Tag: Housing

Council – May 25, 2026 (pt 1)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The Council meeting on Monday started with a Public Hearing (well, two actually), which is less common these days since the Province changed the rules a few years age and prevented cities from holding public hearings for residential rezoning that are compliant with the Official Community Plan. I’ll write a bit of a summary of the Public Hearings and follow up with a Council meeting report in a subsequent post.

Our City, Our Homes: Implementation of the Infill Housing Program
The first Public Hearing addressed the City’s updated response to Bill 44 Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing (“SSMUH”) regulations from the province, and our Infill Accelerator program sponsored by the federal Housing Accelerator Fund. This requires an OCP update (hence, requiring a Public Hearing) and an amendment to the Zoning Bylaw.

The effect of these changes is to update the Land Designation under the OCP for about 3,000 properties in the City to permit up to a sixplex where there is currently a single family home or duplex, and to change the zoning of about 1,900 of those properties for four-plexes, and the remaining 1,100 for six-plexes. Most of the differentiation between four- and six-unit areas are related to the provincial regulation (six-plexes are required within a certain distance of frequent transit), though a small number (~200) are different that provincial requirements to fit specific technical context such as access to a laneway or unique lot dimensions, and the result of public consultation.

These changes are not simple integration of the provincial regulations, they represent a made-in New West response that addresses our specific context. This means significant technical analysis was done around managing the infrastructure impacts and buildability issues related to our unique geography. We did three rounds of Public Engagement on these changes as they were i9terated over time, in spring and winter 2025 and with a final round in March of this year. We have some infrastructure challenges here, in that most “single family’ neighbourhood are designed to allow up to the three units per lot (a main house, rental suite, and a laneway/carriage house), and increasing to 4- or 6-units means increased in-ground infrastructure needs. Though the City will be gradually upgrading these systems, this will be an economic and practical delay on wide-spread implementation of these changes, as it will put extra onus on boulders to pay for upgrades if needed before the City has done the work.

At the Public Hearing, we received about 9 pieces of correspondence, all opposed in one way or another to increased density in New Westminster, and we had about 25 people come and delegate at the hearing: a few in support, several with concerns, and the majority expressing opposition.

Issues raised were not surprising, but are worth exploring a bit more.

Several folks raised concerns about growth happening faster than schools can plan. However, City’s OCP and the Schools long-term Capital plan are in synch and nothing in this update to the OCP will substantially shift that. The schools are not lacking for planning, they are lacking for investment by the Province in new school sites. Fortunately, this situation is changing as there is a major expansion of Queen Elizabeth happening right now, the District is about to break ground on a new downtown elementary at Simcoe Park, and they are now in business case development for major expansion in the West End that will end an era of portables for the district.

The schools discussion was aligned with a general notion that infrastructure can’t keep up with this growth, and the report clearly outlines (as I mentioned above) how the City plans to deal with this. Simply put, we are upgrading and expanding infrastructure as growth occurs and are expecting much of this cost to be covered by the growth. There was some concern raised about the Burnaby experience, with concerns that these multi-plexes will be built to the four corners of the lot and completely change the streetscape. However, the reports details the guidelines that will be applied, with 50% lot coverage and property line setbacks consistent with current practice to make sure these plexes fit the existing streetscape, though they are likely to be taller than previously seen in single family lots.

The one challenge we don’t have an immediate answer to is the parking challenge – there is no doubt over the long-term these changes will put more pressure on street parking, especially as the province limits our ability to require off-street parking for much of the area, and for all buildings with the TOD areas (see below). This is ongoing work Council has asked staff to work on recognizing that it will be years (likely a decade or more) before multi-plexes arrive in most places at enough concentration to create these challenges. A City-wide review to residential parking and curbside management is a major piece of work the City is beginning now, and will inform our response to this.

In the end, Council approved third readings to these bylaws, and added an advocacy part about reminding the Province that we will need investment in their part in infrastructure to support this shift in our OCP.

Our City, Our Homes: Implementation of Transit Oriented Development Area Extensions and Regional Planning
The second Public Hearing followed on our previous work meeting the letter of the law on the Province’s Bill 47 changes to encourage higher-density use around SkyTrain stations (“Transit Oriented Development” or TOD). Here the City is trying to make the circles fit better into the mostly-square street grid context by squaring off the circles created by the 800m buffer the province drew around SkyTrain stations. We don’t have the legal ability to skim some properties off the periphery where it might not make sense, so in effort to adapt them to the street grid, existing subdivision and neighbourhood patterns, or topography, the circle was slighty expanded in a few places along the edge – meaning about 100 properties just outside 800m are included within the TOD area designation.

