing crisis. As Blue Mountains Ratepayers’ Association chair Jim Torrance told council, the community relies heavily on service and hospitality workers, the very demographic that's increasingly being priced out.
“I think the perception is that the Town of the Blue Mountains is such a well-off community. How much help do they need when it comes to different types of housing?” says Torrance, who is part of the local housing-strategy working group.
But according to a housing-needs assessment commissioned by the town in 2023, while multiple high-earning households skew the income average — which was $157,000 a year in 2020 — 50 per cent of local households make less than $100,000 a year. Meanwhile, the average two-bedroom unit goes for $2,750 a month, while the average single-family home sold for $1.6 million in 2023, according to data from the Lakelands Association of Realtors.
“If you’re below $100,000 in today’s housing market, you’re really quite challenged,” Torrance says, adding that the Blue Mountains’ housing mix is dramatically imbalanced, with detached homes making up 80 per cent of the stock. The town has no purpose-built rental units and few condominiums or townhouses. The working group says the town needs to focus on building more affordable housing, purpose-built rental housing, seniors’ housing, and dedicated workers’ housing.
Sam Chapman, a 32-year-old sanitation worker who works in the Town of the Blue Mountains, knows this challenge well. He rents a room in a house with friends in Collingwood. He and his partner (a retail worker) have been struggling to find an apartment in town that rents for less than 60 per cent of their income. “The stuff you do find is starting at $2,000 a month, and that’s hard to do,” he says. “From the very first weekend of May to the end of September, I did overtime every week. It kind of sucks when you’re doing that much work, and you can’t come back to your own place.”
According to Torrance, such challenges stem from market forces, remote work, and the town’s location near both Georgian Bay and the Niagara Escarpment, which attracts visitors and residents.
The town “is a very appealing community to live in, and for a decade, we have seen GTA residents transform their home equity into homes of substantial value in our town,” he says. According to the housing-needs assessment, the Blue Mountains has experienced the second-fastest growth of any community in Ontario, at a rate of 26 per cent between 2016 and 2021. The majority of that migration has been from Peel Region and Toronto.
“It's a case of developers identifying a market opportunity and creating housing that profitably fills that demand. What it shows is that market forces, without intervention of some form, won't resolve our housing challenge.”
That’s where the town’s declaration of a housing crisis comes in. Mayor Andrea Matrosovs says it could help fast-track priority development projects, particularly those that incorporate affordable units. It could also assist with the allocation of municipal water and sewage services to those developments.
In April, a group of private-sector professionals, including developers, land-use planners, and finance experts established the non-profit Georgian Bay Housing Development Corporation. Its goal is to support developers looking to build affordable housing in Grey, Bruce, Huron, and Simcoe counties. That support could take the form of partnerships with other non-profits, religious organizations, or private developers. It’s also developing a toolkit to standardize some elements of affordable projects, like land-use-planning information and possibly even design templates.
Julie Scarcella, the chair of GBHDC, says the corporation’s model was influenced by several other non-profit real-estate developers and housing authorities across Canada, including the Banff Housing Corporation, which has operated since 1993 and currently manages 133 affordable rental apartments. But, she notes, the Blue Mountains declined to partially fund a pilot project proposed by the corporation earlier this year that would have helped them develop the toolkit, leverage other funding programs, and potentially test it on a real-world affordable housing project. At the time, council expressed concern about the group’s newness and the complexities of a single municipality managing a pilot project for a multi-community organization. In the meantime, the GBHDC is trying to secure corporate sponsors for its toolkit.
Matrosovs says the town would be open to collaborating with businesses or non-profit entities that have “workable and practical” plans to build housing: “The town is not in the business of actually building housing, so we do need to work in collaboration with partners.”
She hopes that Grey County — which serves as the upper-tier municipality for nine towns, including the Blue Mountains — will provide some support through its own Housing Action Plan, passed last year. “That’s an important piece of the puzzle, too,” she says.
Torrance says the town needs long-term affordable housing now or it risks losing workers to other regions altogether. “An aging population … will have greater need for support in the years ahead,” he says. “A lack of service workers, which definitely includes those in the health-care field, would most assuredly compromise the quality of life experienced by residents.”
In the meantime, Margie, who is actively searching for a new place to live after her current short-term rental runs out, feels stuck. “It just puts you in a cycle, which is the one that I’m in, where you’re just very precariously housed.”
Donate