Cassidy is not a municipality. It is an unincorporated rural village in Electoral Area A of the Regional District of Nanaimo, and it is here because of coal. Granby Consolidated Mining worked the Douglas seam at Cassidy between 1918 and 1932 and built a small model town for its workers, which emptied when the mine closed.
The housing is what makes a renovation here different. The regional district's community plan for this area records that a large proportion of the dwelling units in the Cassidy Rural Village designation are within one of three manufactured home parks, and that the Cassidy Rural Village has the highest density of any of the village centres in the RDN electoral areas. The census bears that out — just over a thousand residents and fewer than five hundred dwellings inside 7.65 square kilometres, around 136 people to the square kilometre, which is town density on rural servicing. Across the electoral area as a whole, close to one occupied dwelling in ten is movable rather than framed on a foundation, the largest single building cohort is 1971 to 1980, and roughly 45 per cent of the housing predates 1981.
Neither community water nor community sewer is provided here, so properties draw from private wells and dispose on site. The community plan is direct about what that means: the upper Cassidy aquifer is the main source of domestic water for most residents and is considered highly vulnerable to surface contamination, and the airport lands sit above it. At this density, with each home on its own system above an aquifer the plan calls highly vulnerable, adding a fixture is a capacity question before it is a layout question. Permits are coordinated where the scope requires them, and the work is built to BC Building Code. Scope is itemised in writing and set out in a written contract. Other renovation work is available on request.