Month: August 2025

Council – August 25, 2025 (part 1)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Our Council meeting on Monday had a Back-to-School feel after our short summer break. The late august meeting always is a strange one, feels more like getting a few things out of the way before the real works starts in earnest in September, but we actually had a lengthy agenda and lots of good discussion on important issues, so I’m going to split this reporting out into two posts. It all started with a Presentation:

Building Safer Communities Fund Program – At-Risk Youth Update
The Federal Government provided the City a grant through the Building Safer Communities Fund to work with local non-profits and youth to develop a Youth Resilience Strategy, and over the last almost two years staff and partners in the community have been working to make this happen through the New Westminster Youth Hub, Dan’s Diner, the New Westminster Situation Table and preventative programming for middle schools across the City.

There was some good news coming out of this work – youth involvement in crime and gang activity is lower than pre-COVID levels, there are a lot of youth at risk getting support at the key time when they need it, and the better coordination between service providers means fewer cracks for youth to fall though. This report provides a lot of statistics about the number of youth served and the measurable success of this suite of programs.

We now need to move this momentum into a sustainability model – and yeah, that means funding beyond the $1.7 Million offered by the federal government and approved by Council in 2023. We will start now hitting senior governments for the ~$600K/ year in sustainability funding, and worst case scenario, look at City providing some funding in the 2027 budget.

We then had a few items of Unfinished Business after the last meeting in July unexpectedly ended early:

Supporting Longstanding Civic Non-Profits through Prioritized and Multi-Year Funding
Submitted by Councillor Minhas

WHEREAS non-profit organizations such as those behind the May Day celebrations and the Hyack Parade have been delivering signature community events in New Westminster for over 50 years, contributing significantly to the city’s cultural identity, civic pride, and tourism economy; and
WHEREAS over the past decade, funding for these legacy events has been dramatically reduced, including a decrease in annual City support for the Hyack Festival Association from $150,000 to just $15,000 per year; and
WHEREAS these long-standing non-profits are now forced to compete for limited grant funding against newly formed organizations, creating barriers to sustainability and threatening the continuity of historic civic traditions;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of New Westminster direct the Grants Review Committee to prioritize funding for long established non-profit organizations that have demonstrated sustained contributions to civic life and cultural heritage over several decades;
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT the Committee explore the implementation of multi-year funding agreements, for up to three years, to support the financial stability and long-term planning of eligible legacy organizations.

I amended this item to add the following two clauses:

THAT staff be instructed to include a 50% increase in the Community Grant funding envelope for 2026 as part of the 2026 Budget deliberations; and
THAT the City continue to actively advocate to the Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport to increase the B.C. Fairs, Festivals and Events Fund and also advocate to the Minister of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation to provide increased support to local festival organizations, including arts and business improvement organizations who activate our communities, support cultural exchange and connection, and boost small business prosperity through festivals, fairs and events.

This was a bit of a divisive conversation last meeting, but Council had ( I think) a much better discussion of relative values this meeting. My main emphasis was that over my decade on Council, we have made a conscious shift to get the politics of favoritism out of community grant awards. We have created a system where grant criteria are approved by Council and are then provided to applicants through staff. We then have volunteer members of the community work with staff to review applications and determine how best allocate the funds. As much as possible, we have tried to take Council’s finger off the scale, because successive Councils have felt it was perilous for elected folks to play favorites with different groups in the community through funding, and I stand by that principle.

Directly to the first “be it resolved”: I think what an organization delivers to the community is a more important criteria than how long they have been around. The Hyack Festival Association has done great work for this community, the Hyack parade was great this year, a tonne of people loved the fireworks last weekend, and those volunteers and staff work hard to deliver great events. But so did the Dia de Campo folks who are relatively new grant applicants, delivering something new and exciting to the City, and they should not (in my opinion) have to wait 50 years to get equal access to funding.

And it’s not just me who thinks this. Council did a review of the Community Grant Program last year (it was reported to Council on July 8, 2024 if you want to read the report). This included a community survey, focus groups with grant recipients, an Arts Culture and Economic Development committee review, and more than 600 people in the community taking part in the consultation. The first recommendation was and I quote “evaluate grant applications using a values-based matrix, rather than Council priorities, to remove any potential political component”. Further, the results of that public engagement specifically said the City should continue to provide balanced support for established and emerging organizations. Only 9% of the public felt we should prioritize longstanding organizations through this mechanism. The question was asked, and this motion appears to be diametrically opposed to how the community wants us to allocate grant funds. For these reasons, I could not support that part of the motion.

