Counting homes

It is 2022, which means 2021 Census data is trickling out. If you are interested in this kind of data, you should probably be over at censusmapper or Mountain Doodles where Jens does cool things with maps and data visualization to make census numbers fun. But before you go, I want to talk a bit more about what the census can tell us about the regional housing situation.

I have written a few blog posts in the past that compare census data to the regional growth trends projects in the Regional Growth Strategy – the master document of regional planning for Metro Vancouver, and the one that all municipal Official Community Plans must align with. In those posts I compared the decade of population growth that the regional government planning folks predicted back in 2011 to the actual population growth shown in the census. Turns out (surprise!) growth is not evenly distributed around the region, and though the overall growth of the region is close to the projection (when you account for census undercount, which is an interesting phenomenon), but there are great regional variations between those communities that met or exceeded their regional growth projections and those that fell far short.

However, the population count is not something cities directly control (despite some fanciful promises candidates may offer). The region grows for many overlapping demographic, economic and socio-political reasons, and cities can either accommodate that growth (by supplying homes, employment spaces, utilities, infrastructure) or choose not to (and face housing price inflation, labour shortages, and failing services). The Regional Growth Strategy also includes projected dwelling counts for every community, and Cities though their policies and practices, have much closer control of this. It also happens that dwelling count is a major factor in housing affordability – the idea that increasing supply puts downward pressure on price is not controversial outside of some Landscape Architecture schools.

The 2021 dwelling count data was recently released by Statistics Canada, and we can now compare the decade-old RGS projected numbers for 2021 to the census numbers for 2021. I’ll start with a table, because I am not the data visualization genius Jens is:

I don’t think anyone would be surprised to see only 5 of 21 municipalities built more housing units than the RGS projected, though some may be surprised to see Vancouver exceed its targets by almost 20,000 units. As is probably expected, North Van City exceeded growth projections by the highest amount proportional to its population, and Delta, New West and White Rock round out the Municipalities that built more housing units that projected (and Richmond was within statistical error of it target). However, during a decade of overlapping housing crises, while everyone agrees the affordability of housing is the primary local government issue, every other Municipality in the Metro Vancouver fell short of the very commitment they made to the region to get new housing built.

Yes, I dropped Anmore and Lions Bay and other small munis that have negligible effect on regional housing supply.

Of course, not all munis are equal in size, nor are all munis equal in their ability to accommodate growth. A significant part of the Regional Growth Strategy is to emphasize new growth near transit and established transportation networks, to increase residential density near work / study / shopping areas to reduce transportation burdens, and to prevent the erosion of the ALR and and the Urban Containment Boundary.  This is why the RGS set different targets for different municipalities, and came up with 2021 targets that every muni could agree to when they signed off on the document.

So I compared the projected increase in dwelling units from 2011 to 2021 to the amount that each municipality exceeded or fell short of the 2021 target based on 2021 census data, and you can see how the growth was not only shared unequally, but how different municipalities had different commitments to the agreed-upon plan. It is here that the two recalcitrant North Shore districts and the Tri-Cities really stand out.

Note this is not total dwelling units, just the increase between 2011 and 2021. It also shows that the apparently-rapid growth of new towers in Burnaby and Coquitlam are not enough to keep up with the demand that was projected in the region a decade ago. And that Sea Bus apparently is the great catalyst to urban growth?

The RGS is being updated right now, the decade-old document projecting to 2040 is being replaced with one projecting to 2050. All of the Municipalities are expected to sign off on it, though there are some rumblings Surrey is going to push back because they felt the other cities were not sufficiently diffident in granting them a major re-draw of the Urban Containment Boundary so they can replace forest with warehouses. One of the concerns raised by New Westminster through that process was that municipal projections/targets are being replaced with sub-regional ones that clump municipalities together, further reducing the accountability local governments have in addressing our serious housing crisis. And with strong anti-growth voices rising regionally during this local government election period, I am less confident that the order of government most able to bring in new supply is going to get the work done.

Hey Mr. Eby; we should talk.

