Could Jasper’s Blaze Ignite Housing Solutions?

In 2018, Len Sather decided to uproot his life in Edmonton and move to Jasper in the Alberta Rockies. An avid cyclist and photographer, Sather went to work at the local hardware store and picked up dishwashing shifts at the Jasper Inn to complement his income — life in heaven isn’t cheap.

In his free time, Sather explored the myriad roads and trails surrounding Jasper, capturing with his camera the beauty of the forests, lakes and mountains.

The drawback was that he found himself bouncing from one address to another because competition for rental housing in Jasper was fierce.

“I lived in seven different places,” he said.

What evicted Sather last summer was a raging inferno that made international headlines. Flames devoured more than 32,000 hectares of forest and a third of Jasper’s buildings, including the townhouse complex in a section called Cabin Creek, where Sather had been renting a basement suite since June 2023. “That’s the part of town that’s all gone.”

Since then, like many of the 2,000 Jasperites displaced by the fire, Sather has yearned for some sense of certainty about the future. “It’s hard to live a normal life if you don’t have a home.”

Immediately after the fire, Sather stayed at a resort near Valemount, B.C., a mountain community 123 kilometres from Jasper that received the bulk of evacuees before reception centres were set up across Alberta. After a brief stint in Valemount, Sather left for Fort Saskatchewan, a city northeast of Edmonton, where he spent a few weeks waiting for Jasper to reopen.

After Jasperites were allowed back in town in mid-August, Sather rented a room with friends, and he supports the rebuild efforts by operating a forklift. But what comes next remains clouded.

“I was up for temporary housing, but there’s no temporary housing,” Sather said, adding that on March 1 he must move out of his current quarters, which have been rented out to seasonal workers arriving for the summer season.

Parks Canada announced last week it will install 320 temporary dwellings by the end of February to house essential workers. But some displaced Jasperites will continue to struggle, as there are 600 households in need of interim housing.

“People are having a hard time right now because they know a lot of people are coming in,” Sather said. “Jasper has historically had a workforce that comes from other places.”

As pressure builds to find solutions, the town recently saw a protest by locals demanding the provincial government fund interim housing.

Beyond that battle over public money, a question hovers above Jasper’s fire-levelled lots. Can the traditional market be relied upon to replace all of Jasper’s decimated housing and more, so that residents like Sather can settle in for good? Or has the time come to test innovative approaches such as community land trusts and co-op housing?

Bracing for summer

It’s not like Jasper can ask tourists to take a break from coming while the town figures out its future. The tens of thousands who visit stunning Jasper National Park each year sustain the livelihoods of Jasperites, a quarter of whom are employed in food and accommodation services.

“We are all looking forward to the return of summer, the return of visitors,” said Alan Fehr, superintendent of Jasper National Park, during a virtual info session in late January. “The recovery of the community is highly dependent on getting some visitation restored, and we’re committed to achieving that goal.”

But that dependence is a double-edged sword.

Because the number of visitors swells in the summer months and recedes in the winter, the staffing needs of shops, restaurants, hotels and tourist attractions also fluctuate dramatically. A 2023 report estimates an additional 2,000 residents live in Jasper during the high season, but the number of seasonal workers in a given year can reach up to 12,000.

This situation has a significant impact on housing.

Despite a vacancy rate that’s remained close to zero for at least three decades, the construction of rental apartments in Jasper has been slow. One reason is that not enough local workers can pay rental rates high enough to provide an attractive return for investors. In 2020, the median individual income in Jasper reached $46,000, but the annual expenses for a single person amounted to roughly $50,000 in 2024.

Only those employed in Jasper are eligible to live there full time. But many workers can’t afford to rent year-round in Jasper.

To compound the crunch, many homeowners choose to use their spare basements and garage suites to host vacationers, rather than workers, during the busy summer months, finding they can charge tourists higher rates.

And so Len Sather and other Jasper tenants live precariously in paradise, spending an oversized share of their income on rent just to live in the substandard, often overcrowded accommodations produced by a distorted market.

The fire that destroyed more than 800 bedrooms last July has made a bad situation worse.

Disaster as opportunity

“Housing is a right,” a crowd of about 200 Jasperites chanted on Jan. 24 as they marched across town protesting against the province’s decision to withhold $112 million in funding committed to the construction of interim housing unless the United Conservative Party government’s terms are met.

Before it will release the funds, the province wants Parks Canada to expand the town’s footprint to allow for the construction of single-family homes, a move that requires changes to the Canada National Parks Act, which caps the town’s footprint at roughly 12 hectares to preserve the ecological integrity of the national park.

Asking for such a major concession in the wake of a destructive fire, say observers, is a textbook example of disaster capitalism. They say the province is trying to use the disruption created by the fire to advance interests that would otherwise receive significant pushback from the community.

In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein describes how powerful players exploit the sense of urgency generated by a crisis to “impose rapid and irreversible change.”

But disasters can present opportunities for positive change, too.