On the Second “be it resolved”: the City grants program already has a multi-year grant process, with many organizations already applying for three-year terms, others choosing only one year grants, the resolution is moot as the three year grant option already exists, and the program is actually expanding to permit five year terms starting this year.

I added the amendments because in discussing this issue with staff and applicants, I found the issue is that our grant program is over-allocated. Though we have slowly increased our grant amounts over the last decade and are now over $1 Million a year, we had only enough in the budget to support 55% of the requests received. So when a valued community organization doing great work like Hyack received 90% of their requested funding from a program that is only only 55% funded – isn’t about political bias, it’s about an underfunded grant envelope relative to what we expect organizations in our community to deliver. This is why my amendment would ask Council, as part of budget deliberations for 2026, have an option that increases this funding envelope by 50%. And we should take this opportunity to remind senior governments that this is a great investment in community, and they might be able to help us.

In the end, Council did not support the two original clauses, but supported the amendment clauses unanimously.

Review of City’s Speed Hump Installation Policy
Submitted by Councillor Fontaine

WHEREAS the City of New Westminster’s current speed hump policy primarily relies on resident-initiated requests, which may unintentionally favour areas with greater resources or civic engagement capacity;
WHEREAS traffic calming measures, including speed humps, are an important tool for improving road safety and livability—especially near schools, parks, and in high-pedestrian areas;
WHEREAS a more equitable and standardized approach to the installation and design of speed humps would ensure consistency, fairness, and prioritization based on need and data;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT Council direct staff to undertake a review of the City’s Speed Hump Installation Policy, with a focus on improving equity in access, standardizing implementation practices, and incorporating data-driven criteria for identifying priority locations, and
report back with findings and recommendations.

The City has a Speed Hump policy that is about 5 year old now. When it was established, it represented regional best practice, and the description in this motion describes exactly how the program was designed: to assure equity in access, standardize the decision making, and be data-driven in prioritizing locations. So we don’t need an all-new program, our existing program meets these criteria the best we know how. That said, any program like this that was rather innovative when we launched it and has been operating for 5 years can benefit from a review to see if we are meeting our established criteria, so I support this motion, as did all of Council.

We then did our regular Consent Agenda work, which I will report on next post, so I can skip down to the end of the meeting when we considered a few new Motions form Council:

Ukrainian Sister City Proposal
Submitted by Mayor Johnstone

WHEREAS New Westminster has previously identified Moriguchi, Japan (1963) Quezon City, Philippines (1991) Lijiang, China (2002) and the six communities of the Tŝilhqot’in Nation (2020) as Sister Cities; and
WHEREAS New Westminster has both deep historic ties to the Ukrainian community and a growing population of more recent arrivals from Ukraine, centered around the Holy Eucharist Cathedral and a burgeoning local Ukrainian business community; and
WHEREAS Canada has been resolute with our NATO allies in supporting Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in the face of illegal occupation and horrific destruction wrought by the deadliest war in Europe since WW2; and
WHEREAS since 2022 communities across Canada have sought twinning agreements with communities in Ukraine to show support for the Ukrainian people, and as a means to stronger cooperation between communities to the benefit of both nations;
BE IT RESOLVED that New Westminster work with the local Ukrainian community to identify an appropriate partnership city in Ukraine with whom to develop a Sister City relationship.

This motion, I think speaks for itself. It arose from discussions I had with Rev. Ozorovych at Holy Eucharist Cathedral after a meeting with him and (then-) Member of Parliament Peter Julian. The Reverend spoke about the experiences of many Ukrainian people who are finding refuge in Canada because of the illegal occupation by Russia, and the thousands who are finding home and community connection in New Westminster. We discussed how the City can help folks here feel more welcome and supported, and how we can support them as they try to support their loved ones and friends back in Ukraine. When Rev. Ozorovych mentioned Ukraine’s interest in developing Sister City ties to help forge connections, cultural sharing, and pathways to support, I recognized that the City of New Westminster does not yet have a Sister City relationship with a European city, and I suggested that I would take this idea to Council hoping that the rest of Council would agree this would be beneficial.