Council – July 11, 2022

The Summeriest of all our Summer Council meetings was a longer meeting with a lot of important and foundational work on the agenda. We also had several delegations and a weird procedural thing where we had to fix a administrative error made earlier in the year, but it started with a pretty significant Report to Council:

New Westminster Homelessness Action Strategy
The City has been working on an updated strategy to both reduce homelessness and address the impacts of homelessness, and has done this work in partnership with the New Westminster Homelessness Coalition, the Community Action Network, and UBC to bring both lived experience and academic experience to the issue. The 46 recommendations in the strategy are based on a thorough review of policies developed in other Canadian and American jurisdictions facing similar issues, based on what worked previously in New West and where new gaps have appeared, and engaged stakeholders across the community in its development. This is work that began just before COVID hit. The previous strategy was demonstrably effective for the time it was established, but new housing cost pressures and vacancy pressures were causing an upswing in unsheltered residents in New West and around the region. When COVID hit, it impacted many vital support systems and made them less effective, at the same time housing and employment uncertainty caused a spike in unhoused people across the region. This was the context that went into developing this strategy.

The first step after this new 5-year strategy is adopted is to put together a working group to action those 46 recommendations. There will be follow-up reports as some of these actions are going to require funding and staffing (decisions that need to be addressed by Council as they come along) and the plan includes structuring work around annual action plans for both budgeting and accountability.

The report is a good read, and the CAN presentation at Council was inspiring, reflecting the work a Municipality can do that is both meaningful and effective, even when we don’t have the funding to build the thousands of new homes we need in the community (see report below). Our role is to facilitate their being built when the senior government funding does arrive, support the social supports in the community that keep people in their current housing and provide basic care to those who are unhoused, and never stop advocating to senior governments to bring their massive resources to bear on this most pressing of problems.


We then moved the following items On Consent:

Draft Community Energy and Emissions Plan
Talking about most pressing of problems, when the City Declared a Climate Emergency in 2019, staff brought us and aggressive action plan based on 7 Bold Steps to get the City to 2030 and 2050 targets that meet the commitments made by Canada at COP21. Like most municipalities, New West divides up its Climate Action work in to two parts. Corporate Emissions are those created by the City doing city stuff – running fire trucks and swimming pools. The City has a “Corporate Energy and Emissions Reduction Strategy” (“CEERS”) to address these. Community Emissions are those made by the residents and the businesses in the city doing their stuff – heating their homes and driving their cars. This CEEP addresses this latter category.

Where the CEERS is direct action by the City, the CEEP is more about the behavior we incent through our policies, our bylaws, and our infrastructure investment. At the most basic level, we want to make it easier and cheaper for people to make decisions that reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. As this is very public-facing work, there is more public engagement required to develop a viable plan – one that works for the community. There has already been a phase of public and subject matter expert outreach, and in this report, staff outline the framework of the CEEP that arose from those meetings, to be taken out for another round of public engagement. I hope to be talking more about this in the months ahead, but for now it is over to you, New West. See you at BeHeardNewWest.

Manufacturer’s Patio Application (Steel and Oak) for 1319 Third Avenue
Steel & Oak wants to expand their patio, and this requires that the City clearly and expressly tell the province that this expansion of their liquor license is good with us. So we are making that clear definitive statement that the City supports the liquor license change.

National Day for Truth and Reconciliation – September 30, 2022
September 30th is now known as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, by federal mandate. It is a statutory holiday for federal employees, and the Province is still working on making it a permanent stat holiday (I honestly don’t understand the jurisdictional things here, but I’ll let it pass). In the meantime, the Province suggests it be a Stat holiday in 2022, so the City will designate it a Stat holiday for our operations this year, in anticipation that it will be a Provincial Stat holiday starting in 2023. This shouldn’t be so complicated.

Recruitment 2022: Grant Committee Appointments
The City has grants we award to groups in the community who do work to build the sustainability, social equity, and culture of the community. There are always more applicants than grant funds available, and we have a committee of volunteer community members who we task with evaluating the applications and making a recommendation to Council on where the funds should go. This report is where we appoint those committee members.