At the same time and attached to this, we are updating the OCP for a few regulatory reasons. We are required to draft a new Regional Context Statement that aligns our OCP with the Regional Growth Strategy, and are now required to integrate our Community Energy and Emissions Plan to the OCP, both of these to meet regulated Metro Vancouver requirements.

Much like the item above, we did multiple rounds of public consultation around these changes, and it showed that 70% of people who engaged supported these changes. We received a few pieces of written correspondence, and had about a half dozen delegates raising concerns, though some also expressed support. Council voted to support the Third Reading of these changes.

That ended the Public Hearing, and as mentioned, I’ll write another post about everything else that happened at Council in a follow-up.

Protest

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

This story picked up some regional media, and I was asked to comment. As is common and necessary, my lengthy thoughts were edited for a short TV news bit, so I wanted to expand on the discussion publicly, as there are a lot of details in this story that are relevant to how we do public engagement and discourse in the City. I wantto talk aobut the difference between community engagement, and the “white noise” of this astroturf anti-housing group.

I had never heard of “Lets Vote” or their colleagues at “We Vote Canada” until the BC Housing announcement of HEART and HEARTH funding and a Tiny Homes Village model for transitional housing in New Westminster. As BC Housing began its work of community consultation, there was clearly some community concern raised, which is not surprising or different than community concern raised when Mazarine Lodge, Moytel Lalem, or the upcoming housing at Sixth and Agnes were addressed at Council.

But there is something different this time.

There were suddenly small groups of people leafleting the neighbourhood, then at elementary schools across the City during student pick-up times. “Literally forcing pamphlets into parents’ hands” is how it was reported to me by a concerned parent. When one of these pamphlets was circulated to me, I scanned the QR code, and found an invite to join a WhatsApp group, which I briefly did to see what it was about before I was removed, presumably because the organizers recognized my name and their model of public engagement didn’t include engaging with decision makers.

Then a planned protest showed up at one of the BC Housing open houses. A small group with pre-printed signs and a “LetsVote” banner, along with a PA system to provide opportunities to speak for several members of the BC Conservative Party from Richmond and Abbotsford. At this point, some colleagues from around the region contacted me and let me know that this appeared to be the same group of people who protested supportive housing and shelter projects in Burnaby, non-market housing in Semiahmoo Village in South Surrey, and against the very idea of “supportive housing” being included in White Rock’s Official Community Plan update. Same people, same signs, same anti-drug rhetoric used to oppose four (now 5) very different housing proposals in four different cities:

The same members (carrying the same signs) then showed up at New Westminster City Hall to protest before a Council meeting when the Tiny Homes Village was not even on the agenda. A New Westminster resident sent me a note of concern, as they has also received the pamphlet at the elementary school and had been following along with the “protest movement” out of curiosity, and sent me this image of the agenda for this protest:

Again, it was courteous of them to leave space at the end of the program for “New Westminster Locals”, but I am going to suggest that the purpose of this protest at New Westminster City Hall was not to relate the concerns of New Westminster residents to members of Council or staff at the City or BC Housing, but to put up their banners and platform an organization that is using misinformation and fearmongering to drive membership for the BC Conservative Party, predominantly in the ethnic Chinese community.

Part of me thinks this is all fine and good. Folks can organize politically and use their messaging skills to drive engagement, and the public can decide if they like or don’t like that message, and react accordingly. That’s democracy.

The other part of me is disappointed that this “white noise” is drowning out an important conversation the community needs to have. As we in the City engage with community and BC Housing around the delivery of transitional housing (and all housing, for that matter) it is important that we hear from community members and have an opportunity to share information and address legitimate concerns. We had a delegate at the same Council meeting as the protest, a resident from the Riverview area, express heartfelt concerns with questions about the impact of this project on his community. You can believe or not believe his concerns are legitimate based on the scope of the project, but it is our job to hear them, and address them the best we can. Having people with a political agenda and partisan bone to pick shouting mistruths and fearmongering is not conducive to that respectful dialogue. I also should note there were several locals from New Westminster at the protest, and I’m not sure if they had microphone time, but many of them came to Council Chambers afterward even though the housing was not on the the Agenda, and Council had no decision-making to do regarding the project at that time.