The government of the Ukraine has a process they have developed to connect Cities there with appropriate Canadian counterparts, and now that Council has approved this motion, city staff can work with Father Ozorovych to identify a candidate City in Ukraine, and we could draft a formal agreement to be approved by Council at the appropriate time.

London Street Active Transportation Route
Submitted by Councillor Campbell and Councillor Henderson

WHEREAS the City is considering improving parts of the London Street Active Transportation Route and in addition to these options, other active transportation improvements are being proposed along the London Street route.
WHEREAS input will be reviewed following the community engagement and will be used to adjust and refine the proposed improvements along the London Street Route and final designs are expected to be completed in the fall, and construction of the new active transportation route is expected to begin in winter 2025.
BE IT RESOLVED THAT staff report back to City Council with London Street Route public engagement results prior to tendering any work.

We had another delegation from folks on London Street irritated by plans to make the London Street Greenway safer for all users. The London Street section of the ongoing Active Transportation Network Plan was planned for some upgrades this year, and through the public consultation we have heard back from an activist group in the neighbourhood who don’t want to lose their free street parking and have some other concerns about how the changes would impact circulation and traffic patterns in the West End. This is why we do public consultation (more on that below) and like many of the other projects in the ATNP, staff put out some draft designs and expected to iterate the design based on feedback prior to building. There usually isn’t a role for Council in that iteration (the Network Plan is approved and is Council policy, this is staff operationalizing that policy). However, as this particular section has garnered an unusual amount of feedback, Council is asking that staff check in to Council with the results of the public consultation prior to tendering any work. Council (even those who oppose bike lanes) agreed unanimously to this approach.

Listening to Residents and Temporarily Halting the London Street Bike Lane Capital Improvements
Submitted by Councillor Minhas

WHEREAS the residents of the West End have started a petition and have asked this Mayor and Council to reconsider the decision made by a previous Mayor and Council in 2022 to implement significant enhancements to the bike lane on London St; and
WHEREAS over 100 residents attending a regular meeting of Council on June 23rd to voice their concern regarding what they perceive to be a severe lack of consultation and communication regarding the London St bike lane project; and
WHEREAS the two options put forward for consideration regarding the London St bike lane project do not necessarily reflect the desired outcomes for a significant number of West End residents;
BE IT RESOLVED that Council direct staff to temporarily pause the London Street bike lane improvement project until an enhanced communications and community consultation plan can be developed and implemented; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the public survey be reopened for at least another 60 days with the addition of a “none of the above” option for residents to express their dislike of either option should they wish to do so; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that it become city policy moving forward that all public surveys, where practicable, include a ‘none of the above’ option to allow residents to express their desire to not support any of the options put forward for consideration.

Yes, a second motion on the same topic. My understanding is that staff and Councillors Campbell and Henderson attempted to set up a meeting to amalgamate these into a single motion, but that effort was to no avail.

The first part here is somewhat redundant after Councillor Henderson’s motion, except that it requests a new round of consultation, which at this point I cannot imagine would garner any different results. It is safe to say after months of consultation (and a preliminary extension of consultation earlier in the year) and several delegations to Council that the opponents of any change on London Street have been heard, and the commitment to bring this back to Council with a reporting out on the public engagement so far gives Council the ability to decide next steps when the information is available to them. As this motion was “severed” (each clause was voted upon separately), this first clause was not supported by Council, nor was the one asking for yet another round of consultation, at least until Council has an opportunity to hear the results of this round.

The third clause led to some interesting discussion and but for the presence of the weasel words “when practicable”, I was not keen to support it. For clarity, our Public Consultation teams already include the do-nothing option when it is appropriate. If we are doing public consultation about something “nice to have” like closing roads to hold a Canucks viewing party, then staff include that option – “is this something the City should do?”. The same question is disingenuous when talking about things the City needs to do, like sewer separation and upgrades, adding green infrastructure to new drainage projects, or important road safety upgrades. Even projects like our Urban Reforestation program, the 22nd Street visioning project, or the Massey Theatre upgrades (as three recent examples from Be Heard New West) where there is significant senior government funding and/or the project is aligned with City policies, long-term plans, or commitments that Council has already made to the public, engagement can be helpful in developing program details or how to prioritize different parts of the work, but it is disingenuous to ask “none of the above” when the City is already committed to and vested in the work.

In the end, Council supported this last clause, with an emphasis on the “when practicable”, as it is fairly well aligned with our current practice.

