The People Who Serve South Surrey Drive Two Hours to Get Here. That Is Not Sustainable.

The nurses, the teachers, the restaurant workers, the childcare providers — the people who make South Surrey function cannot afford to live in South Surrey. The commutes they are absorbing to serve this community are unreasonable. Something has to give.

The nurse who works at Peace Arch Hospital lives in Langley. She leaves at five forty-five in the morning to make a seven o'clock shift. On a good day, the drive is fifty minutes. On a bad day — which is most days — it is closer to ninety. She has been on two waitlists for rental housing in White Rock and South Surrey for fourteen months. The rents she has been quoted are forty percent of her take-home pay before utilities.

The childcare worker at a South Surrey daycare commutes from Abbotsford. The café owner on Johnston Road has had three staff members quit in the past year because the commute from the only neighbourhoods they could afford became unsustainable. The school district is recruiting teachers with competitive salaries and struggling to retain them because the housing costs in the communities where they teach make long-term residency financially impossible.

A community that cannot house the people who work in it is not a sustainable community. It is a place that has outsourced its human infrastructure to regions with lower costs and is paying the penalty in commute times, recruitment difficulties, staff turnover, and the slow degradation of services that depend on stable, experienced people.

South Surrey is a wealthy community. It has the political and economic weight to advocate for the kinds of housing programs — below-market workforce housing, rental protection, partnerships with non-profit developers — that other communities have used to keep essential workers within a reasonable distance of where they work.

It has not chosen to use that weight in any serious way. The consequence is a community that is increasingly dependent on people making sacrifices to serve it that the community is not making any effort to reduce.

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