![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1763262608_405_default.jpg\")
Donna Vassallo, a deli worker at Country Grocer on Salt Spring, lives with her teenage daughters in a trailer provided by her employer. (Emily Fagan\/CBC)<\/p>\nWhen Donna Vasallo lost her housing on Salt Spring Island, the mother of two figured she would have to leave the island \u2013 until Country Grocer, where she works, offered shelter for her family in a two-bedroom trailer.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s meant a lot, like thank goodness,\u201d said Vassallo, who has now been living in that trailer for about four years. <\/p>\n
\u201cI’m so grateful that I have what I have, because I can afford to feed my kids and pay bills.\u201d <\/p>\n
Vassallo\u2019s trailer, equipped with hot water and a garden, is one of 25 owned by Country Grocer, along with six homes across the island.<\/p>\n
Donna Vassallo, a deli worker at Country Grocer on Salt Spring, lives with her teenage daughters in a trailer provided by her employer. (Emily Fagan\/CBC)<\/p>\n
The grocery store is the island\u2019s largest employer, according to operations manager Mateo Hermani, and currently houses a fourth of the store\u2019s roughly 200-person workforce and their families.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the trailers, along with many other makeshift shelters Salt Spring Island\u2019s workforce resides in \u2014 including boats in the Ganges Harbour \u2014 are illegal. That’s according to officials from the Gulf Island\u2019s governing body, the Islands Trust, which prohibits people from living in these types of accommodations long-term.<\/p>\n
Many services on the island are experiencing a labour shortage, including the local hospital, says Salt Spring Chamber of Commerce president Jason Roy-Allen, driven by a lack of housing workers can afford.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s pushed businesses around the island to offer housing for workers in order to improve recruitment \u2014 and fierce debate on how to solve the island’s affordable housing crisis.<\/p>\n
Company housing becoming popular<\/p>\n
An estimated 1,695 Salt Spring households live in unaffordable, unsuitable, or inadequate housing, with \u201ccurrently no realistic alternative,\u201d according to a recent report into the island\u2019s short-term rental market<\/a> from Third Space Planning.<\/p>\n Hermani says the store\u2019s push to provide housing was sparked about six years ago when he realized an employee was living in her car with her daughter. <\/p>\n The trailers cost about $20,000 each, he says, and the store\u2019s owner Leigh Large has an ongoing interest in acquiring new property on the island to house staff, as the demand outpaces their available spaces.<\/p>\n While housing employees comes at a cost, Hermani says this effort to house staff \u2014 first intended as a temporary measure \u2014 is now essential for the store to function. While he’s aware these trailers are against Islands Trust policy, he feels it’s necessary due to the shortage of housing his workers can afford. <\/p>\n \u201cThere is no other option,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can quickly see how that adds up, but it’s better than having to shut the store.\u201d<\/p>\n At one of his businesses, Roy-Allen received no applications for a recent job listing \u2013 but when company housing was offered, he heard from 53 applicants within a day.<\/p>\n However, having your employer as your landlord comes with its own challenges. <\/p>\n Eric March, a Salt Spring resident who previously lived in homes provided by employers, says it can be daunting to call in sick or leave your job.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhether you want to quit on your own terms or whether something has gone wrong\u2026 you quit and you’re homeless,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cJobs are pretty easy to come by on Salt Spring, but homes, less so.\u201d<\/p>\n Laura Patrick, an elected trustee representing Salt Spring with the Islands Trust, says there are a series of challenges making affordable housing difficult to obtain for Salt Spring and other Gulf Island officials, who find themselves competing against urban areas for provincial funding.<\/p>\n \u201cThe cost of building on this island is easily 30 per cent more than in an urban setting,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cSo when you have smaller projects, higher costs, more complexity, it really makes it very hard.\u201d<\/p>\n As a result, a Vital Signs report from 2022<\/a> estimated the island has a vacancy rate of below one per cent. <\/p>\n Patrick says that while the Islands Trust is aware of the many illegal dwellings on the island, if there are no environmental and health concerns, the occupants are left alone due to the housing crunch.<\/p>\n The island had 137 homeless residents in the 2025 point-in-time<\/a> count \u2013 down from 165 people in 2023, which at the time was the highest per-capita<\/a> rate of homelessness in B.C.<\/p>\n Residents clash over potential solutions<\/p>\n It is undisputed among residents of the island that Salt Spring is in the midst of a compounding housing crisis \u2013 but the best path forward is a hotly contested topic that has divided community members for years.<\/p>\n The Islands Trust is in the process of reviewing the island\u2019s official community plan (OCP) over the next year, which Patrick hopes will allow for more options to address housing insecurity.<\/p>\n Ron Wright, a founding member of Keep Salt Spring Sustainable, is worried about the toll adding more density may have on the island\u2019s environment and limited freshwater resources. <\/p>\n He feels the existing OCP allows for enough housing to be built to address the challenges, and worries changes could set developers loose, to the detriment of the island.<\/p>\n \u201cThe solution is to have more publicly-funded housing that is situated where there are services, where there’s water and sewer and transportation and shops and all of that,\u201d Wright said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPretty much everybody recognizes that, it’s just a matter of doing more of it and doing it as quickly as we can and that is moving ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n About 140 units of affordable housing have been built over the past five years, according to the Capital Regional District\u2019s Salt Spring Island director Gary Holman. <\/p>\n He noted three other projects are planned or proposed for the island, which combined could provide more than 120 additional units.<\/p>\n Push for denser housing<\/p>\n Roy-Allen, however, thinks the Islands Trust has taken its mandate to preserve and protect the island too far. <\/p>\n To urgently address the challenges islanders are facing, he wants four-storey housing complexes allowed in the town centre, year-round secondary suites allowed on more of the island, and more workforce housing. <\/p>\n He thinks it\u2019s possible to find a balance between providing safe, legal places for people to live and preventing the loss of critical workers to other communities \u2014 without it coming at a cost to the environment.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you come in on a boat into our Ganges Harbour and you see derelict sailboats and multiple people living on little floating rafts, what does that say about us?\u201d said Roy-Allen.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt says that we’re a conflicted community and we really need to work together to come up with a better solution.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Donna Vasallo lost her housing on Salt Spring Island, the mother of two figured she would have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-265366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"an](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1763262609_102_default.jpg\")
One of the trailers for employee housing owned by Country Grocer, located behind the Salt Spring Island grocery store. (Emily Fagan\/CBC)<\/p>\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1763262609_947_default.jpg\")
Laura Patrick, elected trustee for Salt Spring Island with the Islands Trust, says enforcement on many illegal dwellings is not conducted \u2014 if there aren’t major concerns \u2014 due to the lack of affordable housing. (Emily Fagan\/CBC)<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1763262610_638_default.jpg\")
St. Mary Lake, one of Salt Spring Island’s main water sources. (Megan Thomas\/CBC)<\/p>\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1763262610_453_default.jpg\")
Salt Spring Chamber of Commerce president Jason Roy-Allen stands next to Ganges Harbour, where some residents live in derelict boats due to affordability challenges. (Emily Fagan\/CBC)<\/p>\n