I have received a lot of correspondence on this file, both raising concerns and expressing support. The overwhelming response is “we need to do something about homelessness”. Some would like us to do it somewhere else other than here (though the notion of “where” is somewhat fuzzy), some would like us to do it in a different way, but very few are telling us to do nothing. Though most unhoused people in New West – those who will be prioritized for housing at the Tiny Homes Village – do not have active addictions to illegal drugs, some of them might. Just as some of the people in the apartment building where you live, perhaps in your very home, may have addictions. Telling a person that they cannot have a safe place to sleep because they have an addiction – be that to alcohol or cigarettes or opioids – is not a solution, it is exacerbating the problem. A safe place to live while they work though their addictions, their trauma, their mental health challenge, and find support to deal with those issues is not only the right thing to do morally, it is the proven path to a healthier community.

I find it a bit ironic that much of the correspondence from outside of New Westminster is concentrating on the need for drug-free housing options, suggesting the City should instead support drug-free / sober living and the recovery community. These folks are apparently unaware New Westminster is considered a national leader by the recovery community, and does more than most cities in Canada to support the recovery community in words and action, including having more sober living beds per capita than any other City in the Lower Mainland. There is nothing in the Tiny Homes Village that takes way from those efforts, or directs funds from those efforts. The simple reality is that we need every resource we can get our hands on to address homelessness – which is a very different set of tools than needed to address addiction, because they are not interchangeable crises. There is definitely some overlap between them, and where they overlap we need a range of tools because people in addiction are not a monoculture. We need complex care beds for some, we need detox and recovery for some, we need stability and access to counselling for some, we need medication for some, and for most we probably need some combination of those things.

The Tiny Homes Village is a work in progress. As a City, we have engaged with the railways and industrial neighbours, and are connecting them with BC Housing to determine what measures can be put into the Operations Plan to manage existing security and safety issues around their operations, and to assure the transitional housing reduces these concerns. I say existing, because there is already a history of informal encampments near this site that have been challenging for the Province and City to respond to, and this project provides us an opportunity to bring new and different tools to that challenge.

We are also looking forward to the results of the BC Housing engagement process, and the City will be using that information to inform not just the Operations Plan, but the Neighbourhood Inclusion process we are setting up with BC Housing to provide proactive management of issues around the village once it is set up in the fall. We are taking guidance from other jurisdictions where this model has been successful in similar settings, and learning from the example of others where there were issues that needed addressing. And the conversation with the community continues.

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. 1 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.

Lower 12th

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

There was an interesting discussion at Council Workshop on Monday that is worth unpacking a bit. I don’t usually write up Workshop reports here, because these are not typical Council meetings. They tend to be more free-ranging conversations Council has about items that are preliminary or half-cooked; more of a check in and request for direction from Council on an ongoing initiative than final decision points. We talked about spending on Canucks viewing parties, about the Liquid Waste Management Plan, and about next steps on Vision Zero, but the most interesting item was staff checking in with Council on the Lower 12th Special Study Area.

Blue dashed line shows the “Lower 12th Special Study Area” in the City’s Zoning map.
…and in the City’s Official Community Plan land use designation map.

Lower 12th is a (mostly) grey spot on the City’s zoning map, and an equally distinct purple spot in our Official Community Plan maps. It was an area identified during the 2017 Official Community Plan discussions as being unique, and requiring a unique approach. The current OCP updates (being driven by Provincial mandate) and some preliminary applications by developers interested in putting mixed-use residential development here are pushing staff to ask Council how they want to deal with this space.

The background here is that Council back in 2017 saw this space as needing to continue to be a job-generating space. One of the larger policy goals of our OCP is to continue to develop job growth on pace with population growth (as we have managed to do over the last few years, despite the COVID blip). Staff and Council identified this area as being one of the last parts of the “mainland” where job creation is the main land-use driver. It is also unique in the downtwon area in that there are relatively large lots, it is generally flat, and the transportation connections are robust, including being a short walk from a SkyTrian station. This all means there is opportunity here.

