Residents at the Hoy Creek Housing Co-op will continue to receive subsidies until September 2018 after an agreement was struck last week between the board and the Co-op Housing Federation of BC (CHFBC).
The decision bypasses the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), which has been pressuring the board to relinquish control of the Coquitlam property and grant it full receivership powers over the land. CMHC said it would not extend a subsidized housing agreement, which expires in July, unless the co-op complied with its request.
Instead, the provincial organization said it will make up the difference, allowing more time for all parties to come to a long-term agreement regarding Hoy’s future.
“We don’t presume to speak for the co-op in this matter but Hoy Creek is a member of our federation and we have a mandate to stick up for our members when they find themselves in a tough spot,” Thom Armstrong, the executive director of CHFBC, told The Tri-City News. “Whatever the merits of CMHC’s position — and that is far from clear — it just seems wrong to us that the most vulnerable members of a community should fear for their security of tenure while the conversation unfolds.”
CMHC has been seeking full receivership over the land from the board since last summer, after the co-op fell behind on its mortgage payments to the federal Crown corporation. Hoy was unable to pay its bills after it stopped receiving rents from 60 townhouse units on the site that were deemed uninhabitable due to mould, rot and bad plumbing.
The housing corporation said it needs control of the property to redevelop the land and get the housing complex back on firm financial footing, and even Coquitlam-Port Coquitlam Liberal MP Ron McKinnon weighed in, asking tenants to “put pressure on their board to co-operate with CMHC.”
But the board said last week that it fears relinquishing control would go against its goals of avoiding displacement for its subsidized members and stabilizing housing charges at the complex. The Hoy directors also worry they will lose their status as a co-operative entity after redevelopment of the land occurs.
“We ourselves were not comfortable with acquiescing to CMHC’s demand for full receivership at this time,” the board said in a statement. “We were not persuaded that doing so would ensure that we meet our primary objectives.”
CMHC already has limited receivership over a portion of the site, which was granted following a court process last summer. Those powers allow the housing corporation, through receiver PriceWaterhouseCoopers, to demolish the townhouses between the Creekview building on Johnson Street and the Maple Creek building on Glen Drive.
According to the board, the work was only supposed to cost $1.2 million but the budget ballooned to $2.3 million and work is three months past schedule.
“It was the cumulation of these and other experiences with CMHC that convinced the board that CMHC may not, in fact, have Hoy Creek and its members’ best interests at heart,” the board said.
On June 7, the 35 subsidized renters in the 97-unit complex received letters from Terra Property Management informing them that the housing agreement and their subsidies would be ending July 1.
Several residents, including Bobbi Style, a 12-year tenant with cerebral palsy who uses a wheelchair, said that without the agreement, their housing charge would rise from $350 per month to as high as $1,100 per month. He added that the short notice made it difficult for residents to find other subsidies or make alternate housing arrangements.
Susan Harris, another subsidized tenant who has lived at the housing complex for 17 years, said communication between residents and the board has improved in the last few weeks. She added that a recent meeting helped alleviate some of the concerns residents had around the future of the co-op and whether funding was available for its most vulnerable tenants.
“There has been a lot of concern… but our board is working extremely hard,” she said, later adding: “They are a little more advanced than most of the boards we have had.”
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