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Recently I was interviewed by Stephen Calverley for ElliotLakeToday.com about our proposed affordable, sustainable, eco-friendly tiny home community in Elliot Lake. With the need for more affordable starter homes, workforce, and seniors’ housing, our community model has the potential to check a lot of boxes. Our engineer is currently working with city staff to develop a site plan that meets development and building code requirements.
If you are a local contractor or supplier looking to support a development, let us know. We are looking to establish solid business relationships, as we work to build affordable communities across northern, central, and southern Ontario.
Read the full story here … https://www.elliotlaketoday.com/local-news/tiny-homes-proponent-develops-concept-seeks-funding-8161021
We are pleased to announce our recent partnership with Tapestry Community Capital.
Ever looked into where your investments are going and ended up feeling a bit disheartened? Too many traditional investments funnel your money into harmful industries like fossil fuels, deforestation, and weapons.
What if you could invest directly into affordable, sustainable housing for your neighbours and earn healthy returns at the same time?
At Tiny Town Association, we’re excited to soon offer an opportunity to do just that. We’re partnering with Tapestry Community Capital, an organization supporting non-profits and community groups in raising investment for their crucial work.
More details about how you can invest in Tiny Town projects (like our proposed 82-home community in Elliot Lake) are to come in the next few months. But first, what is a community bond? And how can community bond investments support affordable housing in Canada?
Scaling up affordable housing in Canada
There’s no doubt about it — Canadians are facing a housing crisis.
People living on minimum wage or fixed income can’t afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment in most major cities. And the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates we’ll need around 3.5 million new housing units by 2030 to restore affordability. Canada has the lowest number of available housing units per 1,000 people of all the G7 countries.
Non-profit affordable housing providers (like the Tiny Town Association!) have scalable, sustainable solutions. But to bring those solutions to communities, they need flexible financing solutions tailored to their terms and timelines.
Traditional lenders often base loans on a property’s anticipated income. When rents are adjusted below market value, resulting in decreased net income, lenders become hesitant to provide the required funding, creating a funding gap. This challenge is compounded for Canadian non-profit housing providers who cannot take on equity investment. Consequently, these organizations often navigate a complex web of multiple — sometimes over a dozen — financing sources, each with its own set of rules and requirements. It can be a major challenge to align their projects’ milestones and cash flow needs with their financing.
The solution: community bonds
Tapestry Community Capital offers a solution by supporting non-profit organizations in unlocking private capital through a social finance tool — the community bond. Unlike traditional bonds, community bonds not only provide a financial return but also offer investors a social or environmental return.
Community bonds are available to both institutional and retail investors, meaning even individuals with small amounts of available capital can support affordable housing (and other social purpose projects) right in their neighbourhood — helping to house the people who work in their local shops, supporting their disabled and elderly neighbours, and making a serious contribution to the effort to end homelessness in their community.
To date, Tapestry has supported qualified issuers in raising over $120 million in community investment from more than 4,000 community investors. This capital has been deployed by our partners to develop a range of essential community assets, including those in renewable energy, arts & culture, education, and affordable housing.
Benefits of community bonds
From financial capital to social capital, community bonds offer many benefits, including:
Tapestry’s work in affordable housing
Currently, Tapestry supports eight diverse affordable housing providers in unlocking capital using community bonds. Explore some of their stories here.
Want to be the first to know about Tiny Town Association investment opportunities? Send us an email or sign up for our email newsletter here.
Thanks Rasheed, for the opportunity to share our affordable, tiny home community vision with your audience. The more we can get the word out, and help people to understand that our tiny home communities aren’t something to fear, they are just like any other, but smaller and more affordable. We feel our developments will also rekindle what has been lost in traditional housing, community. When the biggest room in your house is the outdoors, meeting and getting to know your neighbours is inevitable.
I had been talking to Loyalist Township about tiny home communities and felt there was interest. An opportunity came up to purchase a property I felt could make a good community, and as many people at the TinyHome.Show asked how they could start a community on land they owned, this seemed like an ideal test project.
I purchased the property, and we submitted this community design proposal. The property is 27-acres, zoned for a single-family dwelling, has no municipal water or sewage service, and backs onto other rural 2-acre residential properties, as well as woodland. Here is the township’s response:
Hi Ed,
Thanks for the additional information.
I can confirm that this will be a very complex project to undertake. Several planning applications will be required, including a Zoning By-law Amendment, Official Plan Amendment, Site Plan Control Application and Condo application. Given that the property is in the rural designation also complicates matters as the Township’s Official Plan states that the Township envisages that the rural settlement pattern will contain very limited residential development. The Official Plan also speaks to development being focussed to the urban settlement areas, where municipal services are available. The County of Lennox and Addington Official Plan also speaks to providing for limited residential development in the rural designation while focusing the growth to urban areas and rural settlement areas.
