Yellowknife mulls bylaw change to expand $1 land sales for affordable housing

A bylaw change could make it easier to get affordable housing built in Yellowknife.

Deputy mayor Rob Warburton asked city staff at last week’s council meeting to come back with recommendations for selling municipal land for as little as a dollar to any nonprofit planning to build affordable housing.

Right now, the city can do that for just one organization: Habitat for Humanity.

“What we need is a lot more housing,” Warburton said.

The N.W.T needs at least 1,700 homes right now and estimates it will need 1,000 more over the next 20 years, according to the government of the Northwest Territories’ latest Territorial Housing Needs Assessment.

Yellowknife will need 1,059 more units on top of what it already has by 2035, according to the city’s own assessment.

Three hundred and fifty-five households in Yellowknife were on the waitlist for public housing as of March 2025, according to Housing N.W.T., the territory’s largest provider of subsidized housing. About 437 of its public housing units are in buildings that are at least 50 years old and at the end of their service life. Another 532 units are in buildings at least 40 years old.

“Every new unit makes a meaningful difference,” said Vanessa Stretch, acting president and CEO of Housing N.W.T. in a statement to CBC News.

She said the territory welcomes anything that supports increased collaboration with nonprofits to expand the supply of affordable housing.

“Land access is the single biggest thing,” said Warburton. “You can’t work on a project unless you have a piece of land to point to.”

Having that piece taken care of would allow nonprofits to access funding from other sources and get their projects rolling, he said, speeding up development.

“Timelines for non-market or nonprofit housing are very long. Those projects take four, five, six, seven years sometimes because you require a lot of funding, a lot of planning, a lot of work,” he said. “But the land bit is something that we can help them with at the very start.”

Habitat for Humanity N.W.T. says the proposed change is good news.

“Without that … donation of lots from the city, Habitat wouldn’t have been able to build nearly as many houses as we have in Yellowknife,” said executive director Alayna Ward in a statement to CBC News. More NGOs building more affordable housing is always a good thing! We all know that land availability is in short supply, so anything the city can do to increase availability and encourage more home building is a good thing.”

Several city councilors and the mayor, however, all raised concerns they’d like to see staff address before they sign off on the idea.

“How do we make sure, if we’re going to potentially give land to an organization … that they’re legitimate?” said Mayor Ben Hendriksen. “Because what I would not want to see is somebody stand up a new nonprofit, say they’re going to do affordable housing, and there’s nothing there.”

Habitat for Humanity, he said, has a long track record both in Yellowknife and across the country.

This past weekend, for instance, the organization gave keys for new homes to four families in Yellowknife.

Hendriksen wants to keep the city out of a situation where it provides the land for projects that are never finished or are turned into for-profit housing once complete, he said.

City staff will study the issue and present their recommendations by Aug. 19.