Port Alberni is having a makeover. So are its people.

Every morning at the IGV Build Systems factory in Port Alberni, the team does a quick check before starting the shift.

Not a safety check. A wildlife check.

Black bears wander the river edges just minutes from the factory floor. Otters surface in the inlet below the waterfront office. Eagles drift over the inlet that stretches 50 kilometres to the Pacific. On calm mornings, the mountains that ring the valley reflect off the water so clearly you could mistake them for a second sky.

This is not a town you would describe as ordinary. And right now, it is having a moment.

The salmon capital of the world is getting a TV show

In June 2026, Port Alberni was named as the first Canadian community to be featured in Hometown Takeover Canada, the HGTV series hosted by Bryan and Sarah Baeumler. The show will follow a full scale renovation of homes, businesses, and public spaces across the city through summer 2026, then broadcast that story to the entire country.

Mayor Sharie Minions put it simply when the announcement was made: this is a community built on resilience, pride, and connection.

She is right. But there is more to the story than the TV cameras will show.

When you spend time in Port Alberni, you quickly realise this is not a town looking for a handout. It is a town ready for an opportunity.

A town that knows how to start again

Port Alberni has been starting again for a long time.

It was the site of British Columbia's first sawmill in 1860. For most of the century that followed, the forestry industry built this town, the jobs, the houses, the hockey rink, the high school, the hospital that serves the whole west coast of Vancouver Island. When the mills began to close, Port Alberni felt it deeply. The Somass Sawmill, which once employed over 1,000 people, curtailed indefinitely in 2017. San Group's large log operation closed in 2024.

But the people stayed. And they started looking for what came next.

What came next turned out to be housing.

Where the factory is

IGV Build Systems chose Port Alberni for a reason.

This is a town with a manufacturing heritage, a skilled workforce, and people who know how to build things that last. When IGV Housing needed a home for its advanced manufacturing facility on Vancouver Island, Port Alberni made sense in every direction.

The factory produces SmartCore units, the working heart of each IGVhope home, with plumbing, electrical, kitchen and bathroom fully integrated in a precision controlled environment before the home is ever assembled on site. Twelve of the first hires came directly from North Island College's new Green Building Foundations and Manufacturing programme, which IGV Housing helped create in partnership with the college, Synergy Foundation, and WorkBC. Priority was given to former forestry workers. The production target once fully operational is two SmartCore units per shift.

What the town looks like from the water

Stand on the Victoria Quay boardwalk on a clear morning and you understand immediately why people stay.

The Alberni Inlet stretches south toward the ocean, flanked by mountains that drop straight into the water. Eagles circle above the Somass River estuary. In the autumn months, when the chinook and coho salmon return to spawn, black bears come down to feed along the riverbanks, sometimes visible from the boardwalk at low tide, unhurried and entirely at home.

In the deeper waters of the inlet, sea lions, seals, and grey whales pass through on migration. Otters move along the shoreline. The Lady Rose, a working packet freighter, makes her way down 50 kilometres of inlet to Bamfield and Ucluelet three times a week, stopping at communities along the coast.

Port Alberni calls itself the salmon capital of the world. The fish hatchery at Robertson Creek, the annual Labour Day salmon derby, the bears on the riverbank in September, they are not tourist theatre. They are just Tuesday.

The people who make it work

What the bears and the mountains do not tell you is that Port Alberni has a housing problem.

According to CBC News reporting from January 2025, the city has seen housing prices accelerate sharply since 2015, driven by a lack of supply and a growing population. A few hundred multi family units have been built since 2022, but it has not been enough. Rents have risen. Teachers and nurses and tradespeople, the people who keep the schools open, the hospital staffed, and the town running, are feeling the pressure of a market that has moved faster than their incomes.

According to the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board, the benchmark price of a single family home in Port Alberni was $524,400 in June 2026. Even in one of the most affordable communities on Vancouver Island, that math still leaves a wide gap to close before a family can move in on their own terms.

This is the gap IGVhope was built for.

IGVhope homes are coming to Port Alberni

IGVhope is launching its homeownership pathway in Port Alberni.

HOPE participants move into a newly built home on Day 1. The agreed purchase price is set at entry and does not change. During the building period of up to ten years, they pay occupancy contributions at a market equivalent level while their financial position strengthens. At Year 10, they complete the purchase at the price agreed when they moved in.

No down payment race. No stretched finances on day one. The journey starts the day you move in.

IGVhope is part of IGV Housing, an integrated platform that connects construction, capital and homeownership into one system. The homes that IGVhope participants move into in Port Alberni are built right here, in the factory by the inlet, by people who live in the same community.

That matters. The workers who built the home live in homes like it. The community is investing in itself.

What it means to put down roots

There is a phrase people in Port Alberni use when they talk about why they stayed, or why they came back.

They say: I already live in paradise.

You hear it at the farmers market at Harbour Quay. You hear it from the people who fish the inlet on Saturday mornings and watch the salmon run every September like it is the most natural thing in the world, because it is.

Putting down roots in a place like this is not just a financial decision. It is a commitment to the bears on the river and the eagles overhead and the neighbour who has lived on the same street for thirty years. It is knowing that your children will grow up knowing those same things.

That is what homeownership actually means in a community like Port Alberni. Not an asset. A life.

The HOPE pathway is how IGVhope helps people get there, not when they are stretched, but when they are strong.

Port Alberni is having a makeover. So are its people.

Hometown Takeover Canada will renovate homes and businesses and parks this summer. The cameras will capture it. The country will watch.

But the deeper story is happening a little more quietly, on a factory floor by the inlet where the otters swim, in the hands of people who spent their careers in the forest industry and are now building something different.

Port Alberni has always been a town that builds things. It is building homes now. And it is building the people who will own them.