Sixty-Four New Homes and One New Basement Tenant: The Month Chilliwack Affordable Housing Got Personal

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | August 2026

Est. reading time: 6-7 minutes

My tenant moved in this last week.

If you have been following this blog since April, you know this moment has been a long time coming. The empty nester post. The blend and extend mortgage. The budget the bank laughed at. The sound deadening upgrade. The four weeks of holding my price. The pet policy reversal that surprised everyone including me. All of it has been building toward a single ordinary moment: a person carrying boxes down the stairs into a suite that used to be a very expensive storage room.

It went smoothly. The final walkthrough happened, during which I casually checked things I had already checked eleven times. Boxes went down the stairs. Keys changed hands. Nobody needed the talking points I had prepared. She is settled in and everything is good.

The dog, meanwhile, has not yet realized she has a downstairs neighbour.

We are anticipating that talk any day now. She is a good dog, but she has spent her entire life operating under the assumption that everything on this property answers to her. Sound deadening insulation works both ways, so her intelligence gathering has been limited. At some point in the near future she is going to hear something, or worse, meet the other pet, and we will have a conversation for which no amount of preparation will help. I will report back.

But this post is only partly about my basement, because while I was mopping vinyl plank and testing smoke detectors, something much bigger happened in Chilliwack affordable housing recently, and almost nobody I have talked to knows about it.

The Other Move-Ins Happening in Chilliwack Right Now

At the end of July, a six-storey building called Cedar Lá:lém officially opened in Chilliwack. Sixty-four new affordable homes for individuals and families with low incomes, including Indigenous people and Elders, made possible through the Province's Community Housing Fund.

The building offers one- and two-bedroom homes, including five accessible units. The Province, through BC Housing, contributed approximately $29 million to the project, including a grant of approximately $10 million through the Community Housing Fund, and the Mamele'awt Qweesome Housing Society contributed $1 million in cash equity. MQHS, a non-profit Indigenous housing society with deep roots in the Fraser Valley, operates the building.

Sixty-four households. Getting keys. In our town. Right now. While my one tenant was unpacking boxes, sixty-four other households were doing the same thing across town.

If you are wondering why you did not hear about this, I do not have a good answer. It got a government press release and a story in the Progress and then the news cycle moved on. Meanwhile it is one of the most significant additions to Chilliwack's housing stock this year, and the story behind how it happened is even better than the number.

The Church That Chose Housing

Here is the part of the Cedar Lá:lém story that stopped me.

The property is owned by Cheam View United Church, and it will be leased to MQHS at a nominal rate for 60 years. The building replaces the previous church building and includes new dedicated community space for the congregation.

Read that again slowly. A church looked at the land it had held for generations, looked at what this community actually needs, and decided that the highest use of its property was housing for the people who are struggling most to find it. Then it signed that decision away for sixty years at a nominal rate. That is not a press release talking point. That is a congregation making a permanent, binding choice about what it exists for.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about what I learned in a fair parking lot: that the thing you are actually buying in Chilliwack is a community that shows up for itself. I did not know it at the time, but Cedar Lá:lém is the six-storey version of the same argument. A church, a First Nations housing society, the province, and the city all pulling in the same direction until sixty-four families had somewhere to live. Nobody involved got rich. Everybody involved got something better.

What Housing Supply Actually Looks Like

I write about housing supply constantly on this blog. Development charges, absorption rates, CMHC forecasts, federal funding programs. It is easy to let "supply" become an abstraction, a number that goes up or down in a spreadsheet somewhere in Ottawa.

So here is what housing supply actually looked like in Chilliwack this month, on the ground, in real life.

A church partnership opened sixty-four homes downtown. And a guy with a construction background, a blend and extend mortgage, and a very patient wife finished a basement suite and moved in one tenant.

Sixty-five households, housed, through two completely different mechanisms. One took $29 million, five partner organizations, and years of planning. One took a homeowner, roughly 25 percent more money than he budgeted, and a bank that was right to laugh at him. Neither approach could have produced the other's result. Both results matter.

This is the honest answer to the housing conversation that usually gets flattened into slogans. The big non-market projects like Cedar Lá:lém serve people that my basement suite never will. My suite rents at market rates to a tenant who can afford them. Cedar Lá:lém houses individuals and families with low incomes who the private market has largely stopped serving. These are different segments of the same continuum, and a town the size of Chilliwack needs every segment working at once. It is also worth noting Cedar Lá:lém is not alone: in June, the federal and provincial governments announced over $50.6 million in combined funding for Phoenix Pathways on Trethewey, a four-storey building with 49 supportive homes and 42 shelter spaces. The pipeline is real and it is local.

When the population decline post made the rounds a few weeks ago, a few people asked me whether building more homes even matters if fewer people are coming. Cedar Lá:lém is the answer. The people those sixty-four homes serve were already here. They were just not housed well. Supply is not only about growth. Sometimes it is about finally serving the people who never left.

What This Means for the Rental Market Conversation

Some of you are reading this as landlords or future suite owners and quietly wondering whether sixty-four new affordable units plus a wave of government-funded housing is bad news for your rental math.

The honest answer: not really, and here is why.

BC has now recorded 25 consecutive months of year-over-year decreases in asking rents, which are down 11.9 percent from their August 2023 peak. That softening is being driven by broad forces, new purpose-built supply, slower population growth, and policy pressure, not by non-market housing projects. Cedar Lá:lém residents were mostly not competing for market suites like mine in the first place. Different tenants, different price points, different problem being solved.

What the rent data does mean is what I said back in May and will keep saying: build your suite math on today's rents, not 2022 rents. My own suite penciled at current market rates with the pipeline demand window as upside. That discipline is why last week felt like a win instead of a stretch. The suite is rented, the number held, and the math works at the rents that actually exist.

And if you are a renter, the combination of two years of falling asking rents and genuine non-market supply finally arriving means you have more real options in Chilliwack right now than at any point in the last five years. That sentence would have been unthinkable in 2022.

Two Sets of Keys

At some point in the last few weeks, property managers at Cedar Lá:lém handed over keys to families that had probably been waiting a long time for a stable, affordable home in the community where they already live and work.

Around the same time, I handed a single set of keys to my new tenant, stood at the top of the stairs resisting the urge to explain the sound deadening insulation one more time, and then went upstairs and let her move in like a normal person.

Two sets of keys. Wildly different scales. Exactly the same outcome: people in Chilliwack going to sleep tonight in homes that did not exist a year ago.

I have spent months writing about why the market math of this town makes sense. This month I got to watch the human math instead. It is better.

The tenant is settled. The suite is quiet. The dog remains blissfully unaware that her kingdom now has a lower level, and we are letting her enjoy the mystery for as long as it lasts.

If you are sitting on unused space and wondering whether your own version of this story is worth starting, or if you just want to talk about what is actually happening in Chilliwack housing beyond the headlines, I am easy to reach. No pitch. Just the conversation.

Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt Fraser Valley Real Estate | Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Langley, Mission, Hope and Agassiz 📱 [604-991-5028] 🌐 thewelcomematt.ca

Market data referenced in this post reflects Chilliwack and District Real Estate Board statistics for May & June 2026. This post is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or real estate advice specific to your situation.