Submission to the Department of Canadian Heritage Museum Assistance Program under the Recovery Fund For Heritage Organizations
There is funding Museums and Archives from the federal Government. We are applying for it.


The following items were then Removed from Consent for discussion:

2022 Heat Response Planning Update
The City’s Emergency Operations folks have developed an updated Extreme Heat Response Plan. This dovetails with the Provincial alert process that triggers a “Level 1” Heat Warning for those more typical heat waves, and “Level 2” Extreme Heat Warning for events like last year’s Heat Dome. The plan details what types of supports the City can activate, including outdoor cooling areas, misting stations, indoor cooling shelters, distribution of water, managing increased staff needs to cover the emergency actions, and some communications strategies to better get the word out to vulnerable people and those who care for vulnerable people. The communication part is an ongoing effort, and something Emergency Management staff are going to continue to develop over the summer working with community stakeholder groups.

Not the full answer yet, more to do in how we communicate, and more work to do in exploring what regulatory powers we can apply to assure building management is responsible for the safety of their buildings and their residents.

Affordable Housing Project Update
The City’s Housing Needs Report indicates we need to build 230 units of affordable or supportive housing every year for the next decade to meet the anticipated need. That means at least two buildings of the scale of the Aboriginal Trust building approved on Eighth Street need to be brought on line every year. This is not a target we are currently on pace to meet, and we are ahead of almost every municipality in the Lower Mainland. The situation is dire.

Every government has a role in helping us get there, and with the fewest financial resources of the three orders of Government, out role is not to finance the building of it, but to facilitate it getting built when a proposal comes to the City, and incent more proposals to come to the City. This means streamlining approval processes (which we are doing), providing land if we have appropriate land available (we have done), and provide targeted support for capital costs through our Homlessness Reserve Fund (currently over-subscribed). The City has $8.9 Million in its 2022-2026 Capital Plan to support these projects, but how these are realized is dependent on a lot of factors. The City is also looking at hiring a Project Manager whose job will be to coordinate between these overlapping factors.

This report is mostly an update on the progress of Affordable Housing support programs the City is running. The 24/7 Emergency Response Shelter at 502 Front will provide 50 beds and is currently going through building improvements involving a BC Housing Code Consultant and Lower Mainland Purpose Society. This will “bridge the gap” until permanent shelter can be built at 68 Sixth Street. BC Housing has determined that a permanent wood-frame building works better than TMH at that location, which adds to the timeline. The City has approved the project, but they are waiting for BC Housing funding approval for those 52 beds. The proposed 58-unit family-friendly project on City lands on Fenton Street was not successful at its first funding request from BC Housing, but an application is going to CMHC. The proposal for housing on the combined City and Metro Vancouver lands at 1400 Quayside is stalled because the high cost of development on those lands pushes it down the priority list for funders.

So the update is positive, but not nearly the numbers we need. On paper here we have fewer than 200 permanent affordable housing units in the pipeline, along with a few dozen more that are being built right now but are not covered in this report (such as the PALS building on Carnarvon), which is less than half of what we need in the next couple of years.

Business License Bylaw Modernization
The City’s Business License Bylaw includes 160 different types of businesses, trades, and professions. I don’t know what the right number is, but 160 seems like a lot. I suspect this is a result of an old bylaw (1986!) that keeps getting updated in piecemeal ways over the years as the regulatory environment evolves, but less time has been taken to comprehensively review and simplify the regulations.

So we are going to modernize this by removing obsolete requirements and streamlining the language and structure of the Bylaw. This will help staff serve the community better, make things easier for businesses and staff, and we can make sure we are applying our energy in effective regulating the higher-risk businesses while not overregulating the low risk ones.

This work will take some stakeholder consultation with the business community and community at large, which will start up this summer.

