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The cost of living in Nelson

Recent survey by Nelson Committee on Homelessness reveals surprising numbers for basic shelter, but Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation isn’t sure if the stats are a true reflection
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Whatever the true cost of rent in Nelson

Is $800 too much for a Nelson-area bachelor suite, or an accurate mark of what renters are already paying?

A market rent estimate compiled by the Nelson Committee on Homelessness over the month of April says potential tenants should be prepared to pay $800 a month for a bachelor pad and about $850 for a one-bedroom, while two and three-bedroom accommodations go for about $1,000 and $1,500, respectively.

Community coordinator Celeste LeDuigou says she put together the numbers by looking at what’s currently up for rent around the city.

“We looked in the same places where people generally look for apartments: ilovenelson.com, Craigslist, the newspaper and the Pennywise,” she explains.

The statistic includes apartments, but also secondary suites, former single-family dwellings carved into flats and condos.

LeDuigou says she was inspired to start collecting numbers last year after reading rental statistics for Nelson put out by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which tracks vacancy rates and average rental prices.

According to the CMHC’s most recent numbers, the average rent paid in the city for a bachelor suite is closer to $550, with one-bedroom apartments costing just over $600 a month.

“The prices are so low. I just couldn’t believe it,” she says. “How could this be average when nobody I know is paying that, and I’ve never seen a price like that advertised?”

Examining the corporation’s surveying practices, she found it only logs the rents paid by people living in apartment buildings with three or more units, which LeDuigou says represents “older stock” — rentals which may have been held by the same tenants for many years.

“The number represents people who are already living in these buildings, and they experience a form of rent control,” she says. “It’s not attainable to any new renter coming onto the market.”

CMHC’s Kootenay market analyst Paul Fabri says the corporation is aware their surveys leave out a portion of the rental market that has become more prominent in recent years.

“We do secondary suite surveys in some of the larger centres in B.C. like Vancouver or Victoria and Kelowna and Abbotsford — those are the only four centres in which we do those surveys,” he says.

“It’s a very lengthy process, because we contact each owner and ask them for information about their property. For the smaller centres in British Columbia, we just have not been able to do that.”

But even with suites and condos left out, Fabri expressed some skepticism over the Committee on Homelessness’ rent estimates, suggesting they may be skewed because of the small number of rental listings available (in the case of the bachelor suite projection for April, only two ads provided the data).

“I would be surprised at $800 a unit,” he says. “That’s more than probably Vancouver. So I would be very surprised.”

LeDuigou says the Committee on Homelessness plans to keep tracking rental advertisements and will likely compile data every spring and fall.

The most recent set of projections will also be part of the committee’s upcoming Report Card on Homelessness, set to come out in June.