Canada Needs Housing, Housing Needs Clearford
Affordable housing starts with engineered solutions tailored to meet the environmental and affordability objectives for the community.
Water and wastewater management are one of the essential services required to support housing supply. Clearford can provide help with land development opportunities that are outside of traditionally serviced urban areas, which is an important component of meeting construction goals for affordable housing.
Housing shortages and affordability concerns have been major headlines in Canadian news, and according to an article written by the CBC, “two-thirds of the supply gap is found in Ontario and British Columbia, two markets that have faced major declines in affordability”.1 Expanding the housing supply is not a linear path – it’s often time- and cost-prohibitive for traditional municipal urban infrastructure. When it comes to working with property owners, land developers, and condominium corporations, Clearford zeroes in on affordability. This is part of our foundation – building reliable and genuine relationships with our clients and the communities we serve while protecting public health and the environment.
When building outside of denser urban settings—in suburban, peri-urban, village and rural areas—property developers can rely on Clearford to cost-effectively operate decentralized treatment facilities. Whether a site has existing water services connected to an on‑site treatment plant, to a municipal line, or no water connection at all, Clearford’s team tailors its service offering to meet the development demands with in-house engineering and operations expertise.
In the town of Carp near Ottawa, Ontario, Clearford has done just that. Existing water and wastewater servicing were sustainable for the town core, but not expandable for new residences under the local municipality’s planning and infrastructure framework. Clearford’s expertise in delivering decentralized water and wastewater services was a perfect fit for the new 1,000-acre community of affordable family homes.
A multi-phase approach and modular design grants flexibility in the build process and ensures increasing demand is continuously met with sensitivity to project financing constraints. Clearford operations has supported the client through each development phase with critical recommendations for improving efficiency and achieving regulatory requirements as well as collaborating with municipalities to meet level-of-service and reporting standards.
Supporting our client in Carp and other property developers seeking to build affordable communities is critical to curbing the housing supply gap. Clearford puts forth the effort to support communities in navigating the technical and regulatory complexities of water infrastructure management and ultimately, makes affordable housing more accessible.
Footnotes
1 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/housing-affordability-cmhc-report-2030-1.6498898
