In Whistler’s 2022 Community Life Survey, more than 500 people were surveyed by phone to gauge their thoughts and feelings about the place they call home.
By and large, the results were encouraging.
Ninety per cent of permanent-resident respondents reported feeling a very strong or somewhat strong sense of belonging in Whistler, while 84 per cent were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied to live here.
But according to the Whistler Community Foundation’s (WCF) most recent Vital Signs report released in early March (and to the surprise of nobody), there remain some very real challenges in our community around things like housing and affordability.
One major theme to arise through the process was an increasing reliance on community services.
The Whistler Food Bank, for example, saw an astounding 13,633 visits in 2022, up from the previous record of 9,365 set in 2021. Compare that to 5,782 visits in 2020; 3,005 in 2019; and 2,773 in 2018.
Is the rush going to start trending the opposite way any time soon? It doesn’t seem likely, considering June 5 was the busiest day in the history of Whistler’s food bank. Over the course of three hours in the afternoon, the organization served food 141 times to 84 households.
Whistler Community Services Society’s outreach services, meanwhile, served an all-time high of 8,380 visitors seeking mental and emotional support in 2022, up from the previous record of 6,128 in 2021. The longer trends are not encouraging there, either—in the pandemic year of 2020, 4,922 accessed the services, up from 3,233 in 2019 and 2,040 in 2018.
“Everything is so intersectional,” WCF’s executive director Claire Mozes told Pique earlier this year. “It’s really impossible to think about something like mental health and then not relate it to things like affordability, or living conditions like housing. We really recognized that there was a lot of overlap between themes … it all is very interrelated.”
With that in mind, the time has come once again to ask ourselves some important questions: Is Whistler a livable community? And are Whistlerites thriving?
Both questions will be explored through a pair of Vital Conversations hosted by the WCF this fall.
Discussion at the events, which are scheduled for Sept. 27 (“Is our community livable?”) and Oct. 18 (“Is everyone thriving?”) at the Whistler Public Library, will be guided by the themes and data found in WCF’s Vital Signs: A Community Check Up document.
And the check-up is chock full of illuminating facts.
On the topic of community livability, the document highlights things like access to childcare (14.3 spaces per 100 kids in Whistler, compared to 12.5 in Pemberton and 21 in Squamish); and the instances of violent crime (195 in 2021, up 22 per cent from the 160 reported in 2020).
While calls to police were down in several areas, such as drug crimes (18 in 2021, compared to 41 in 2020), traffic offenses (102, down from 139) and property crime (351, down from 423), calls related to mental health showed a worrying spike, hitting 185 in 2021 from just 60 in 2016.
And calls related to mental health grew more serious in nature, according to RCMP Sgt. Sascha Banks.
“When people were in mental-health crisis, they were in serious mental-health crisis where they had attempted to take their lives or people were in violent states, from which they required police attendance and police intervention to ensure the safety of not only themselves but everybody else around them, including my members on my team,” Banks told Whistler’s mayor and council in a recent Committee of the Whole presentation.
On the topic of a thriving community, meanwhile, the stats aren’t much better.
Food costs went up 16.9 per cent in 2022, while the cost of shelter rose 16.7 per cent, the report said.
The median purchase price of a single-family home hit $3.3 million (but you can still get a townhouse for the low, low price of just $1.3 million, or an apartment for just $770,000).
Forty-two per cent of dwellings in Whistler do not meet StatsCan’s criteria for “acceptable housing”—housing that costs less than 30 per cent of one’s income, while also being suitable in size and type, and in good repair.
According to Communities That Care Whistler’s 2021 needs assessment survey of students in Grades 6 to 12, nearly one quarter of respondents felt sad or hopeless over a two-week period, with 10 per cent seriously considering suicide. Just over 40 per cent of Grade 10 students reported going to school drunk or high in Whistler—well above the Sea to Sky’s average of 23 per cent.
These numbers of course don’t paint the entire picture of Whistler and its current livability, but they offer valuable insight for community planners—and allow them to answer the key question at the heart of all the research: is everyone in Whistler thriving?
“The hard answer is no. Not everyone is thriving,” the check-up report concludes.
“While income is growing in Whistler, living expenses are growing faster. And while we found that few people are living below the national poverty line, Whistler struggles to house, transport, feed, and provide a livable wage, and supply health-care to the folks hoping to continue to call Whistler home.
“This is especially true in times of ever-increasing extreme weather events, a bigger housing crisis than ever before and a looming recession.”
As 2023 draws to a close, will we see a tempering of current trends? Will visits to the food bank level off in 2024? Will fewer people need access to additional supports, or find themselves in crisis situations?
One can hope. In the meantime, you can take part in WCF’s upcoming Vital Signs sessions at the library by registering here: whistlerfoundation.com/vital-signs.
