Saskatoon fast-tracks housing initiative to address rising rents

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The lack of housing availability and affordability is taking its toll on many people, but it’s not just a big city problem, as Saskatoon is discovering.

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The city recently announced that Camponi Housing Corp. has been selected to develop a 120-unit building that will provide affordable housing mainly geared towards families.

“We have about 804 families that are on our waiting list, looking for affordable housing,” said Angela Bishop, chair of Camponi Housing, a not-for-profit Métis housing organization that has been around for 50 years.

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The housing project will be located on a piece of land in the city’s southeast that was sold to Camponi Housing as part of the municipal Housing Action Plan. The action plan was set up so the city could access funding from the federal government’s housing accelerator fund and fast-track the construction of more than 900 housing units in the next three years.

“These projects will serve the critical need of affordability and housing across the city,” a Saskatoon spokesperson said in an email.

The greenlighting of the Camponi Housing project comes at a time when Saskatchewan has been bucking some recent national housing trends in a negative way.

Asking rents this past fall were decreasing in many parts of Canada, but that was not the case in Saskatchewan, according to an analysis by Rentals.ca and Urbanation Inc., which said it was because people were moving to the province from other parts of the country, thereby increasing demand for housing.

Homelessness has also become a major issue in Saskatoon, with the city counting nearly 1,500 people living on the streets last fall, almost three times higher than two years earlier.

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In addition to affordable housing, Bishop said Camponi is looking to offer additional support to try to build a true sense of community and empower people.

“The model of housing allows our tenants to support one another, supplemented by other onsite supports, such as the wraparound services,” she said.

Wraparound supports include onsite child care, which Camponi Housing is putting in place at another one of its projects, and financial literacy classes. Bishop said the corporation has developed an understanding about the importance of providing additional supports to their tenants that help reduce barriers to their overall success.

“We understand what the need is, and we’re designing our housing to respond to that need so we can empower our tenants,” she said.

While Bishop now serves on the board of trustees for Camponi, her history with it goes back many years to when she was a tenant living in one of its properties after moving to the city from northern Saskatchewan. During this time, she was trying to finish high school while caring for her two children, which she said the Indigenous housing provider understood.

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“Camponi was able to understand the supports that I required even back at that time in the ’80s,” she said.

The current budget for the project is about $53 million, with funding coming from sources such as Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. and Saskatoon.

There is currently no firm groundbreaking date, but Bishop said Camponi Housing hopes to have people taking up occupancy in the next few years.

“We hope to have the development substantially completed by early 2027, with occupancy in 2027,” she said.

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