As a housing crisis continues in Grey Bruce, a local organization is stepping in to help find some answers. The Community Foundation Grey Bruce will host a Vital Conversation on Housing on Thursday, December 1, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Foundation Executive Director Stuart Reid said several guest speakers will be sharing their findings, and participants can also share their experiences.
Bruce County's Tania Dickson, Housing Services Manager, and Jack Van Dorp, Manager of Land Use Planning, will share the county's Affordable Housing 101 Toolkit. Researcher and Advocate, Erica Phipps, will have survey results collected by the RentSafe Owen Sound Collaborative. And Marilyn Struthers, Institute of Southern Georgian Bay, will talk about the National Financialization of Housing Lab and how it could help municipalities to cope with the housing crisis.
Reid added they will also talk about the findings in the Vital Focus on Housing report released earlier this year.
"There will be an opportunity for people to talk about their own experience, and we'll probably have some break out rooms, mostly around those clusters from our report that I mentioned. You know, living standards, equity and affordability, and those will be opened up for people to share and learn from one another," he said.
Reid pointed out the report viewed at the housing crisis was from the perspective of well being, equity, living standards, accessibility, and affordability.
"Particularly in the tourism and service sector , you know, how wages were not increasing to reflect market rates of housing, so that was really pricing people out of the market," said Reid.
"One in two rental households in Owen Sound is spending over 30 per cent of their income on housing. That is quite substantial," he said.
Reid said the seminar is a chance to bring all the parties together to come up with the innovation and collaboration needed to address the housing crisis in the region.
"What we're hoping to do is land on a call to action, a way to get involved, and maybe some modelling for how we can bring people together for the kind of of complex solution making that we really see is going to be the solution to the situation in grey Bruce," he continued.
To register for Vital Conversation or read the full Vital Focus on Housing report, visit their website.