The discussion about tiny homes is coming back to city council on Oct. 1.
In a motion brought forth at the Sept. 9 meeting by Coun. Anne Marie Gillis, council voted 6-2 in favour of having city staff develop an action plan to create tiny transitional houses.
“We've done some initial research to see what other municipalities have done, how they've gone about it, how they've set them up and how they operate,” says David Jackson, the City of Sarnia’s general manager of engineering and operations.
“We're now trying to kind of layout the steps we would need to take, and some of the challenges we'd have to work through to be able to implement that [tiny homes], and the cost involved in that. So this report is just making council aware of those, and then confirming what next steps they want us to implement.”
After completing their report, city staff are presenting city council with three options on how to proceed with tiny transitional homes.
The first option is approving the addition of a social services project management position and an initial budget of $100,000 for consulting services in order to start the implementation of a transitional tiny house community.
The second option is moving the request for the creation of a transitional tiny house community to the Lambton County social services division.
The third option is deferring the addition of the social services project management position and initial budget to the 2025 budget deliberations.
In their report, staff looked at two other municipalities that have created tiny home communities. Peterborough and the Region of Waterloo have adopted this method to help people transition into more permanent housing.
The report found that the annual cost to run the tiny house community in Peterborough ranges somewhere around $2.2M to $2.6M per year. These communities consist of “50 tiny houses and communal facilities including washroom and shower, staff space, security space, and community hub. All are staffed 24/7 with both security and social services staff.”
Jackson explains that because social services are currently done through the county, this is why a specific social services project manager would have to be hired if that option was voted through. The city’s report found that “social services supports are a critical part of the communities both to manage them and to try to progress the residents into more stable housing.”
Currently, Peterborough and the Region of Waterloo outsource their operations of the tiny home communities. Chatham-Kent, which just approved the implementation of this type of community, plans to operate it with a social services staff.
Operations are just one of the factors the report points out will have to be discussed if a tiny home community is implemented. Other factors include construction and site selection. These factors will not be voted on at Tuesday’s meeting.
“The other communities [Peterborough and The Region of Waterloo] kind of developed a set of criteria, certain places they didn't want it to be near, others they were okay with,” Jackson explains. “And then it also looks at, is there water and sewer servicing available at the site? We'd have to develop a list of criteria, come back with a number of options, and then make a selection.”
While this report did not include any research the city has done into if residents of Rainbow Park, for example, would be willing to use tiny transitional homes, Jackson says the other municipalities they consulted did look into that aspect.
“They had received a positive response where some of those concerns about going to those larger open room shelters are mitigated when you have a private tiny cabin. Some of the communities who had implemented had done some of that kind of consultation work and received a response and interest from people willing to utilize those versus a kind of a typical open room shelter,’ says Jackson.
As for a possible timeline? The report found that the other municipalities using NOW housing successfully “delivered tiny houses within six months of purchase. Implementing the overall project within one year is ambitious but could be possible depending on the amount of time taken to select a site and the level of complexity of site preparation for the selected site.”