That’s long enough for now. I will follow up with a post about the rest of the agenda in the next couple of days.

Our City Our Homes (Non-market, etc.)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

As I mentioned when I started this series on our OCP updates, the provincial legislation we are trying to catch up to is almost exclusively about market housing. This means it is working to accelerate the approval and development of primarily strata ownership and purpose-built market rental – the houses over on the right side of the housing spectrum:

In New Westminster in 2025, that means houses that will sell for $1.5 Million, townhouses that will likely be $1 Million, apartments that will be over $700,000 if they are large enough for a bedroom and rents in new market units are not affordable to the average working person.

To be clear: as a City and as a region, we need this market housing despite its apparent unaffordability. much of our current housing affordability crisis is a supply issue – there are simply more people moving to this region than we are building housing for – and cutting off new supply of housing won’t make that better. The last Housing Needs Report we did in New West showed the need for almost 5,000 market ownership and market rental units in the next 5 years. However, the same report showed that we need 2,700 non-market (shelter, supportive, and non-market rental) affordable homes over the same period:

And in reporting out to the Province on our Housing Target Orders, we see that New Westminster is meeting its targets, except in the mon-market part of the spectrum:

The province has introduced more Inclusionary Zoning support, which provides incentives to the market housing sector to build a few affordable housing units with new market buildings. This is a useful tool, but the scale of need is disconnected from what inclusionary zoning can actually supply. The City’s own analysis suggests that asking the development community to build 10% affordable rental units along with market strata may make most market projects unviable. If we ask for more than 10%, we end up with neither the market or non-market need addressed, if we ask for less than 50%, then we need to find another way to get non-market built.

That way, of course, is for the Federal (and to a lesser extent Provincial) Government to invest directly in building affordable housing, at the scale of tens of thousands of units a year like they did from the early 1960s until Paul Martin’s disastrous 1993 austerity budget that got the feds out of the business of affordable housing. Smaller Local Governments don’t have the finances (or the mandate for that matter) to build affordable housing at the scale needed. What we can do is make it easier for the governments with deeper pockets to get the housing built. Pre-approving projects, saying “yes” without creating unnecessary hurdles when projects come to us, providing grant support to reduce the cost of City permits or utility connections, investing our own city-owned land where possible to support affordable housing projects, and actively lobbying the Province and BC Housing for more investment.

The City of New Westminster is already doing all of these things.

We have an Affordable Housing Capital Reserve Fund to provide strategic support and reduce development cost for non-profit builders, we have said “yes” to all of the non-market affordable housing projects brought to Council in my time at the table, and we have amended our Zoning Bylaw to pre-zone areas in the City for secured non-market affordable housing up to six storeys. Now we are taking this the next step to open up more areas of the City for 6-storey secured non-market housing.

In the amendments before Council now  we would allow non-profit affordable rental housing of up to six storeys to be built on sites designated in the OCP for Residential Townhouses, and anywhere in Tiers 2 and 3 of the designated Transit Oriented Development area (that is, anywhere within 800m of a SkyTrain Station). Overall, this would mean the majority of lots in New West would be effectively pre-zoned for affordable housing projects like Móytel Lalém, taking a significant planning risk out of the way of non-profit housing providers, and making it easier for them to apply to senior governments for the funding, as that funding is often tied to meeting zoning requirements.

There are also several other smaller changes Staff is proposing to make during the OCP update, some needed to clean up all the small changes and make it a more cohesive plan and map, some to meet other City polices that make sense to formalize at this time. This includes designating “public schools” as a permitted use in the majority of residential and mixed use areas to speed up approval process for new schools when the Province and School District identify new school locations. It is also proposed to update our Frequent Transit Development Areas map to better reflect Provincial legislation and recent updates in the Regional Growth Strategy.

Other changes seem a little more technocratic, but are appropriate at this time. We are integrating the results of our most recent Housing Needs Report into the OCP, to make clear that the OCP provides sufficient planned capacity to accommodate the housing need identified in that report. We are also integrating Climate Action strategies and targets into our OCP (as the Local Government Act now requires). Finally, staff have drafted a new Regional Context Statement to integrate our OCP with the Regional Growth Strategy, which if approved by Council will then go to the Metro Vancouver board for approval.

