Watchdog says six-figure income earners are living in Alberta subsidized housing

Northern Alberta is best known for its booming oil-sands industry, which has made it a mecca for high-paying jobs and the attendant fallout of high living costs and housing prices.

But it's hard to see how the region's hot economy justifies allowing someone who makes more than $100,000 a year to live in a government-subsidized home, paying just $725 a month.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, using freedom-of-information, has discovered several tenants of Heart River Housing, which administers social housing in a dozen northern communities, are earning high incomes while paying low rents for their digs.

While the documents show the vast majority of the agency's clients are seniors on pensions or low-income earners, the federation turned up one renter had reported an annual income of $112,320 while living in a three-bedroom $725-a-month home for since December 2000.

[ Related: Opposition MPs support bill for affordable housing strategy ]

Several others in subsidized homes had incomes ranging from $46,800 to $82,518.

“These documents strongly suggest that a system intended to help the poorest in society is being gamed and that some people are allowing it to be gamed,” the federation's Alberta director Derek Fildebrandt, said in a news release. “We need a full audit of Heart River Housing and the Alberta Social Housing Corporation (ASHC) to determine the extent of this practice, as well as a review of income-cut off levels.”

The federation said Heart River Housing claimed it has some vacancies among the units it manages and fills them by renting to those who are not in need. But that doesn't explain the renter with the six-figure income staying in one home for more than a decade.

“Twelve years is a rather long time to be filling a temporary vacancy," said Fildebrandt. "If there are units that cannot be filled by the needy, then it should have occurred to Heart River Housing and the ASHC to sell these units."

The other high-income earners lived in their subsidized units for an average of more than five years, he added.

Heart River Housing, headquartered in High Prairie, about 360 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, did not respond to a Canadian Press request for comment.

The agency's web site says “family housing units are available for households of modest means.” Rent includes utilities and is based on 30 per cent of gross total household income, with incomes reviewed annually to determine continued eligibility, CP reported.

Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths thanked the federation for bringing forward the material but turned down its demand for a provincial audit, saying social-housing agencies should do their own audits.

“Now everyone who’s involved with social housing and every local authority around the province should be looking internally at the way they operate so we can fix this,” Griffiths told CP.

“It will mean every housing authority from Calgary to Cold Lake and Fort McMurray to Fort Macleod will say: ‘Hmmm. Let’s check and evaluate our strategy here. Maybe we have properties we don’t need.’ "

Many regions of Canada have a shortage of affordable housing, especially economically booming areas like northern Alberta or energy-fuelled Estevan, Saskatchewan, where residents were renting a bedrooms in their homes for upwards of $1,200 a month, according to CBC News.

At one time in the B.C. resort town of Whistler, people working at its restaurants and hotels were sleeping in crawl spaces and under stairs because of a lack of affordable housing.

[ More Brew: Montreal's famed Schwartz's deli sandwiches coming to grocery stories ]

Officials in Fort St. John, another energy-driven boom town in northeastern B.C., shot down a provincial government notion of shipping welfare recipients to the region where job prospects were better, citing the area's acute housing shortage.

High rents in hot markets can make things desperate for low-income residents, which makes it all the more important for social-housing agencies to manage their housing stock carefully to avoid the kind of problem the taxpayers' federation unearthed.