Council Maternity and Parental Leave Draft Policy
Serving in City Council is a weird job. Though some are reluctant to call it a “job”, preferring to think of it as public service or a volunteer gig, the reality is that working on Council takes away from a person’s ability to do other jobs. It would be the epitome of privilege to only allow the independently wealthy dedicate the hours every week it takes to do this work.

The Council/Career balance is hard, but there are other challenges that serve as unequal barriers to participation. Trying to balance family responsibility at the same time as all of the above means that a cohort of younger candidates, disproportionally women, are disincentivized from serving on Council. This is reflected in the regional imbalance in gender and age of people who serve on Councils.

Many Cities, from Coquitlam to Whistler, are recognizing this barrier, and are bringing in a parental leave policy that aligns with what municipalities offer their non-elected staff, but structured to support the unique employment conditions of Councillors and Mayors. New Westminster is introducing a similar program to reduce barriers to participation for young adults who are thinking of starting or growing their families.

Proposed Energy Step Code Acceleration for Single Detached Dwellings
The City is subject to enforcing the BC Building Code. In recent years, the province has been rolling out an energy efficiency standard as part of the Building Code called the “Step Code”. Recognizing that it will take time for the building industry to shift from what they build now to the highest efficiency buildings we want in the near future, the “Step Code” is designed with multiple “steps” that local governments can choose to require as the industry catches up to these shifts – where Step 1 is a traditional building and Step 5 is so efficient as to approach Passive House standard. New West now requires new single family homes to meet Step 3.

The Step Code is agnostic towards energy sources, so if a City wants to incentivize moving away from GHG-producing energy sources and the use of low-carbon electricity, we need something on top of the Step Code. Following the lead of a few different jurisdictions in BC, we can increase our default requirement to Step 5, but allow a builder to only hit Step 3 if they agree to not use natural gas appliances in the new build. That way builders and homeowners have some choice, can manage their costs appropriately, and we are creating an incentive to get people off GHG.

This report outlines the process we will take to make this change, a bylaw will come when staff work out the details.


We then Adopted the following Bylaws:

Development Approval Procedures Amendment Bylaw No.8342, 2022
Delegation Amendment Bylaw No. 8344, 2022
These bylaws that streamlines some building approvals processes by allowing the delegation of minor variances to staff were adopted by Council.


Then we had some Motions from Council:

Re-Branding the City of New Westminster Mayor Cote
After some Whereases:

Be it resolved that the City of New Westminster begin the process to update the City’s logo and phase-out the use of “Royal City” moniker in our branding.

Be it further resolved that the City develop a plan to engage with the community in the development of a new brand identity that is inclusive and allows for collective pride in our city.

Launching what is sure to be an interesting conversation in the community, this motion starts a process where the City will update its branding, something the City has not done in something like 15 years (when the current gold crown was adopted). Surely not the only point of discussion, but probably a timely one, is the role of the crown itself in our marketing and branding materials.

There will be more to say here, as this will surely be a months-long consultation process, and a conversation we should not shy away from. I’m sure there will be much more to say here, but I’ll hold that for future blog posts.

Mandatory Health Warning on Alcohol Products Councillor Puchmayr
After some Whereases:

Therefore be it resolved that the City of New Westminster write to the Federal and Provincial Governments and ask them to introduces policies requiring warning labels on all alcohol containers and that the governments expand the education of our citizens, young and old, on the dangers attributed to the harmful use of alcohol.

There is a national movement to promote this idea of mandatory labelling for alcohol, and New West is joining the call for senior governments to take action on this issue.


Finally, we had a raft of On Table resolutions related to a recent administrative error made by staff and caught by a vigilant council watcher:

Public Hearing Process – Correcting an Administrative Error
There were five recent Zoning Amendment Bylaws that got procedurally caught up in recent changes to the Local Government Act, and due to those changes the City provided public notice for comment at the wrong step in the process. Three of those Bylaws were adopted by Council, two had not yet been adopted, but had passed three readings.

It is important to note that the notifications were appropriate in how they went out, and there is no material difference in people’s opportunity to be heard on the issue excepting that the opportunity was granted at third reading, when it should have been granted at first reading according to the new system. The number of reports, decision points, and notifications was appropriate, as was the time available to opine, it is just supposed to happen at a different period in the process.

