I wanted to start a new thread as the last one has wandered. In former times , housing was an issue here in Tofino . People working in the herring plant would camp along Sharp Road by the Dolphin Motel. Sin City was built as a response to this and other housing issues.
McMillan Bloedel built ten or twenty houses as well as a trailer park to support its logging operations in the area.
Logging and fishing are gone and tourism was seen as the way forward. Now tourism is seen as being largely responsible for the housing shortage . Is tourism the problem or has it just been grossly mismanaged in Tofino ??
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11 comments:
I think it's actually been managed well by Tofino, all things considered. Compared to other communities, anyways.
Resorts and VRs have all built staff housing on site, Tofino has the townhomes on Arnet St. and Gibson St., a housing complex on Sharp Road now (ironic, I know), also Sea Otter and Yew Wood apartments, and in 2024 the first of the Headwaters buildings will be ready for occupation.
There are a few other housing projects in the works that will surface in the next 3-5 years as well.
Can't we all go back to hating the hippies? Or Ucluelet? And stop all this fighting amongst ourselves.
Seriously though. We have it pretty good here on the west coast. Could it be better? Of course. But is could be a hell of a lot worse.
Both are accurate. Tourism has a lot of marginal paying jobs and seasonal employees looking for cheap accommodation. But Tofino decision making and foresight has been atrocious. We have this deal with the province were no end of money can be spent on cosmetic improvements that support tourism while we have been short on water and market housing solutions for twenty years. At the same time we allow houses to be used as businesses Think about it. The priorities have been all ass backwards. Spurred on by narrow minded councils trying to save the world from the latest environmental cause dejour. 25% of the working class live in slum conditions as bad as a ......fill in the blank....third world barrio? But we are a roaring success in the media. Paradise. A good rock slide on the Hwy to Port and Tofino has bout 4 days of fuel. No one thinks of the basics anymore. We have dillettante councils.
Tourism provides the average worker with a low standard of living . An entry level job with government of any level is much more desirable.
From the Clayoquot Bioshere study :
CBT executive director Rebecca Hurwitz explained that the report is a critical tool for identifying regional priorities and helping the CBT direct its granting and programming towards those priorities, but also offers a myriad of benefits for the community.
“Having the data is one thing, what we do with it is what matters,” Hurwitz said.
The report includes the region’s living wage calculation, which is up to $26.51 an hour, up from $20.11 in 2018’s Vital Signs report.
The report states that 51 per cent of the region’s residents earned less than the living wage in 2021.
Tofino has had a collection of people going through its revolving district office doors. Not all have been competent. Some have been liabilities to the town for their failures to properly do their jobs. Failures to apply for grant monies have resulted in us paying for an enormously more expensive sewer system as one example. Other examples are staff who have had their ideas promoted beyond where they should have functionally gone. Other examples of poor choices have involved delegating, with council’s permission, to clueless consultants and then not taking any public feedback into account in a plan.
So asking has Tourism failed Tofino results in a multitude of answers.
The first failure was replacing natural resources with tourism without a plan. It just happened spontaneously.
Tofino did not plan or account for the demands created by tourists being here. Thus our water shortages each summer and much larger than locally needed sewer system.
The biggest Tourism failures were #1. Tofino allowing vacation rentals everywhere. #2 Tofino allowing vacation rentals without property owners living on site.
Tourism continues to fail the community as it creates a demand for workers who need places to live.
This results in tourism businesses expanding into our scarce industrial lands and council blindly approving those non industrial uses.
The industrial high paying jobs of the potential Catface copper mine will not have industrial lands available in Tofino as a result.
That and the pressure to find housing are major failures of tourism.
Tourism does not create real wealth.
Real wealth is when something tangible is made from nothing and creates foreign exchange flowing to Canada.
Tourists are just like rats, but with better public relations.
So here we are with workers supporting the tourists working for low pay and living in trailers.
That’s a tourism failure.
Tourism is a mandate of all levels of government. Any town in Canada would see a similar percentage of people working below a living wage. When was the last time a private company announced a major investment in any community without substantial government subsidies? AI will now start to terminate many of these low skilled jobs, creating even more separation between the haves and the have nots. But fear not, I just saw Gord Johns slipping into a phone both; Universal Basic Income to the rescue.
Before tofino declared itself a tourist destination resort in the early 2000s, 62% of the dollar economy of Tofino was from fish farm related activity. That segment didn't go away. it just got ignored by an overenthusiastic component believing in the miracle of tourism to solve everything except inadequate infrastructure.
Tourism BC and Tourism Tofino had no interest in assuring anybody that Tofino's infrastructure - sewer, water, housing, employment, bylaws, and planning - were adequate to support as many tourists as could possibly be encouraged come here.........
Much like the fisherman who caught so many fish he sank his own boat, it feels like Tofino finds itself is this spot.
How do you correct a couple of decades of inadequate thinking and greed which has gotten us to the dilemma we are in now without getting a high paid consultant to do a study.?
I am pretty sure Tofino rules say a caretaker or suite is mandatory in all vacation rentals. The resident may work somewhere else and a vacation rental company looks after the property. To me it’s win win …accommodations for locals and tourist $ we need now.
There is no requirement for the owner to use a management company. They can provide housing, and operate their VR themselves.
It seems the province is also recognizing that units already providing some housing will satisfy the principal residence requirement.
"Where the host is a tenant, the Province may
also consider their tenancy agreement to verify
principal residence status. Some local
governments have established a Landlord
Consent Form as part of business licensing to
confirm that the property owner does not
object to the short-term rental."
7:29 there’s another seemingly more logical way to read the situation. If the landlord does not object to his long term tenant running a VR from the rental, then it may be possible for a tenant to do so if all the other requirements are met. However that is the situation where the renter is doing the VR and by implication doing all the work and keeping the money from the visitors and none is going to the property owner.
7:25 A.M.
" slipping into a phone booth; "
How is that possible, especially after all those trips he made to the parliamentary buffet at our expense?
It must have been quite a sight.
Now I know how they get sardines in cans.
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