He started looking for a place to rent two months before returning to Banff for work — but had no luck. Eventually, her employer provided her with a hotel room to live in so she could start working and continue her search from there. He stayed in that hotel room for a month. “It was very shocking to me, that [with] The army of people helping me look for a place and myself, it took me three months to find,” 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 prominent Bow Valley Home Finder Facebook group, which has more than 25,000 members. He said the housing situation in Banff this year has been horrendous. “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen. 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 stay in hotels and guesthouses, while others are crammed into a dormitory with bunk beds and multiple roommates. It results in a summer staff shortage that is plaguing businesses across the city. If employers cannot provide new hires with accommodations for staff, they cannot guarantee that they will be able to move to Banff and find housing. “It’s just destroying human resources departments, it’s breaking them probably across the city,” Poirier said.
Worst staff shortage in years
Michel Dufresne, director of the Job Resource Center in Banff and Canmore, said Banff is facing its worst staffing shortage in years. “I’ve never seen that before,” Dufresne said. Speaking to employers over the past three months, Dufresne said companies are about 20 to 25 percent short of staff this summer. This compares with the usual 10 percent in previous years. City officials say the pandemic has changed the housing situation in Banff, but they’re still trying to figure out why housing is in such short supply. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press) He said these employers had to adjust the way they did business so they could operate with only three-quarters of the staff they normally have. Along with those changes, and adding to the issue, Dufresne said some employers no longer have staff accommodations to offer those interested in working in Banff. “We hear that some larger employers are using hostels for staff accommodation, even some of their own hotel rooms.” Ebony Rempel, CEO of YWCA Banff, says homelessness in Banff is a “terrible” situation for workers. (Submitted by Ebony Rempel) Ebony Rempel, CEO of YWCA Banff, said the lack of housing in town is having a negative impact on her organization. “It’s particularly dire for us … in terms of finding staff housing for those we need to have here to work in the tourism industry,” he said. YWCA staff are offered lodging at its hotel, and Rebel said workers from other organizations often stay there as well. Forty percent of job vacancies in Banff have staff housing available, according to Dufresne. But he said that’s not always the case for workers. “We’ve also heard that someone would advertise with staff housing, people would apply for the job and at the interview they were told 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 was cancelled, crammed into rooms
Bruty was hired in March with guaranteed staff residency to start work in June. But five days before she was scheduled to arrive in Canada from England, she was told her employer had run out of places to live. Then she was on her own to find a place to stay. Bruty eventually found a room to rent through Facebook, which cost her $800 for a security deposit and a month’s rent. “The money I came to Canada with, half of it was gone within two days of landing because I had to have a roof over my head,” Bruty said. Samantha Bruty moved from England to Canada in June. Now he sleeps in a bunk with two other people in the same room. (Submitted by Samantha Bruty) After that month, Bruty was able to move into staff accommodation. She now sleeps in a bunk, sharing a room with two of her colleagues – despite being promised just one roommate. “You have almost no personal space,” he said. “I’m lucky I can fit my suitcase in a locker, but that’s pretty much all I’ve got.” Heisler said a situation like this is not unusual. 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 issue or a housing issue, period, but we have a stability issue,” Heisler said. Poirier said she has seen this issue grow over the decades. “I’ve never, ever seen it like this. I hear people struggling because they’re stuck in terrible rental situations that they just can’t get out of or they’ll have to leave the city.”
Where did all the houses go?
If summer is usually Banff’s busiest time for visitors and staff, yet the town has never before experienced such a housing shortage, where has all the housing for these workers gone? No one is sure. Sharon Oakley is the Town of Banff’s director of housing sustainability. “It’s a really, really interesting dilemma that we’re in right now. And I’ll be honest, we’re a little confused as to what’s going on,” Oakley said. Oakley suspects the pandemic has changed the lives of people in Banff. While much of the world shut down in 2020, Oakley said many temporary foreign workers have returned home, creating an influx of vacant units in the city. Sharon Oakley says no one is sure why housing is so scarce in Banff, but figures 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 accommodation, he said many people living in dense situations have found the opportunity to find their own place. “I think a lot of people are still wondering if they want to have more roommates or not,” Oakley said. “So when we had the flood of people going back to work, there wasn’t the same availability in terms of housing.” The YWCA’s Rempel agrees that the pandemic has changed people’s lives, with many now choosing to have more balance in their lifestyles. He suspects that people no longer work as many jobs as they used to. “People who were working maybe two jobs and would obviously only need one accommodation for them are now working less. And so we have to hire more people to do the same work that we needed before the pandemic,” he said. Heisler and Dufresne said it could be in part because people who moved to Banff during the pandemic to work remotely decided to stay — even though Parks Canada’s eligible residency regulation technically doesn’t allow it. “This shouldn’t happen. You should work 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 lose their vacation rental housing. “I think slowly taking pieces out of the market where people lived in Canmore has really hurt the balance,” Heisler said. Oakley said the Town of Banff should have more specifics on the cause of the current housing shortage in the fall. Meanwhile, they are actively working to create more units to house residents. “Our community recognizes the need for more accommodation to be able to house people. It is certainly a priority for our council, and has been for a long time, to provide affordable places to call people who come and choose to support community .”
