As a local who lived in Banff for two decades, Nikole Poirier didn’t think twice when she left the mountain town to help family members retire. But when he was ready to return, he faced a major problem: there was nowhere to live.
He started looking for a place to rent two months before returning to Banff for work, but had no luck.
Eventually, his employer provided him with a hotel room to live in so he could start working and continue his research from there.
He lived in that hotel room for a month.
“That was pretty shocking to me, that [with] the army of people helping me look for a place and myself, it took me three months to find it,” Poirier said.
It took Nikole Poirier three months to find a place to live in Banff, and for one of those months she lived in a hotel. She says her two cats are an additional limitation to finding housing in the city. (Submitted by Nikole Poirier)
Cindy Heisler has been helping people find places to live in the Bow Valley for nine years through her popular Bow Valley Home Finder Facebook group, which has more than 25,000 members.
He said the housing situation in Banff this year has been horrible.
“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it. It’s twice as bad as I’ve ever seen it. There’s just no place to rent,” Heisler said.
Many long-time locals and new Banffites are struggling to find housing this year. Like Poirier, some live in hotels and hostels, while others have crammed into a dormitory with bunk beds and multiple roommates.
It’s translating into a summer staff shortage that’s affecting businesses across the city. Unless employers can offer new hires with accommodation for staff, they cannot guarantee that they will be able to move to Banff and find housing.
“It’s just tearing apart HR departments, rather tearing them apart across the city,” Poirier said.
Worst staff shortage in years
Michel Dufresne, director of the Employment Resource Center in Banff and Canmore, said Banff is facing its worst staffing shortage in years.
“I’ve never seen that,” Dufresne said.
Speaking to employers over the past three months, Dufresne said businesses are 20 to 25 percent understaffed this summer. This compares with the usual 10% in recent years.
Town officials say the pandemic changed the housing situation in Banff, but they’re still trying to figure out why housing is so scarce. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)
He said these employers have had to adjust the way they do business so they can only operate with three-quarters of the workforce they normally have.
Along with those changes, and adding to the problem, Dufresne said some employers no longer have staff accommodation to offer to those interested in working in Banff.
“We hear that some larger employers are using hostels for staff accommodation, and even some of their own hotel rooms.”
YWCA Banff CEO Ebony Rempel says Banff’s housing shortage is a “dire” situation for workers. (Submitted by Ebony Rempel)
Ebony Rempel, CEO of YWCA Banff, said the shortage of lodging in town is negatively affecting her organization.
“It’s particularly serious for us … in terms of finding staff accommodation for those we need to have here to work in the tourism industry,” he said.
YWCA staff are housed in their hotel, and Rempel said workers from other organizations often stay there as well.
According to Dufresne, forty percent of vacant jobs in Banff have staff accommodation available. But he said that doesn’t always happen for employees.
“We also heard that someone would advertise with staff housing, people would apply for the job and be told at the interview that there was no more staff housing available,” Dufresne said.
Something similar happened to Samantha Bruty when she moved to Banff earlier this month.
Staff accommodation cancelled, rooms crammed
Bruty was hired in March with guaranteed staff accommodation to start work in June. But five days before he arrived in Canada from England, he was told his employer had run out of room to live.
Then she went alone to find a place to stay. Bruty eventually found a room to rent through Facebook, which cost him $800 for a security deposit and a month’s rent.
“The money I came to Canada with, half of it was within two days of landing because I needed to have a roof over my head,” Bruty said.
Samantha Bruty moved from England to Canada in June. Now he sleeps in a bunk bed with two other people in the same room. (Submitted by Samantha Bruty)
After that month, Bruty was able to move into staff accommodation. Now he sleeps on a bunk bed, lives in a room with two of his co-workers, even though he’s only promised one roommate.
“You have virtually no personal space,” he said. “I’m lucky I can put my suitcase in a locker, but that’s about all I’ve got.”
Heisler said a situation like this is not uncommon. He said he has heard of even worse living conditions, with up to a dozen people living in one house because they have nowhere else to go.
“It’s almost like we don’t just have an affordable housing problem or a housing problem, period, we have a stability problem,” Heisler said.
Poirier said he has witnessed this problem over the decades.
“I’ve never, ever seen it that way. I’m hearing people struggle because they’re stuck in terrible rental situations that they just can’t get out of because otherwise they’d have to leave the city.”
Where did all the housing go?
If summer is usually Banff’s busiest time for visitors and staff, but the town has never faced a housing shortage like this before, where did all the housing for those workers go?
No one is sure.
Sharon Oakley is the Housing Sustainability Manager for the Town of Banff.
“It’s a very, very interesting dilemma that we’re in right now. And I’ll be honest, we’re a little perplexed as to what’s going on,” Oakley said.
Oakley suspects that the pandemic changed the living situation of people in Banff. Even as much of the world shut down in 2020, Oakley said many temporary foreign workers returned home, creating an influx of empty units in the city.
Sharon Oakley says no one knows why housing supply is so tight in Banff, but data coming in the fall should answer some questions. (Submitted by Sharon Oakley)
As public messages spread around the world to prevent the transmission of COVID-19 by social distancing and avoiding shared accommodations, he said many people living in crowded situations took the opportunity to get their own place
“I think a lot of people are still wondering if they want to have more roommates or not,” Oakley said. “That’s why when we had the flood of people coming back to work, there wasn’t the same availability of accommodation.”
The YWCA’s Rempel agrees that the pandemic has changed people’s lives, with many now choosing to have more balance in their lifestyles.
She suspects that people no longer work multiple jobs like they did in the past.
“People who used to work two jobs and obviously just have to find accommodation for themselves, are now working less. So we need to hire more people to do the same amount of work we needed before the pandemic,” she he said.
Heisler and Dufresne said that could be in part due to people who moved to Banff during the pandemic to work remotely and decided to stay, even though Parks Canada’s eligible residency regulation technically doesn’t allows
“This shouldn’t be happening. You should be working in Banff [to live in Banff]but it’s not something they enforce, unfortunately,” Dufresne said.
Heisler also said a similar housing shortage in Canmore could inadvertently hurt Banff, as Banff workers who live in Canmore and commute to work are losing housing to vacation rentals.
“I think slowly taking pieces out of the market where people were living in Canmore has really hurt the balance,” Heisler said.
Oakley said the town of Banff should have more concrete data on the cause of the current housing shortage in the fall. In the meantime, they are actively working to create more units to house residents.
“Our community recognizes the need for more accommodation to accommodate people. It is certainly a priority for our council, and has been for a long time, to provide affordable places to live for people who come and choose to donate support to our municipality. community.”