How a small Newfoundland town is handling a huge population boom

Jordan If you’ve spent this pandemic in one of Canada’s largest and most expensive cities, I bet you thought about leaving. Especially if you’ve been stuck in a downtown apartment while most of downtown has frequently been a ghost town. Especially if you’ve been renting, because you know that there’s no way you could ever afford a home in Toronto or Vancouver, or maybe even Montreal. And of course, if you have a job that now allows you to work remotely, why wouldn’t you leave? And so you close your eyes and dream…

Newfoundland Tourism Clip …celebrate the return to normal in the most extraordinary place on Earth. I promise you, family and friends you haven’t even met yet are waiting to welcome you to Newfoundland and Labrador.

Jordan As it turns out, you are not the only one with that dream. You are one of hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have thought about packing it up and heading east to Atlantic Canada, where the sea meets the land. There’s very little covid 19, plenty of space for everyone and, oh yes, a couple of hundred thousand dollars can buy you a full size, really nice home with a backyard and everything. And so for thousands of those hundreds of thousands of dreamers, the dream has become a reality. Atlantic Canada is in the middle of a population boom. Everywhere from cities to towns to smaller villages and even remote rural land. But the dream is never quite reality. While there’s no question that so many of these areas desperately need new citizens and new families, there is a limit to the infrastructure in places like that. And the infrastructure that does exist is often not up to the standards of people coming in from a massive city. So where does this population boom work? Where doesn’t it? What can these towns do to take advantage of their good fortune without losing what makes them special? Today, we’re going about as far east as east gets in this country to have a look at one example.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. John Norman is the Mayor of Bonavista, Newfoundland. Hello, John.

John Hello.

Jordan Why don’t you first tell our listeners who have never been out there about Bonavista? What’s it like? Where is it? Most of us haven’t heard of it.

John Well, I would say a fair number of Canadians might have heard of Bonavista if they hear the Canadian version of ‘this land is your land, this land is my land from Cape Bonavista to Vancouver Island’.

Jordan Of course!

John So we’re that far easterly community on the very edge of Canada, jutting out into the North Atlantic. Next stop, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland.

Jordan Why don’t you take me back maybe five or ten years ago and tell me about the situation in your town in terms of growth and population and sustainability. Where were you?

John Well, I was just moving back to the community a little over ten years ago, I had gone away to University to study and collect a few degrees. Moving back to my hometown, I always planned on it, and I always felt that Bonavista had quite a bit of potential. But while I was growing up there, especially junior high high school years, while I was away, most of the seven years in University, it was a socioeconomically depressed community. Our community is a fishing community, and was a fishing community historically right from the 1500s. So with a major downturn in the fishery in 1992, the cod moratorium hit the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Of course, Bonavista was severely impacted. It was historically known as the cod capital of Newfoundland when it was the country of Newfoundland.

So it was a bit of a depressing place. And people of my generation, and I’m sure listeners from rural communities across the country would have heard the same from their parents and family and friends, if you want a future, if you want to succeed, unfortunately, you’re going to have to leave the community. And that’s what a lot of us were told. But that’s now changing.

Jordan We’re going to talk about the impact of the pandemic specifically in a moment. But maybe first describe your mission pre-covid to try to change that. What were you doing?

John When I first moved back to Bonavista right after University, I won a Council chair on the town Council as a result of a byelection. So it was a little bit unexpected. There was a sudden loss of a councillor on the city council and I stepped up. There were four of us running for the one seat, and I won that seat. I was working professionally in education and a number of other things on the side. But around that same time, I started acquiring a few heritage properties in the community because real estate was very undervalued. And for those who haven’t been to Bonavista, it’s part of a UNESCO region. It’s got National Historic Sites of Canada, provincial Historic sites, all sorts of designations, international points of historical significance. And it has over 1000 pieces of built heritage in this town of about 4000 people. So it’s incredibly dense and a lot of those properties were serially under utilized.

So around that time, I began in the infancy my first private company in real estate development in Bonavista, Bonavista Living. And it was myself and one employee at her dining room table. It’s now grown to over 50 employees. And now we have three companies under that banner. And we do major real estate development, community and commercial development in the community. Everything from creating manufacturing spaces, to unique manufacturers moving in, to tourism accommodations to home resales in homes that were vacant for 20 and 30 years. I myself live in a house now that was vacant for 27 years, and until I bought it, it was a home for European Starlings.

Jordan Before the pandemic struck, how were you finding people to move back there and fill those empty homes? How did you sell this place before covid?