So, in the interest of us meeting the letter of the law, not just the spirit, we are going to go through a process where these Bylaws are rescinded, and readings and notice are done in a way consistent with the new regulations. It’s a bit of a hassle, but the right thing to do. We started the process this meeting, and there will be some subsequent readings of Bylaws in the couple of meetings ahead.


That was an evening’s work, along with some public delegations that I usually don’t address in these reports. This was our last meeting until the end of August, and there are many events going on in the City this summer – have fun and stay safe. I’ll probably be generating less content here over that summer break as the Campaign is starting to ramp up, and I hate mixing the streams. You can pop over to pjnewwest.ca to see how that develops now that Council is on break. Cheers!

Ask Pat: 4Qs on EVs

JP asks—

I’ve got questions about electric vehicle infrastructure. I read this morning that 3/5 BC residents intend for their next vehicle to be an EV. This along with the current target from the federal government to phase out new non-electric vehicle sales by 2035, has me worried that our city isn’t prepared for what I anticipate will be an imminent influx of demand for electric vehicle infrastructure. I also want to note that if I were to own an electric vehicle, driving to a charging space, leaving it there for a couple hours, then going and moving it once it’s charged, just doesn’t meet my expectations of reasonable infrastructure. So I have a few questions.
1. Are all new residential builds being required to have electric charging available for their parking spaces? If not yet, what steps are being taken to move in this direction?
2. If a rental building or condo tower does not have sufficient energy coming to their property to support adding EV charging to their parking spaces, what incentives are available to upgrade this infrastructure? Are there things the city can do to help move things in this direction?
3. What is the city’s strategy for electrifying their fleet of vehicles?
4. What percentage of new parking spaces being built by the city (ie at the təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic centre) are being equipped with EV charging?

That’s a lot of questions, and I held off on answering them for a bit because I knew the City’s eMobility Strategy was coming to Council, and I didn’t want to jinx any parts of it before adoption by getting ahead of it here. But this question now gives me a good chance to talk about that strategy, which I only mentioned in my Council report last week when we adopted it. That strategy answers some of your questions, but not all of them, so let’s go through these by number:

1: Yes. In 2019, New Westminster made it a requirement that all new residential buildings be ‘EV Ready’. This means every parking stall includes an energized outlet that can accommodate a Level 2 EV charger. There is no requirement to install the charger, as we fully expect the technology at the end of the wire will continue to evolve, both in the types of chargers and the energy management systems attached to them, but having a hot wire in place for every parking spot removes a big barrier to home charging for multi-unit residential buildings.

2: Yeah, this is a challenge. Something like 60% of New West residents live in existing multi-family buildings where charging infrastructure is limited or non-existent. To meet our 2035 goals for EV use, the vast majority of these will need to be EV ready. The eMobility strategy includes the exploration of financial incentives to “top up” those already available from the Provincial Government and Federal Government to facilitate retrofitting charging infrastructure into existing buildings. There may be some Community Charter issues with direct subsidies from a City to do this, but we also have a role in facilitation and setting up more streamlined permitting and inspection processes. This is a work in progress, with relatively high priority.

3: As fast as possible/practical is the strategy. It is laid out in some detail in our Corporate Energy & Emissions Reduction Strategy (“CEERS”). Vehicle emission represent about 40% of current GHG emissions from City operations, (“Corporate Emissions”) and the CEERS has us reducing these by 30% by 2030. The City has various fleets, and there are two things setting the pace of our transition: the availability of zero emission alternatives on the market, and the ability to support the EV fleet with charging infrastructure. We want to optimize the latter so we are ready for the former, if that makes sense.