All told, this is a big piece of planning work that includes not just the City’s planning staff, but engineering and other departments have provided technical background and support, all resulting in the policy and bylaws that back up this map. There has been quite a bit of public engagement that gave some clear feedback on some items and some mixed opinions on others, and all of this will end up in front of Council, then to a Public Hearing, which will no doubt be a big topic of discussion in the fall. If you have opinions, be sure to let us know!

Our City Our Homes (Missing Middle)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I started last post talking about specific changes the City is looking at to comply with Provincial housing regulation and our Housing Accelerator Fund commitments to the federal government. This post covers housing changes outside of the Transit Oriented Development areas.

*note, there are some terms I’m going to use here that may not align with how everyone else uses them, so the clarify: “townhouse” is a multi-family ground-oriented, usually multi-story development form where the homes are part of a strata; “rowhome” is a similar model, but with each unit a fee simple property without strata, only sharing a firewall with neighbours; “infill” means increasing density while maintaining the integrity of the single family lot through accessory buildings (laneway/carriage homes) or converting houses to multiplexes).

New West has always struggled to bring in enough townhouse & rowhome development, except for the Queensborough where this form has been very successful and popular in relatively greenfield development. Even during the 2017 OCP work, it was this so-called “missing middle” that got a lot of emphasis, especially from young families who saw it as an affordable transition from too-small apartments to higher-cost-and-hassle detached home. Alas, it was about the same time as that OCP was being approved in 2017 that the increase in local land values reached a point where the economics of land assembly for townhouse forms became marginal, resulting in only a few notable developments this side of the North Arm.

One surely-unintended consequence of the Provincial TOD area regulations is that the broad 800-m circles drawn around transit stations encompass many areas the City’s current OCP designated for Townhouse/Rowhouse development. The province effectively “upzoned” past what the City was intending (which, to be clear, was the goal all along) but as a result, we need to re-imagine where in our housing mix we can include this “missing middle” if we want to see it built in the City at all.

The “neighbourhood character” gambit gets the bulk of attention here, but this distracts from the real technical and engineering aspects of these seemingly small density increases. We have to assure the City’s ability to service this higher density form through sewer, water, electrical and transportation upgrades prior to approving its being built, but these small projects are not large enough to pay for those offsite upgrades. Another challenge is road access: if we want walkable safe neighbourhoods, Townhouses work better with access form lanes than from main roads and not 20 individual driveways crossing sidewalks.

To these ends and to plan infrastructure upgrades, staff are suggesting we expand townhouse areas in our OCP, pre-zone some areas for townhouse to streamline planning and implementation, and we update our design guidelines to make townhouse form more viable for development in the current market in those areas where we pre-zone for it. The locations where Townhouses might work best went through public consultation, and generally the public reaction was to open up more Townhouse area rather than less, resulting in the following DRAFT map for Council consideration:

Two big questions in the Townhouse program that Council will need to grapple with are whether to permit secondary suites in townhouses, and how much parking to require; and these questions are related because both take up space and impact the cost and therefore viability of townhouse projects.

Secondary suites were generally supported in the public consultation, because they provide more housing options (including better opportunities for intergenerational living), make mortgages more affordable for some, add to the (unsecured) rental market, while reducing the likelihood that illegal rental suites will be created that don’t meet building code standards.

A challenge is if we permit secondary suites is the pressure they may put on street parking unless we include more parking requirements with new townhouses, which in itself makes secondary suites harder to integrate into townhouses and pushes up cost. So staff are asking Council to consider if secondary suites are desired, and if so, how much parking should we require for them? Housing vs. Parking rears its ugly head again, and I’m sure this will be the source of continued debate even after the OCP updates are completed.

The province introduced Bill 44 to require cities to permit multiplexes where single family homes are only permitted now: six-plexes near frequent transit and four-plexes everywhere else. The planning term used here was “SSMUH” (pronounced SMOO) for Small Scale Multi-Unit Housing. This is a place where the City struggled early on to read how the legislation applied in our complex zoning code, and with managing some local engineering challenges related to this form of infill development. As a result, we received permission from the Province to delay SSMUH implementation in Queensborough for a couple of years because most existing development is already higher density, and in the remaining areas rapid SSMUH implementation presented some water and sewer supply issues that simply needed more engineering work. So everything below applies only to the mainland.