In Hawaii and Puerto Rico, community members spearheaded the creation of land trusts to prevent the displacement of vulnerable groups, such as racialized tenants and migrant workers, who are often treated as collateral damage during the recovery process after a disaster.

“Community land trusts have played a very important role in building community resilience,” Susannah Bunce, an associate professor of human geography at the University of Toronto, told The Tyee. “CLTs ensure that when towns and cities that have experienced natural disasters rebuild, the urban landscape isn’t rebuilt for profit, or in a market-oriented situation only.”

By holding on to the land they own, and keeping it off the market, CLTs effectively decommodify private property.

“Housing co-operatives in Canada are increasingly interested in the CLT model,” Bunce noted, “because they are able to retrench and add a layer of protection to the co-operatives.”

An arrangement offering similar benefits already exists in Jasper.

Because all of the land in the townsite is owned by the Crown and leased to homeowners and businesses at market rate, Parks Canada has allowed for special considerations that help maintain affordability for first-time buyers.

Three limited-equity housing co-operatives, Southview, Mountain Park and Caribou Creek, leased their land from Parks Canada at a fraction of the cost on the condition that the 150 homes that were ultimately built wouldn’t appreciate beyond inflation. A four-bedroom townhome purchased in 1998 for $168,000, for example, would sell today for only $286,000, a price point impossible to match in Jasper’s overheated market.

The popularity of limited-equity co-ops among Jasperites priced out of the market has resulted in long wait-lists. However, when it’s come to supporting the expansion of co-op housing in Jasper, business owners have dismissed its potential, framing the low turnover in the existing complexes as a failure to significantly relieve market pressures.

Housing researchers disagree. In Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis, Carolyn Whitzman characterizes affordable housing as critical infrastructure — akin to hospitals, schools and libraries — and stresses the importance of enabling non-market housing models that not only protect homes from speculation but also help sustain communities.

In this context, as Parks Canada releases the last four hectares of land readily available for development to allow for the installation of interim housing, how these parcels are leveraged later on will have a significant impact on renters, and their ability to choose to stay in the community long-term.

“Jasper’s main problem is market supply,” said Bill Given, CEO of the Jasper Municipal Housing Corp., or JMHC, a municipally controlled corporation established in 2023 to respond to the town’s housing affordability and supply challenges. “Because our boundaries are fixed, anything that increases supply is going to be beneficial.”

To boost housing supply, planners at the Municipality of Jasper and Parks Canada have introduced changes to the townsite’s development policies that double the maximum number of dwellings allowed as-of-right on residential parcels (from one to two), and expand the types of accessory dwelling units permitted to include garden suites.

In addition, JMHC is exploring the potential of federal programs to build multi-family housing, including Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s Apartment Construction Loan Program, which offers low-cost loans for standard rental housing.

“JMHC is explicitly looking at options to supply housing at below market rates, but how much below market is subject to the external financing we can bring,” Givens told The Tyee.

To improve their shots at producing affordable housing, JMHC is structured in a way that allows the organization to access private capital from local businesses, and build housing that meets the needs of workers and employers.

This spring, JMHC plans to break ground on a 40-unit apartment building where rental rates would range between 60 and 75 per cent below market, as required by the funding agreement with the province. Work is underway to develop another 40 apartments on the adjacent site.

It's a good start, but the chance to build additional units on those parcels ran into a roadblock — planning regulations and architectural guidelines to maintain the town’s distinctive charm.

“The character of the community is part of the unique offering of Jasper as a tourism destination and is something the locals really value,” Givens said. “We would want to make sure that anything that we build is respectful of this character.”

‘It’s frightening’

In the meantime, rents rise in Jasper and so does anxiety.

Laurisa Reid and their small family rent a two-bedroom apartment in a walk-up building constructed in the 1970s. A stroke of luck kept the quaint rental compound in the west end of town from meeting the same fate as the Cabin Creek complex where Sather lived before the fire — but the kindergarten teacher’s fortune is frail.

Despite the vintage of the wood-frame structure Reid has rented for nearly a decade, rent has gone up by close to 70 per cent since they first moved in, stretching to the limit the stagnant incomes of Reid and their spouse.

Because the fire significantly increased demand for rental housing, and there are no rent controls in Alberta, Reid feels especially vulnerable to the whims of their landlord.

“It’s frightening,” they said. “Because tomorrow a notice could appear on my door saying that my rent is going up.”

Reid’s landlord didn’t respond to The Tyee’s request for comment.

A few days after speaking with The Tyee, Reid’s worries materialized. Starting in May, the family’s monthly rent will increase by $500.

Worse, changes to Reid’s lease suggest that the family of three might have to move out soon, as a maximum of two occupants per unit is to be allowed in the rental complex.

But in the aftermath of the fire, there’s nowhere for them to go.

“I don’t want to leave the community,” Reid said. “But I don’t see a path forward that doesn’t involve me leaving Jasper.”