Light vehicles are relatively easy and we are generally replacing vehicles as they age out of the fleet with electric alternatives. Larger vehicles are, for the most part, just not available. Electric regular-duty pickups are achingly slow getting to the market, and larger vehicles like dump trucks and trucks that can push a snow plow still seem very far away. In the meantime, we have strategically replaced a few parks and engineering service vehicles with smaller specialty electric ones, and are already ahead of the curve on “fuel switching” such as displacing diesel with propane where appropriate, which can reduce emissions by something like 30%. The transition in police vehicles in also a challenge in North America for reasons that are unclear to me, so the shift in the short term is to flex-fuel and hybrid options. Electric firetrucks are a very exotic item right now. So we are shifting when we can, but we are honestly waiting for the technology to catch up in a lot of sectors.

The CEERS also includes some significant trip reduction policies for staff, and as technology allows, we are shifting a bunch of non-vehicle equipment from hydrocarbon-burning to electric.

4: I don’t think that has been decided yet. Indeed, the future market for charging in public facilities like this is a topic of some debate. With the hopefully-rapid deployment of residential charging, the introduction of similar workplace charging requirements, and the ongoing improvement in battery technology and reduction in range anxiety, there remains a question of what role widely-distributed public charging will have in the decades ahead. There will likely always be a place for some public level-2 type charging, and perhaps a greater need for Level 3 rapid-charge facilities for a user group that puts a tonne of mileage on vehicles, but 100% charging at every public parking space is probably not a useful way to invest limited infrastructure money, and will do nothing to fuel the transition to EVs. So a building like təməsew̓txʷ will have some EV charging stations, but I do not know the type or how they will be allocated.


That all said, the transition away from internal combustion cars will not only include swapping them out for EVs. If we are going to meet the Climate Action goals of the city, of the province, and the country, we need to re-think urban mobility. The future of transportation is not just electric, it is shared (more electric Public Transit!) and it is distributed (more Micromobility!). So the eMobility Strategy also talks about how we are going to make the use of emergent transportation technology work better in New West. This means assuring we have the right kind of road and curbside infrastructure to make micromobility safe, and it means advocating to senior governments to change our archaic Motor Vehicle Act and other legislation to make active transportation safe and comfortable for all.

There are a lot of opportunities for a local government to make long-term investments here, and we need our upcoming Community Energy and Emissions Plan to dovetail with this eMobility Strategy. This is also why the City has set up a Climate Action Reserve Fund to help us efficiently manage the various funding sources available to us (such as the new provincial Climate Action Program and assure we are investing in the infrastructure that gets us the best bang for our emissions-reduction buck.

This is an area where there is a lot happening right now, and during the Decade of Climate Action, municipalities are at the forefront, and are redefining their core functions. Not only because local governments (with less than 10% of the tax revenue of senior governments) are responsible though our infrastructure and local policies for more than 50% of all emissions, but because we know the infrastructure we invest in now will save us money and emissions in the decades ahead.

Council – June 30, 2022.

We had a Thursday Council Meeting. One of the half dozen times in my time on Council where we had more work to do than staff figured we could comfortable fit on a Monday night. In this case, we had two Public Hearing topics to cover:

Official Community Plan Amendment (514 Carnarvon Street – Holy Trinity Cathedral) Bylaw No. 8088, 2022,
Heritage Revitalization Agreement (514 Carnarvon Street – Holy Trinity Cathedral) Bylaw No. 8089, 2022, and
Heritage Designation (514 Carnarvon Street – Holy Trinity Cathedral) Bylaw No. 8090, 2022
This project is to build a 30 storey tower with 271 market condo homes and 14 secured rental homes on the space where the current Holy Trinity Cathedral parish hall stands. The building will include a replacement (and improvement) of the parish hall and accessory rooms as part of the base of the residential tower. The project will include a massive restoration and seismic upgrade of the historic cathedral, and a re-imagining of the space around the cathedral, with an expanded public plaza, a fully accessible (with public elevator to address the grade) public promenade connecting Carnarvon and Church streets.

This project has been on the books for several years, and has been though a few different iterations over that time, and there have been a half dozen public meetings to take comments on the plans. At one point, there was non-market housing component, but neither CMHC or BCHousing were able to fund this project, as the first did not have a category that fit, and the second was simply oversubscribed in the current funding year.

