A Sackville housing co-operative is considering using community bonds to help raise the capital needed to get its non-profit housing development off the ground. The Freshwinds Eco-village Housing Co-operative has been working since January 2023 on planning for a 63-unit village style housing development off Fairfield Road in Sackville.
At the co-op’s first public meeting on Monday evening, board members outlined the current plans for the project, including a plan to raise some of the estimated $25 million needed for the project through community bonds, which would pay community investors a modest interest rate, thereby saving the co-op on higher market borrowing rates. The co-op plans to rely primarily on federal funding, to cover about 80% of the build cost for the project. The co-op hopes to get about 7% covered by provincial funding programs, and the remaining 12% by community bonds, loans and investments from supporters and members, and the municipality of Tantramar.
Freshwinds has a case for government support. The co-op will build a number of physically accessible units, and also plans to make one quarter of its units affordable for low income households. While three quarters will start out at roughly market rates, those housing charges will not grow along with market rental rates over the years, similar to the situation at Sackville’s other housing cooperative, Marshwinds.
Chair of the Marshwinds board and longtime resident Bill Burroughs also spoke at Monday’s meeting. “There is no profit anywhere,” says Burroughs about the co-op model. “It’s all on a cost basis.” Co-op members each have a vote, and together set the housing charges for their co-op, according to actual costs or initiatives they decide to take on.
In 2022, Marshwinds paid off their first mortgage, and then started renovation of the eight buildings, including insulation, windows, doors, roofs.
Burroughs says he’s impressed with the work done by the Freshwinds team so far. “They’ve done a lot of great background work,” he says. “Their ideas and plans are in some ways much more modern and better than ours.”
Burroughs noted the Freshwinds commitment to ‘net zero’, something that wasn’t on the radar when Marshwinds was built about 35 years ago. Marshwinds residents sometimes have issues with high power bills from the electric baseboard heating that the units rely on, said Burroughs. Meanwhile Freshwinds is exploring using geothermal energy, and also incorporating renewable power generation to help it attain ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions. “[Freshwinds] seem to have considered everything here, really,” says Burroughs. “I think they’re doing very well with it.”
Original Sackville co-op took some campaigning
Gary Curwin was also at Monday’s meeting. An original Marshwinds member, Curwin came to hear about Freshwinds as a possible option for he and his wife in their later years. Curwin recalled the efforts that went into getting the rezoning necessary to build Marshwinds, back in the late 1980’s.
“I believe it was around two and a half, three years that we walked the sidewalk, got petitions signed, went to council meetings,” recalls Curwin. The approval for the zoning to make way for Marshwinds was a close vote, he says, with the mayor breaking the tie in favour of the project.
This time around the obstacles are different. Judith Snowden is co-treasurer for Freshwinds, and says the financing for the project is the biggest challenge so far. Last fall the co-op applied to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) for funding geared towards housing co-ops, but did not make the first cut. “They thought Sackville didn’t need it because we weren’t big enough,” says Snowdon, “not realizing that our [vacancy] rate here is zero.”
Not getting approved on the first round “was a bit discouraging at the time,” says Snowdon. “But we thought, well, we can do it in April.” However the program still has yet to open another round. According to CMHC spokesperson Monique LaPlante, the program “is expected to open again sometime in 2025.”
Tom Snowden is co-secretary for Freshwinds, and says there’s also concern over finding a builder when the time comes. “We are hoping that the project is large enough that it will attract some tenders coming in when we get to that point,” says Snowden. “So we’re hoping for that.”
Both Snowdens said they were happy with the turnout and participation at Monday’s meeting. “There seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm from the community,” says Judith Snowden.
Too much red tape for non-profits
Another board member, Margaret Tuzs-King, told the crowd that the challenges of pulling together a non-profit housing project in New Brunswick have been extensive, something she’s been telling New Brunswick’s housing minister David Hickey, whenever she gets the chance.
“We all agree that we’re in a housing crisis,” says Tuzs-King, “but it’s really hard to tell, given the red tape that non-profits have to go through in order to access funding.”
The Freshwinds volunteer board has been meeting weekly for two years to get to this point, with a site design and concept, land purchased and rezoned, and an evolving financial plan for the project.
Tuzs-King says it’s “unusual for people to put in that much effort for possibly no return, which is what I think a lot of organizations are doing right now.”
“There’s a lot of ways that the government could make this easier for us,” she says, noting that there’s about eight different government applications active at this time. “That’s very much work to get a project like this going,” says Tuzs-King.
Ultimately, the die-hard co-op member is an optimist, and holds out hope to get shovels in the ground doing preparatory landscaping on the Freshwinds development this winter.
“We would have to have our funding applications approved by the fall in order for that to happen,” says Tuzs-King. “We do need to get some funding confirmed so that we can take that next step.”
