What Happens When Workers Can’t Afford to Live Here?

Why workforce housing has become one of Nanaimo’s most important economic challenges.

Have you ever wondered why it’s becoming harder to recruit healthcare workers, retain young families, staff local businesses, or support economic growth in Canada? 

The answer, in many communities, starts with housing.

Canada is once again focused on building homes at scale. But as new supply enters the market, the conversation is shifting from whether we are building housing to whether we are building the right kinds of housing. 

Housing is no longer just a matter of real estate. In an era of persistent affordability pressures, it has become foundational economic infrastructure.

This is where the conversation around workforce housing begins.

Housing Affordability is More Complex Than It Sounds

When people hear “affordable housing,” they often think exclusively about homelessness, shelters, or deeply subsidized housing. Those are important parts of the housing system, but workforce housing is another component that refers to something different.

Workforce housing is needed for people who earn incomes yet can no longer reliably find housing that matches local wages. The growing gap between local incomes and housing costs is affecting the workforce required to sustain a healthy and economically resilient community, including workers across health care, construction, education, retail, hospitality, public service, and the non-profit sector.

These are not people outside the economy. They are the people holding it together.

Defining the Terms

Housing conversations often use the same words to describe very different challenges. Clarifying a few common terms helps explain where workforce housing fits within the broader system.

Affordability

In Canada, housing is generally considered affordable when a household spends less than 30 percent of its before-tax income on shelter costs.

Affordability is therefore not just about whether housing is “cheap”. It is about whether housing costs remain aligned with local incomes.

Non-Market Housing

Non-market housing refers to housing that is owned or governed outside the conventional speculative market, often by non-profit organizations, co-operatives, Indigenous housing providers, or public agencies. 

The defining feature of non-market housing is the use of governance and financing structures intended to preserve affordability over time.

The Missing Middle

The term “missing middle” is often used in two related but distinct ways:

1. to describe moderate-income households who fall outside traditional affordability programs but remain priced out of much of the private market; and
2. to describe housing forms that sit between detached homes and large apartment towers.

In NPC’s work, “missing middle” primarily refers to the spectrum of moderate-density housing forms now commonly associated in British Columbia with Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing (SSMUH), including duplexes, multiplexes, laneway homes, carriage houses, townhomes, courtyard housing, stacked townhomes, and low-rise apartment buildings that expand attainable housing options without requiring large-scale redevelopment.

These distinctions matter because workforce housing often sits at the intersection of all three conversations: affordability, housing form, and long-term housing stability.

Most communities require housing across a broad continuum of needs and life circumstances. Workforce housing occupies an important space within that continuum, bridging the gap between deeply subsidized and fully market-priced housing.

Where Does Workforce Housing Fit?

A healthy community needs housing across the entire spectrum, including:

Emergency shelter: short-term accommodation for people in an immediate housing crisis.

Supportive housing: housing paired with supports for people with complex needs.

Non-market housing: housing governed outside the conventional private market to preserve affordability over time.

Rental housing: homes occupied by tenants in either market or non-market arrangements. 

Attainable ownership: ownership models intended to remain accessible to moderate-income households.

Market housing: housing priced primarily through private market supply and demand.

Workforce housing can exist across several parts of this continuum, but generally refers to homes that remain attainable for households earning moderate incomes within the local economy.

These are often workers who do not qualify for traditional affordability programs, yet struggle to compete in high-cost housing markets. They include nurses, tradespeople, educational assistants, hospitality workers, technicians, public servants, early-career professionals, and many others whose work is essential to the functioning of a community.

When people can afford to live where they work, local economies strengthen. When they cannot, the talent and skills a community depends on quietly leave.

Why Does this Matter Economically?

Communities cannot function if workers cannot afford to live in them. Businesses struggle to hire and retain staff. Healthcare recruitment stalls. Teachers and service workers, the people a city depends on most, are increasingly priced out of the communities they serve. Young families look elsewhere. Commutes lengthen. And the skilled workers that a city spends years attracting quietly leave. This is what brain drain looks like at the local level. 

And Nanaimo is not standing still. The port expansion is set to increase container capacity tenfold, bringing significant job growth to residents and newcomers alike. Healthcare recruitment is accelerating. The city’s ambitions are growing.

But workforce recruitment and retention involve more than competitive salaries. The people being recruited must also be able to afford to live here. Ambition without housing is a bottleneck waiting to happen. If workforce housing is not addressed now, the plans already in motion will eventually stall under the weight of a shortage that was foreseeable. Housing is no longer peripheral to economic growth, but one of the conditions that makes growth possible. 

What is Nanaimo Seeing?

Nanaimo has been one of the fastest-growing Canadian cities for years. That growth has brought with it new energy and investment, but it has also intensified pressure on the local housing system. Housing costs remain misaligned with local incomes, market softening has not meaningfully restored affordability, rental pressures remain persistent, and demand continues to outpace the production of attainable options.

Nanaimo is building housing, but not always what the community needs the most.

At the same time, Nanaimo continues to grow. Employers across sectors – from healthcare and education to construction, hospitality, and local business – are increasingly competing within the same constrained housing environment.

When housing outcomes begin constraining the broader economy, stronger coordination across institutions and sectors becomes necessary. Fortunately, here in Nanaimo, organizations, institutions, employers, and residents are already stepping forward to help address the challenge. 

NPC’s Role

Most of the ingredients required to support workforce housing already exist in Nanaimo: institutional partners, employers, public agencies, landowners, builders, non-profit organizations, and community capital. The challenge is not simply the absence of effort, but the difficulty of aligning those efforts toward shared outcomes.

NPC’s role is to help strengthen that alignment by supporting the partnerships, coordination, and economic conditions required for more effective housing solutions, particularly those connected to workforce attraction, economic resilience, and long-term community prosperity. 

A City that Moves with Intention

Nanaimo has already shown what it looks like when a city moves with intention: Hullo Ferry, port expansion, and major investments in infrastructure, partnerships, and long-term economic capacity. Each reflects a community actively shaping its future rather than simply reacting to it.

Workforce housing is part of that same conversation. 

The affordability gap is becoming a real constraint on workforce attraction, retention, and long-term economic resilience. But this is not a community without agency. Nanaimo has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to organize around complex challenges when the stakes are high and the direction is clear.

Workforce housing is ultimately about whether people across a range of incomes can continue to build a life here – whether the workers, families, and institutions that sustain the community can continue to grow alongside it.

A community cannot function if the people who run it cannot afford to live there.