$30,000 housing incentive making national news
August 19, 2024, 8:27 am
Kevin Weedmark
Moosomin’s $30,000 housing incentive is making news across the nation.
Economic Development Committee Chair Murray Gray, Economic Development Officer Casey McCormac, Moosomin Chamber of Commerce President Kevin Weedmark, and Mayor Larry Tomlinson were all being interviewed by various media outlets last week.
Under the plan, anyone who builds a new housing unit in Moosomin—a home, an RTM, a modular home, a mobile home ,a basement suite, a garage suite, a townhome, or a backyard suite—will receive a cheque for $30,000 from the town once an occupancy permit is issued.
For an apartment building, condo building, or multi-family housing development and the town will pay $30,000 for the first door and $8,000 for each additional door.
The incentive plan applies to any residential building permit issued since August 21 of last year. The cost of the program is covered by a $1 million federal Housing Accelerator Fund. Moosomin is one of only a handful of communities on the Prairies to be approved for grants under the Housing Accelerator Fund. Moosomin is receiving $992,000 of funding. The town of Outlook and the City of Humboldt are the only two other municipalities in Saskatchewan to have Housing Accelerator funding announced last week.
Happy to see national coverage
EDC Chair Murray Gray is happy to see all the coverage.
“The program is really nothing without people knowing about it. If we put in an incentive plan and only a select a few people to know about it, it’s of no value. The more people hear about it, the more successful we can be in our residential incentive plan.”
Gray says he believes the media coverage will encourage people to move to Moosomin.
“We’ve already heard from some people who are looking at moving here. Someone might hear the story and decide to move to Moosomin and somebody who’s been thinking about moving to Moosomin and hears the good things going on is going to consider it more. The other thing is that we’ve already had a few residential developers contacting us because they’re interested in the fact that things are happening here. So both of those are wins in my estimation.”
Gray is excited for the attention Moosomin’s Housing Incentive plan has created.
“From the very first interview last Friday to now, the momentum that I have seen from it is mind-numbing—just how much play our community is getting in the national media is crazy.
“We’re writing chapters as we go along, and we just wrote another chapter. For each good news story that we put out there we’ve added another chapter to a great book, it’s awesome.”
Gray explains he has been asked many questions from interviews with various news sources.
“I have been asked, ‘Why should I move to Moosomin?’ That’s the big question that I’m getting, which is interesting. They’re like, ‘You can have 45 seconds. Tell me why I should move to Moosomin.’ I say, ‘It’s the people,’ I’ve said that about four times that a community of buildings is nothing. A community is the people. I think that message is awesome to get out there and I think that I’m fortunate to be the messenger of this story too. I’m humbled by the fact that I get to be the messenger of this story because none of it is about me, it’s all about our community and I just get to tell the story which is awesome. Casey’s full-time job is to grow our economy so she’s in that loop as well and I’ve been trying to keep her up to date with what’s going on because she’s going to be an important part of what’s going to happen next too. It’s big. It’s big to get national news media focusing so much on a small town.”
Gray says he hopes a developer would be interested to come to Moosomin for residential development.
“If we had a developer that was interested in coming in and developing an area of the community that would be great, but whatever happens, we still got to tell our story to the whole country to it’s a win-win situation regardless of what comes out of it.”
Gray says the housing incentive is the top priority in town. “Now that we’ve checked some of the other boxes, I have to put it at the top of the list as our biggest need because I think the lack of housing is going to be our biggest detriment to growth. Without adding some more doors, I don’t think we can grow, so I have to put it at the top of the list. It’s worked its way up as we’ve accomplished some of the other things that we identified to begin with—three or four years ago when we identified the needs of the community, it was there, but it wasn’t top. Now it’s become top because we’ve added some other value added things to our community.”
Gray says Moosomin has been steadily growing compared to many communities. “We’re growing—not as much as we can, but we’re growing and we’re showing signs that we can grow more, so I feel good about where we’re at but I also feel like we can grow more.
“All of these things—all of these little wins along the way are part of the puzzle in order to achieve big things as a community.”
