Disappointment is the word of the day in St. Albert affordable housing circles as two local projects remain on the outside looking in as the province continues to announce new housing projects.
Two local projects that were up for grants recently learned they didn't make the cut.
The Sturgeon Foundation had applied for $4 million for an expansion to St. Albert's North Ridge Lodge that would have provided 42 units for adults with disabilities. The St. Albert Housing Society was seeking $6.4 million to build the first half of its Big Lake Pointe project, a 96-unit rental complex in North Ridge. Both groups are disappointed.
"I just feel bad. I might have let some potential clients down," said Marguerite Bosvik of the Sturgeon Foundation.
Feedback from the Housing and Urban Affairs ministry is that her project's costs were higher than some others so Bosvik will be doing a review to see what she can change.
The ministry is on target to achieve its target of 11,000 new affordable housing units by 2012, said spokesman Dan Laville, but it's unclear whether another RFP process will happen in 2011.
Two times unlucky
For the St. Albert Housing Society, it's the second consecutive year it's been turned down by the grant program.
"There's disappointment, obviously," said board chair David McGreer. "All the signs were there that we stood a good chance of receiving the funding."
Only one of every three projects received funding and the successful ones tended to have a higher portion of units earmarked for the homeless and seniors, McGreer said.
"Our project is geared more towards families on low incomes," he said. "When the society looked at the spectrum of need in St. Albert, we determined from a number of sources that the greatest need was trying to provide housing for low-income families."
This leaves McGreer hesitant to try a third time for the grant program.
"There's just no guarantee that we can be successful on a third attempt so we have to look at ways of doing this without provincial funding," he said.
He has a meeting scheduled with the city to explore options but doesn't have any ideas yet, he said.
Mayor Nolan Crouse said he's "been very disappointed over the last few days" since learning the local projects didn't get funding.
He's at a loss regarding the housing society's desire to move ahead without provincial dollars.
"Nothing comes to mind easily unless there's a developer out there that has the ability to do something," Crouse said. "Certainly from a capital point of view with the city, I can't imagine us pulling it off that way."
The city generally spends around $14 million a year on capital projects so this one housing project would eat up nearly half.
"We clearly wouldn't fund it with city money. We just totally wouldn't do it," Crouse said. "We just have too many priorities."
Coun. Roger Lemieux was council's liaison to the housing society board when the organization reworked its application for its second attempt at the provincial grant. The society followed the suggestions of department officials to improve its bid. First it convinced the city to buy the land for $2.3 million and increased the number of homeless units to 18, he said.
Lemieux sees two options: finding a private partner to develop affordable housing or sell the land and use the proceeds for some other affordable housing initiative.
"Certainly I don't want to shelve it," he said. "I want to continue on with affordable housing. There's a need for it in St. Albert."
St. Albert MLA Ken Allred said the news is disappointing but he pointed out that the province contributed to the stage one expansion of North Ridge Lodge that was completed in late 2009, the Rosedale development on Hebert Road that opened last spring and the Citadel Mews complex near the hospital that opened in the fall of 2009.
"We've got some high expectations in getting a lot of these facilities," he said. "Overall we're pretty fortunate in that we've got quite a number of good projects just in the last three years."