John Bonavista has been doing a really great job as a rural destination for tourism and also carefully developing at the municipal level its quality of life through its place capital. So the value of its landscape, its historic landscape, and how some of the buildings were being repurposed by not-for-profits, by the town hall itself, getting involved with some social enterprise in the community. And it created a critical mass that began to attract people, investors like myself and shareholders of my company. And it really took off. Many, many millions of public dollars, municipal, provincial, federal dollars were put into Bonavista in the late 90s through early 2000s, and that laid the groundwork for a lot of private investment coming up. Our company, Bonavista Living, specifically, has already invested over the past seven years about $14 million into the community and the developments that we do.

So all of that has really garnered media attention. We’ve been in national publications, print, television. Documentaries from France, Germany, Canada. Travel shows. So we’ve really been pushing the brand of Bonavista as a place to live and a place to visit and usually a great place to live is a great place to visit. So Bonavista has been doing a very good job over the last number of years enhancing that quality of life. And we’re now beginning to reap the benefits. And of course, that’s been really exacerbated by the situation with covid and the idea of people leaving urban environments for more idyllic rural or semi rural areas. And that’s something actually before the pandemic that I was predicting and discussing and telling people that this was a minority group, predominantly of millennials, that will be more and more… with or without the pandemic, we didn’t know anything about it at the time. They would be leaving these urban environments.

And the last big speaking tour I did was in late 2018, I think, and it was through New Brunswick, and I spoke in eleven different communities. And I talked about the trend of belonging and how more and more people of my generation in their 20s, 30s, early 40s feel a disconnect when they live in large, large urban environments. Still a minority group. I don’t think we’re going to see a mass exodus from our cities. But luckily for some of the well positioned rural communities and regions, you can now more easily attract younger people, families, professionals, mobile workers to your town if you’re ready for them. And if you build a place where they want to live. And that’s what Bonavista has been dutifully doing now for over ten years. And as I said, now we’re reaping the benefits and we have things like housing shortages, which I think many members of Council and myself as Mayor didn’t really anticipate at least so quickly. I anticipated it coming at some point. But as I mentioned, the pandemic has exacerbated that. So now we have waitlists for houses in Bonavista.

Jordan When you say the pandemic has exacerbated it, can you give me an actual idea of the scale of it both in Bonavista and maybe also in Atlantic Canada in general? Like growth numbers, percentages. Where are we compared to where some people might think we would be?

John Well, hard to say with rock solid numbers. It’s being studied right now, municipally and regionally and provincially for Newfoundland, I’ve heard some stories out of other provinces that are in Atlantic Canada that are reflecting similar phenomena. Of course, it’s all relative. So when you’re in a town of around 4000, feeder population around Bonavista, give it a 20 minutes drive, there’s about 8000 people total in the Bonavista area. So say you see a dozen new families move into your community in one year. That’s a big jump. Normally, we would deal with a half a dozen at most. And we had been fighting like most rural towns for a number of years to catch up with immigration and stabilizing the population with a dropping birth rate. Almost everywhere in Canada, people are having fewer children. And of course, Newfoundland has a generally older population, as do most provinces that have high rural numbers, and therefore the death rate was oftentimes higher than the birth rate. And the number needing to make up the difference, the number of people moving into your community just wasn’t cutting it.

So we were only able to stabilize in the last three or four years. Now we’re looking at a growth of 4 or 5%, which is a very strong, stable growth. But that is an anomaly. And that’s an anomaly for much of rural Newfoundland and much of rural Atlantic Canada. We’ll see if it shows up in the census. I think that was a little bit too late. And a challenge with covid is people were buying houses in advance, but they could not relocate or it was very difficult to relocate. But give it another few years when the next rollout is done and the next data collection is also done at our municipal level in two years, I expect there to be reasonable growth and no surprise when it comes to the average age and so on.

And one of the things that we’ve noted and we broadcast as much as we can, is the people who are moving in are more often than not younger people. And that’s something that I think a lot of people need to pay attention to and learn about. I think people feel, the average person on the street feels that rural areas okay, if anyone is moving in, of course, it’s retirees because rural areas don’t have jobs. In Bonavista and a number of our other communities…we’re actually having a forum next month in November talking about lack of human resources and the need to bring in even more foreign workers because we don’t have enough people to fill all the jobs we have, and the job creation rate is rather high in our area. Some seasonal, some year round. But there are lots of jobs that are not being filled. So it creates a whole host of new and wonderful problems for a rural area, but problems, challenges nonetheless.

Jordan Well, that’s what I wanted to ask about next. And we’ll get to the housing shortage in a little bit. But just in terms of infrastructure in a community that’s already fairly small. What happens when you start seeing this relatively rapid growth? And what do you need to build up in order to deal with it?

