Hinton weathers tight housing market in wake of Jasper fire

Effects of Jasper fire on housing in Hinton CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson explains the effect the Jasper wildfire is having on the housing market in Hinton.

Flames forced everyone but the firefighters to leave Jasper in late July.

They returned to devastation.

The fast-moving wildfire destroyed or damaged 356 buildings in Jasper National Park's townsite – one-third of the community.

And while not all of them were residential, Jasper lost 820 housing units as a result, leaving about 1,800 residents – more than a third of the town's population of 4,800 – homeless.

Town staff say Jasperites spread far and wide – to Edmonton, British Columbia, even as far away as California – but many landed as close to home as possible: in Hinton.

Hinton realtor Jeff MacLeod says those evacuees entered a competitive housing market.

Those who could afford it bought a house. MacLeod says some of those homes had previously been rentals.

"You now have one less rental (on the market)," said MacLeod, representing the Alberta West Realtors Association.

"So you have one more family looking for rental, less rentals available, and so on and so on."

Hinton Mayor Nicholas Nissen says housing had been a pressing issue in the town of 10,000 before the Jasperwildfire as its population is growing like the rest of Alberta.

Now with the influx of displaced people, Nissen told CTV News Edmonton this week the Alberta community on the doorstep of Jasper National Park anticipates its housing market will be "under pressure for the foreseeable future."

He said Hinton can, over the short term, absorb and "hide these sort of populations, but if you think about Jasper National Park in general – before the fires, Jasper was pretty close to being full."

"There were more and more tourists coming every year because of international advertising campaigns that had been highly effective," Nissen said.

"It's a beautiful place. I don't blame people for wanting to come and see it at all, but the reality was that overflow was going to start showing up in Hinton in a big way. Now it's just accelerated, so we have to get those permanent housing structures built."

Those permanent structures include those built by private industry – Nissen points out on a map various housing projects across the town, including fourplexes and so-called tiny homes – as well as a government-funded replacement for seniors housing that burned down.

No one tracks how many displaced Jasperites now call Hinton home these days, but for a community that's already behind on housing supply, adding even a few hundred people has consequences.

Renters have been dealt 90-day eviction notices and rent increases in the hundreds of dollars, says Kristen Chambers, a town councillor and the chief administrative officer of the Evergreens Foundation, a non-profit housing management agency in the region that helps about 200 families with housing costs.

Chambers says as people spend more of their paycheques on housing, they're leaning more on services such as the food bank.

"Teenaged children who are going out and getting jobs so that they can contribute to the family income in order for the family to stay housed, that's probably the one that's the hardest to stomach, but it's a reality that we're seeing," she told CTV News Edmonton.

Hinton has several hotels and temporary accommodations, which is where many Jasperites are still living, including a handful of seniors.

Come spring, seasonal workers in heavy industries and tourism will come looking for those rooms.

Nissen said from Hinton's standpoint, an influx of people moving to the community "is nothing new," noting several major industrial projects coming to the town in forestry, mining, oil and gas, and at the long-established pulp mill that's about to go through a significant restructuring, along with seasonal work that brings people to the community.

"We're going to see different groups of people taking up space in our hotel rooms. We're going to see various people renting houses in our community for two-, three-, four-year time periods, and I anticipate that some of these people that came to Hinton during this event are never going to leave," he said.

The plight of the displaced Jasper residents offers "a lot of little nuances" to Hinton's housing situation, Chambers said, as the latter typically has a low vacancy rate and a high rental rate.

"There's a lot of industry around here, a lot of those types of things, and not a lot of multi-family apartment buildings," she said.

"That's certainly been tough. We've also had our Pine Grove Manor seniors apartments which burned down, so that was 33 seniors that we had to try to find independent housing for."

Chambers is hopeful the 250 apartments the province promised to build in Jasper can help ease the pressure on Hinton housing eventually.

"In the meantime, I think it's going to be a really tight winter for the community of Hinton for housing," she said.