Ryan Kiedrowski
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The World-Spectator
Moosomin’s Economic Development Officer has been fielding an onslaught of calls after word of the town’s $30,000 residential housing incentive made national—and even international—headlines.
“For the first week, for sure, the phone was ringing off the hook. I’ve never answered so many phone calls! A lot of people just call me and ask if it’s real,” she told those gathered at Tuesday’s Chamber of Commerce meeting. “But I have had a lot of genuine interest. I actually had a family out here yesterday, they drove all the way from Calgary because they want to move here; they were looking at empty lots. They talked about how they don’t want to raise their kids in Calgary because of the crime rate, and they thought Moosomin was amazing. So they drove out here. I have another guy coming up from Calgary next week, so you can definitely see the interest we’ve had.”
At the centre of the plan is $30,000 or any new housing unit, with an extra $8,000 per additional door for multi-unit housing. The incentive came on the heels of a $992,000 grant from the federal Housing Accelerator Fund..
“If you go back to several years ago when the Economic Development Board was formed and the three funding partners got together and we started talking about things, we talked about how to grow our community, whether it was adding businesses or adding services—all the things that we thought we envisioned for Moosomin,” said Councillor Murray Gray during the Chamber presentation. “We worked on that, and we got some wins, and we’ve added some businesses, and we had some really good irons in the fire, but all of a sudden, housing started to creep up that list of things that we need because we added so many other things in our community, but we never added any doors.”
Any building permit submitted to the Town after Aug. 21, 2023 qualifies to be part of the program, which has an end date of either March 31, 2027, or earlier if the goal of 43 units has been met. So far, around 72 per cent of that target number has been realized with 31 building permits currently submitted. There are 30 empty lots currently available to fill in Moosomin, and the prospect of reaching the project’s goal and beyond is nearing reality.
“We’re hoping to fill in the town, and at some point in time when all the lots in town are filled up, we’re going to have to expand our borders,” Gray said. “One of the things that I’ve learned in economic development and the time that we spent on it, when you talk to businesses about coming and setting up in your community, they all want to know what your population is, and I think we have a bigger number than the census, and we have a bigger number just because of our ‘get ‘er done’ attitude.”
According to the latest census numbers, there are 2,774 people that call Moosomin home with items like the housing incentive poising the town for further growth.
Moosomin-Montmarte MLA Steven Bonk was in attendance during last week’s Chamber meeting, and congratulated the town on their unique housing strategy.
“As far as I know, no one else is doing this, so my hat’s off to you because this is out of the box thinking, and particularly with the CBA—even that’s out of the box thinking for Saskatchewan,” he said. “So whatever you’re doing here in Moosomin, it’s working—congratulations!”
Other areas across the province have taken notice of Moosomin’s success, asking for guidance on how they can generate the same excited curiosity for their areas.
“I’ve had calls from four or five municipalities asking questions about this, because they want to replicate it themselves,” McCormac said.
“The key to a lot of the things that we work on is the collaboration aspect of what we do because we get a lot of people in the room working toward the same common goal with lots of different ideas,” Gray said. “That’s where this idea came from, and to be honest with you, in the beginning, it was a little bit of a hard sell even to myself because it just seems too easy, but at the end of the day, simple is easier to market and the story caught on across the country because of that.”