Back in May and June of 2024, Council unanimously supported a Bylaw amendment that rezoned about 160 properties to permit four units per lot, but for the bulk of properties in the City, agreed to delay until Staff had an opportunity to do more work on making the provincial guidelines fit into our engineering and planning context, including doing some architectural and proforma (economic viability) analysis here in New West. There has also been quite a bit of industry and public consultation over the last year to help frame the technical work done.

The step now is to amend the Official Community Plan to introduce a new land use designation called “RGO – Residential Ground Oriented Infill” that will align the mainland single detached properties  outside of the TOD or Townhouse areas with provincial SSMUH requirements. If Council approves this, the next step would be the creation of development permit guidelines and zoning regulations to inform the shape and character of multiplexes within those neighbourhoods. We hope to have that work completed by June 2026, but until then, if applicant wishes to bring a SSMUH project forward in a property within the RGO designated area, they would still be required to complete a rezoning but would not require the OCP update step of the planning process.

There are a few more details we are working on to meet our housing needs and HAF commitments that are not specifically in response to TOD and SSMUH, and I’ll cover those next post.

Our City Our Homes (TOD)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The first part of our OCP update work right now is to update our approach to Transit Oriented Development areas – the residential areas within 800m of a SkyTrain Station that, through Bill 47, the province is prescribing higher density. There are details in how density is distributed with prescribed minimum Floor Space Ratios, but for most folks it is easier to envision building heights. Within 200m of a Sky Train Station (red circles below), heights up to 20 storeys will be prescribed. Within 400m (yellow circles), the minimum is 12 storeys, and within 800m (the green circles), buildings up to 8 storeys will be pre-approved.

In effect, the province is saying the local government cannot refuse this level of residential density for density reasons alone, and cannot require off-street parking to be built for new residential density in these zones. This does not restrict the City from permitting more density than these minimums (we already permit more than 20 stories in our downtown core), nor does it limit our ability to approve projects that have less density than these prescribed amounts.

This is your regular reminder that Land Use Designation is different than Zoning. The former is a higher-level description of types of land use (residential commercial, industrial, etc.) and height and density in general terms (single detached, townhouse, high rise, etc). Zoning is more detailed in not only being more specific in types of use, but also addresses “form and character” like lot sizes, setbacks and specific dimensions and density of buildings. Any change to zoning must be must be consistent with the land use designation in the Official Community Plan (OCP), or the OCP must be amended prior to changing zoning. Our task right now is to amend our OCP Land Use Designations to align with Bill 47 so that new buildings can be zoned to the new density levels designated by the province. Clear as mud?

Back on May and June of 2024, Council workshopped then unanimously approved changes to our Zoning Bylaw that integrated the TOD area maps, and at the same time required that buildings meeting the Provincial mandated density must be 100% secured market or non-market rental (as opposed to market strata), removed the parking requirements, and removed caretaker suites as a zoning-permitted use in some commercial and industrial areas to prevent Bill 47 from becoming a tool to re-purpose commercial and industrial land for housing.

Now to continue to meet provincial regulatory requirements we need to update our OCP so buildings that meet Bill 47 density don’t require OCP amendments for approval, and we need to do this by the end of the year (there are procedural steps between third reading and adoption of OCP update bylaws that take a couple of months, so September third reading = January adoption). The intent of staff is to bring in OCP amendments that not only meet the letter of the law, but also meet the spirit of the legislation while assuring (as best we can) integration of the existing OCP adjacent to the TOD areas.

So staff have drafted a bylaw that enables buildings of up to eight, twelve and twenty storeys in the appropriate TOD areas, and still maintains a higher land use designation and mixed use entitlements if those are already included in the existing OCP. There are also some changes to two specific areas – the existing “Commercial and Health Care” area around RCH and the “Commercial Waterfront” area around the Quay – to clarify that residential is a permitted use in these area as ancillary to commercial use. We are also suggesting that the caretaker unit designation for industrial and commercial zones lands be removed (meaning the owner, if they want to put in a new caretaker suite, would need to come and ask for an OCP amendment).