John Well, there are going to be some that relocate to rural areas from very large urban environments like Toronto or Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal. They’re going to expect a certain level of service. There is a romanticization of living in a rural environment, and you’re exactly right, there’s a certain level of infrastructure but also a certain level of service required in your community and region. Or you may have the threat of disillusionment with some of those that relocate in another year or two. And you see an exodus.

Jordan Can you give me some examples of what people expect, but they don’t get when we’re talking about infrastructure and service?

John So Bonavista has worked very hard to put in a new wellness center in partnership with the government. It’s a multi, multi million dollar wellness center. There will be space for yoga classes, a tripling of the size of our municipal gym facilities. We have created biking groups, hiking groups. We’ve expanded our figure skating club, our hockey club, our curling club. We have encouraged the growth through municipal supports, but wearing another hat, through my business development work as a social entrepreneur, we have recruited young entrepreneurs from urban environments to live permanently in Bonavista.

They’re manufacturers. They operate small, specialized boutique stores. They make and export sea salt. They make and export artisan soaps and skincare lines. They produce fine coffee. These are all things that are required. The town of Bonavista has through an operating grant, reinvigorated Newfoundland’s oldest operating theater, which was historically just a cinema but is now a dual cinema and live theater and a musical performance space with major expansions to it and over $6 million invested. And that is a year round, twelve months of the year venue, which of course, goes a great way in expanding the quality of life and the livability year round in the community.

So there’s been a lot of thought and a lot of investment. Boardwalks, sidewalks, streetscaping beautification. Millions and millions of dollars have been spent. And that’s what Bonavista has been doing with the money, as our municipal budget has been growing five, seven, sometimes 10% every year for the past four or five years, specifically, the last four years, as I’ve been Mayor in my first term. All those investments have been reinvested that were given to us by tax dollars. They’re reinvested in the community and community infrastructure, and the town of Bonavista on a per capita as a ratio of our municipal budget, which is a multimillion dollar budget, we spend the most per capita of any municipality in Newfoundland and Labrador on heritage, culture, tourism and recreation. A significant percentage, over 20% of our budget annually. That is very high compared to towns smaller than us and towns much larger than us. But it looks like we’re now reaping the benefits.

Jordan With all those investments starting to pay off and driving more and more people to town to the point where, as you say, you’re now dealing with a housing shortage. I want to ask you about the housing market, especially maybe wearing your developer hat, because we’ve covered the housing crisis in many places in Canada. And one thing the experts tell us is when you get people leaving expensive cities for rural properties, one of the things that can happen is they can price those properties out of affordability for the average people who live in that community. So is there a point when houses in Bonavista will get too expensive for locals to buy them?

John That’s been an active discussion for a few years now, both within my company and at the municipal level with the Regional Chamber of Commerce and other organizations that are concerned about it. That has naturally been occurring at a steady pace. Real estate values in Bonavista now have gone up somewhere around 67% to 71% in the past few years, and that was before the newest Covid numbers will be hitting the data sheets at the town hall later this winter or early next spring. I can say anecdotally from the houses that we are selling that it’s not uncommon at all to see an extra $50,000 added to the average home in Bonavista just in the past year. So to put that in perspective for listeners, five, four or five years ago, we were selling restored heritage homes completed inside and out to a fairly high standard by myself and by other developers in the community. And they would sell for around 160, 175, maybe 180. So really affordable houses compared to much of Canada, and some of those would even have ocean views if you got closer to $200,000.

So now those houses are starting at around 250 and going to around 350. So that is quite a jump. The challenge is with Bonavista now, and we had a lot of vacant buildings, hundreds, in fact, outbuildings, commercial buildings, residential houses that we were under utilizing, in many cases completely vacant, throughout the community. They have almost all now been absorbed, reinvigorated, resold, leased, developed in other ways. So now we have a bit of a housing shortage, and now we have new developments over the past couple of years happening on the edge of town. When it comes to lower income housing, that is where we have the most immediate challenge. I myself actually have over a dozen locked in low income housing units that we support throughout the community to blend various neighborhoods. So every time we do, as some say, gentrify a house or gentrify in some way a neighborhood with a number of our projects, we as a private company offset by creating an affordable housing unit or two in a neighboring building. And we’ve been doing that for a few years, just with our strong social lens.

