The Airdrie City View's front-page story this week is a deep dive into homelessness and under-housing in Airdrie – an article that also touches on the city's lack of affordable, subsidized, or below-market housing availability.
Our newsroom has been working on this piece since the topic of homelessness arose at Airdrie City council in early March. That delegation from Community Links was certainly eye-opening, and sent us down a bit of a rabbit hole in terms of learning about the city's under-housed population. Such investigating inevitably led us down the road of learning about Airdrie's lack of affordable housing.
A 2017 housing assessment showed just 0.3 per cent of Airdrie's housing stock was considered “below-market” rentals, which falls well below a national average of six per cent. The situation hasn't really improved since then. According to Community Links, there were five applications for every single one of Airdrie's affordable housing units in 2021.
Everyone interviewed for this story agreed on one point: before a long-term solution to prevent homelessness can be determined and delivered in Airdrie, more local data on homelessness is necessary. Airdrie does not currently participate in a point-in-time count to determine the city's homeless population.
There's no reason not to conduct such statistics-gathering initiatives regularly. Doing so would benefit the City of Airdrie and the non-profit groups that are devoted to bettering the community's housing situation, as it would help identify service needs and help with long-term planning on strategies to prevent homelessness in the future.
Thankfully, some solutions are coming – but it's hard to say exactly when, and how helpful they will be. City council approved a Below Market Housing Strategy last year, and both the Rocky View Foundation and Airdrie Housing Ltd. have acquired properties to expand their affordable housing portfolios.
The completion of those housing projects cannot come soon enough.