The project is aligned with the Downtown Community Plan, and was supported by the Community Heritage Commission, the New Westminster Design Panel, and the Advisory Planning Commission. We had six pieces of written correspondence, mostly in favour, but a couple opposed over density concerns and lack of affordable/subsidized units. We also had correspondence from a series of public service agencies in New Westminster, who spoke to the value of the services and space provided by HTC to the community. We also had about a dozen presentations to the Public Hearing, almost all in favour, though a couple of people expressed caution about some aspects of the project while not opposing it outright.

To be honest, I’ve been on the fence about this project since I first saw and earlier iteration a few years ago. My record shows me about as pro-housing as a Councilor can be, but this seemed like a lit of density in a tight spot in a neighbourhood that is feeling a lot of pressure from recent growth. I reached out to some neighbours I knew, and though they didn’t specifically oppose the project, there is a feeling of construction fatigue in that area, and that block of Carnarvon especially has some quirky public realm issues.

That said, housing of this scale – 128 family friendly units, 285 new homes, in a car-light design virtually on top of a Sky Train Station with frequent service in three directions is aligned with the City’s Transit Oriented Development strategy, and with the region’s larger strategies around more sustainable development. I also believe the ground expression of this site – the public plaza and more accessible connection through the site – will be a huge improvement for the neighbourhood, and when TransLink gets around to making Columbia Station accessible, this project will add to that accessibility.

I’m not a religious person, but I was nonetheless compelled by so many delegates coming to the Public Hearing to talk about the Heritage of Service to the community that HTC and the importance of the parish hall to the community. There is no doubt the existing building is at end of life, and the loss of it would be a real harm to many service providers, and it is hard to fit this type of community benefit into the Pro Forma evaluation of amenity value we do with new significant projects.

In the end, I voted along with the rest of Council to approve the project.

Zoning Amendment (1321 Cariboo Street) Bylaw No. 8345, 2022
This project would see a 5 storey building with 15 units of secured market rental housing in the lower slopes of the Brow of the Hill neighbourhood. The current site has been vacant for a significant amount of time. The project is consistent with the Official Community Plan, had general support during public consultation, and was approved by the New Westminster Design Panel.

We had two pieces of written correspondence for neighbours – both in favour of the project, and we had three delegates, two related to the project, and one expressing that they would prefer affordable subsidized housing on the site. Council voted unanimously to support the project.


And in the Regular Meeting following the Public Hearing, we moved the above projects along and read a few Bylaws, including the following Bylaws for Adoption:

Housing Agreement (1321 Cariboo Street) Bylaw No. 8346, 2022
This is a bylaw that secures market rental tenure for all 15 homes in the above-discussed development project in the Brow of the Hill . This agreement was adopted by Council.

Housing Agreement (514 Carnarvon Street – Holy Trinity Cathedral) Bylaw No. 8338, 2022
This is a bylaw that secures market rental tenure for 15 homes in the above-discussed development project in the Downtown. This agreement was adopted by Council.

Housing Agreement (823-841 Sixth Street) Bylaw No. 8316, 2022
This is a bylaw that secures non-market (subsidized) rental tenure for 96 homes in this project already approved in the Uptown.

Road Closure and Dedication Removal (Queensborough Eastern Neighbourhood Node) Bylaw No. 8347, 2022 and Zoning Amendment (Blackley Street) Bylaw No. 8351, 2022
As discussed at our previous Public Hearing, these Bylaws that officially close and rezone two road allotments in the Eastern Node area of Queensborough were adopted by Council.

Elections Procedures Amendment Bylaw No. 8355, 2022
This Bylaw that officially codifies the Special Voting Opportunities and mail-in-ballot voting for the October elected was adopted by Council.

Climate Action Reserve Fund Bylaw No. 8321, 2022
This Bylaw that sets up a reserve fund for Climate Action (mitigation and adaptation) in the City was adopted by Council.


And that was the end of Public Hearings for this Council Term! Happy Summer everyone!