The community centre also has uses that are primarily directed to the Township’s hamlets or urban settlement areas. The development is also all proposed directly behind existing low density residential homes.
Communal systems are also quite complicated and there are currently none within the Township. These have to be approved by the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks and I believe the municipality has to enter into a municipal responsibility agreement that requires them to take responsibility for failed communal systems. In addition, the entire township is on a highly vulnerable aquifer.
Aside from the issues above, the plan you provided does not contain all the details we would need to understand the proposal (i.e. is the internal road a municipal road or a condo road etc). The plan also did not consider the property itself. For example, there appears to be a natural feature (watercourse) running across the property.
Based on our policy framework and what is being proposed, this proposal will be difficult to support in this location from a staff perspective. My recommendation would be to consult with a planner and engineer familiar with rural development and communal systems and also have the planner review our Official Plan in regards to the limiting rural residential development policies. We would need a full concept brought forward to us to provide any further comments on how the condominium would also truly be set up in addition to addressing the other items above. The concept plan would also have to take into account the actual property being looked at as well.
If you have any further questions at this time, feel free to reach out to me.
I appreciate the detailed response, and how they pointed out the potential challenges along with steps to address them. This is not a small, tiny home development, so if you are thinking of a few tiny homes on your property, you may face similar challenges, just easier to overcome. The communal waste and water services of a larger development will be one of the biggest challenges, as there are not many across Ontario, or Canada. This affordable housing development will be complex to bring together, which just means it will take longer, involve more people, and cost more than our other developments.
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We have been talking to the City of Kingston for a while, and they had provided details on a 2+ acre parcel that we have proposed building 24-homes, a community center, storage lockers, gardens, gazebo, firepits, centralized parking, and lots of green space for the community to enjoy. We have planned a commercial kitchen with dining area where citizens can share a meal, a lounge to gather with neighbours, co-working space, small business space, and a coffee shop in the community center.
While discussions had stalled, recent funding options will hopefully breathe new life into this development. With the need for more affordable housing choices in the city, we bring a unique format that will expand rental and affordable-to-own options for many. We also plan to offer a rent-to-own program for those that would like to take the next step towards home ownership.
To stay informed of our progress in this and any Tiny Town community, subscribe to our newsletter. Its free and we don’t spam.
A little late this week, however this week’s community highlight is the Town of Kincardine, on the shores of Lake Huron in Bruce County, Ontario. We have been talking to the town and they have provided details on a 1.34-acre parcel that we have proposed putting 18-homes on, plus community center, storage lockers, gardens, a gazebo, firepit, centralized parking, and lots of green space for the citizens to enjoy. The community center will provide a community kitchen with dining area where citizens can share a meal, a lounge to gather with neighbours, co-working space, small business space, and a coffee shop.
Let’s play a game.
This game illustrates part of the reason for the increasing number of homelessness everyone is seeing in their cities and towns. People do not become homeless by choice, they become homeless because they have no choice. Increasing house costs, increasing rent costs, renovictions, foreign investment, immigration, whatever you want to blame for the lack of affordable housing, the lack of affordable housing options is what is contributing to homelessness today. It even illustrates how the price of housing, directly affects the number of homeless.
Nobody wants to be homeless, unless they have been homeless so long, it has become a lifestyle.
We need a step-by-step program that gets and keeps people housed, affordably.
1.5M homes by 2032 is an ambitious goal however, the alternative is more people living in friends’ spare rooms, their basements, on couches, and floors, or becoming homeless. While major developers are focused on the high-density, big city builds (the places with the highest need), rural Ontario’s housing crisis is set to explode.
The existing Ontario building industry completed 71,838 units in 2022. The problem is we needed 136,364-units to stay on plan to reach 1.5M homes. If the traditional builders can grow by 5% compounded annually, by 2032 we will only be short 480,000 units, most of which is expected to be in rural Ontario.
Our plan is to build tiny home communities across rural Ontario. The combination of traditional built homes, along with tiny homes, has the potential to meet the anticipated housing need by 2032. Tiny homes can address some of the singles, couples and 3-person household needs, while keeping us on track to absorb some of the big city shortage. We can either plan for it, or be surprised by it.
The following video looks at this plan and explains the numbers. Please share.
Sources/Info/Print Copy:
meeting-rural-onatrio-housing-needs-v2
TTA-canadacities-v7.xlsx
Today I presented the following video to the Canadian Rural and Remote Housing and Homelessness Symposium. The topic was how tiny homes and tiny home communities can address a portion of the housing needs in rural Ontario.