There is a specific issue related to the TOD area around 22nd Street Station. The Provincial legislation came in at a time when we are deep into the visioning process for 22nd Street area. We have done a tonne of public consultation and planning around this area, and it is clear that we have more work to do towards planning the infrastructure needed to support a much denser neighbourhood, from water and sewer to understanding transportation changes and assuring we are preserving adequate green and public space. So staff are recommending we creating three study areas (22A is below the SkyTrain Station, 22B comprises most of the single family areas of Connaught Heights, and 22 C is the strip along 20th Street) to support the technical and financing growth strategy work we need to envision a complete neighbourhood:

The circles created by the 800m buffers around Skytrain don’t align well with the square nature of our existing street grid, resulting in a few anomalies where smaller density will be adjacent to much larger density within the same block, or such. Staff have made some recommendations around how to address these “edge properties”, mostly by slightly expanding the TOD areas across a few strategic lots to make it blend better. This was a subject of some of the Public Consultation that occurred over the last year, and adjustments have been made based on that feedback:

However, perhaps the biggest question before Council when it comes to TOD implementation is whether we allow ground-oriented infill density (e.g. fourplex or sixplex) within the TOD areas. There are large areas of primarily single family detached homes (Lower Sapperton and the West End are the best examples) where the TOD areas mean we must permit 8 storey apartment buildings where there are single family homes now. If we also permit fourplexes to be built in those areas, it would potentially increase housing variety, but may reduce the incentive for multiple properties to be consolidated for the higher density the TOD areas envision. Not allowing infill housing in the TOD area would effectively protect land for higher density development, and townhouses would be the lowest density land use permitted, which might slow development while it brings higher density.

The community consultation favoured including infill density in these areas, but it will be up to Council to determine if we want to see slower development of higher density, or more housing mix with (likely) a higher chance that infill happens sooner.

In my next post, we’ll talk about what all of this means for Townhouses and Rowhomes in the City.

Our City Our Homes (Intro)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The City of New West is facing the same housing pressures as every other City in the region, and as most large urban areas in Canada: not enough housing to meet increasing demand, housing priced out of reach of most working people, inadequate rental housing supply, and a paucity of supportive and transitional housing to lift people out of homelessness. Looking back at my own words from seven years ago, I can confidently say we have made some progress here in New West, but the scale of the regional problem has expanded faster than our response.

Over the last year or two, we have seen more action from senior governments, mostly directed at the market housing end of the Housing Spectrum, and directed at getting housing approved faster, presuming that local governments not approving housing is the main challenge we need to address.

Of course, New Westminster has met its Housing Orders targets and exceeded its Regional Growth Strategy estimates for new market and rental housing need. We have approved every unit of supportive and affordable housing that has come across the Council table. At the same time we are falling far short of our Housing Needs for affordable and supportive housing, and our unsheltered homeless numbers are going up. I’m no more an economist than Patrick Condon, but this suggests to me that serious investment in transitional and supportive housing from senior governments is what is needed to bring housing security to all residents, not what they are currently offering:

So while we work on getting more investment in non-market housing, we are also doing the work that senior governments demand of us to assure our housing policies, Official Community Plan, and permitting processes are updated to support housing growth concomitant with regional population growth.

Back in June, staff brought to Council a set of proposed Official Community Plan changes that, when taken together, assure the City is meeting both the letter and the spirit of the Provincial housing legislation changes (remember bills 44, 46, and 47?) in a way that fits our local context and addresses our local housing need, and at the same time addresses the various initiatives around infill density, family-friendly housing, and affordable housing under our Housing Accelerator Fund commitment to the federal government. This is bringing to culmination a big body of work that included Public consultation framed under “Our City Our Homes” that has been going on for about a year now.

The implementation of this work (and adoption of the OCP changes) has been delayed a bit by some weirdly technical procedural issues (some of which I talked about in my last Newsletter but wont unpack again, subscribe here). This means the timeline Council unanimously agreed to last November will be a bit delayed, and the OCP updates won’t be considered until early in the fall. This gives a bit more time to unpack some of the work that was presented back in June. The final reports when they come back to us in September might be structured differently to address those procedural issues, but the intent is to ask Council to consider the questions raised in the June report.

Over the next week or two, I will write some more posts here that go through the sections of that report, hoping folks can better understand the City’s approach to the new legislation when consideration of the OCP update happens. There are some details in here Council will need to consider, and I cannot predict where those discussions will land, nor am I taking a position on where they should land. On some issues the public consultation has provided a pretty clear idea which way the community thinks the City should go, on others the feedback is less clear, but staff have strong technical recommendations. Ultimately, these details are a discussion for Council and going into them with an open mind, it will be fascinating to see where we land.