Now, of course, not all developers do that, and therein lies the problem. So we now see developers coming on stream that weren’t in existence a couple of years ago, seeing if they can make quick money in real estate in Bonavista, and those lower income houses are going to be the ones that will unfortunately be priced out of the market. So how do we deal with that? We talked to Newfoundland and Labrador Housing, a provincial organization that works through the provincial government to create more lower income housing units or supported housing units in the community. And we’ve also been in dialogue with Habitat for Humanity now for over a year, and they’ve now acquired land in the community to create some duplex spaces.

So we are working on it. But it’s a challenge. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s a wonderful challenge to have that I think most rural communities would be enviable over. But it’s a new challenge for a brand new Council. We were sworn in on Monday, so they have to face things that some rural councils don’t really have to face, like housing shortages.

Jordan I’ve got to ask you, just because I’m sure that our listeners are wondering, and I’m curious as well. How do you deal with wearing two hats as a Mayor and a developer, that sometimes I assume, might come into conflict with one another?

John This is my second term as Mayor. I was actually, as of a couple of months ago, retiring. I had publicly announced that, and I was a bit alarmed leading up to the municipal election a few weeks ago that candidates that I hoped were going to come forward did not come forward. Others did, and I didn’t think that they were the best fit for the direction the community was going. So there have been challenges in the past. There have been questions raised, but that’s not uncommon in a rural area, so it all depends on the distance you are from the issue. There are things that do come up that I remove myself from as a real estate developer, I’m one of many in the community. And I am an accommodation owner, but I’m one of over 100 owners of accommodations in the community. So I’m part of a cohort, and unless it’s something that directly is tied to my company, Council has, as of the past four years, decided me not to be in conflict on various issues, even when I raised them myself and wondered if I should excuse myself from the meeting and discuss amongst themselves. It’s been turned down. Town management and staff have discussed that as well. We’ve even had calls with our lawyer on certain topics in advance of meetings to make sure there’s no conflict and so far so good. But there is always a delicate line to tread.

Jordan The last thing I want to ask you about is if there is risk to building so much new infrastructure, to bringing in so many businesses and spending so many millions of dollars. If, as you say, people who move out here become a little disillusioned with rural life, or maybe as the world opens back up, some of those millennials have to move back to the office. And are you concerned that there is a point at which this rapid growth will reverse and you’ll end up holding the bag of all these things you’ve purchased to support a growing city?

John Personally, as a real estate developer, I’m not concerned with it for us with Bonvista Living and our residential development arm, our house sales are booked now until late 2023, early 2024. So I turned down way more inquiries now than I can deal with. When it comes to our buyers, I can speak from that perspective. I basically give lectures and lessons. I don’t just show houses and sell them to just anyone. I, as an individual real estate developer, talk to, network with the buyers that are interested in these properties and explain to them what you’re going to get, what you can expect, the direction the community is going. Can’t make any real promises on infrastructure that’s not yet in place, but I can illustrate how far we’ve come. And I break down the romanticization of living in rural. There are challenges. There will always be challenges. So you have to evaluate what you can live with and what you can live without.

Bonavista is better positioned to manage a lot of these people. What I am more worried about are some of the articles I’m reading over the past few months where people are mostly urbanites relocating to very rural areas. Bonavista has thousands of people, has a hospital, has public schools, has a small College campus, hundreds of government jobs, a fairly diverse fishery, tourism sector, manufacturing and so on. It’s not the middle of nowhere. But there are urbanites that are moving to much more rural communities. Bonavista is let’s say, a first tier rural, they’re living in or moving to third tier rural, which is how we define rural communities in Newfoundland. Third tier rural may have a convenience store at best, no grocery store in the community, no health facility, no school. They have to be bussed or you drive to a neighboring area.

Will those communities be able to maintain the people that move in? In some cases, yes, I’m sure they will. And I hope they will. but I’m willing to bet in some cases they won’t. And that’s going to create a real negative effect and probably a negative feeling in the communities that are affected by that when they’re excited because a few new families or a few new couples have moved in, and then a year or two later they’re gone. So I think communities are going to have to deal with that the best they can. And I guess this is my disclaimer for any buyers or potential buyers that are listening, the best thing to do is do your research. I’m not going to say there are some communities that are better than others because every buyer is looking for something different, and some are looking for something incredibly remote. And they want to live in a community with 100 people, and they don’t care that they have to drive an hour to a larger grocery store. But a lot of them, I’m guessing, will not want that and will not want that, especially when February is here. So we have to do our research, be very cautious and not just buy on a whim.

Jordan John, thank you for this. It was a delight. And now I want to come and visit.

John Thank you.

Jordan John Norman, developer and Mayor of Bonavista, Newfoundland, and a man who’s very careful about that potential conflict of interest.

That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. Email us Anytime thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!].

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Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page