Much of the land there is zoned as light industrial and commercial, and with no OCP designation (except “special study area”), significant development would require OCP amendment and rezoning. Although valuable commercial businesses, used car lots are not likely the “highest and best use” of properties in the centre of a dense urban city only a few hundred metres from a SkyTrain station. There is pent up value here that developers would love to release, and the most value in the region right now is in housing.

Up to now, much of the discussion of this area has been how to maintain ultra-light industrial and commercial space, maker space or light manufacturing while adding housing to help finance the redevelopment of an under-perfomring area. But the demands in New West in 2025 are different than those in 2017, and Council is more interested in learning how new modes of retail and commercial land use can be supported. Council also recognizes the increased need for green space in the Downtown and Brow neighbourhoods, need for school space and potentially other institutional spaces, and even need for expanded community amenity space for everything from a new Firehall to city administrative space and community centre space.

With all of this in mind, I opened the discussion at Council asking that we take a bit of a step back, and Council unanimously agreed. Staff is going to do more work on the Parks and Recreation Comprehensive Plan, on our Economic Development plans (Retail Strategy, Employment Strategy), and bring Council some more options around how this unique part of the City might develop differently. That may, or may not, include significant residential density to support redevelopment, and this is where I think Council still needs to give some clear direction in the next little while. But we need to give that direction with a fuller understanding of the land economics and potential for this unique area.

We are not a City that has traditionally said “no” to housing, and have taken seriously our responsibility to meet our Housing Target Orders, and meet our regional commitment to housing need. Our upcoming OCP update will address our 20-year housing need as required by regulation. That said, it is not obvious that we need housing in this location to meet those commitments or obligations, and we certainly don’t need housing at the density envisioned by the early catalyst projects in this area. I don’t think we should preclude, however, the opportunity to leverage truly affordable (non-market supportive or transitional) housing in this area if senior government partners are ready to fund it.

Everyone recognizes we also schools, we need green space, we need institutional, community, and creative space to support the livability of our community, and this “grey area” is a place that may provide unique opportunity to fit more of those needs in one of the denser parts of the City. It was a great conversation at Council, and I’m happy we were all able to come to a pretty clear consensus on this.

More to come!

Housing & Bill 47

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I have been writing a series of posts about the changes in how housing approvals are regulated in BC as the provincial government rolls out a series of new legislation. I previously wrote about Bill 44 and multiplexes here, then about Bill 46 and the introduction of ACCs here. This is part three, which could have a profound effect on the shape of New Westminster in the decade ahead:

Bill 47: Transit Oriented Development
This bill requires local governments to designate Transit Oriented Development areas around rapid transit stations and other designated transit exchanges where higher density residential development must be permitted and residential parking minimums cannot be applied. By the letter o the legislation, we will need to update our Official Community Plan to designate TOD areas at all SkyTrain stations by June 2024.

As with other aspects of what’s been introduced, I think this is a transformational change that will make our region more affordable, more sustainable, and more livable, and it probably could have been introduced 20 years ago. But I am afraid we don’t have the human resources available to do an optimal job of implementing it by the deadline.

The province is prescribing a minimum density for these TOD areas, saying the local government can permit more density, and any property owner can choose to build smaller than the prescribed minimum, but the local government cannot restrict density to below the minimums. 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. Here are what those TOD zones look like in New West:

As far as the 200m and 400m TOD zones go, this will not be much of a change for New West excepting the 22nd Street Station area (though this looks aligned with where we anticipated the 22nd Street visioning going) and a bit of Sapperton around RCH. Our Downtown zoning is already in this scale, and aside from Sapperton Green, there isn’t a lot of developable space in Sapperton within the 400m circle that isn’t already being built up. The 800m TOD zone, however, could have huge implications for the West End, the Brow of the Hill, Queens Park and Sapperton.

The implications of Queens Park are perhaps most intriguing. Much of the Queens Park Heritage Conservation Area south of Third Ave is within the 800m TOD area. It is unclear to me at this point if this regulation will supersede a Heritage Conservation Area, but for complicated mechanical regulatory reasons, I suspect it will. I am equally suspecting that Designated heritage properties will be exempt, meaning the extra protection offered properties in Queens Park that have had HRAs applied will be important. But I am perhaps getting ahead of myself and the regulations, so we will wait for clarity when those arrive.

The second part of the regulatory change is that all residential parking minimums will be removed from TOD areas. The City will still be able to require commercial parking and some accommodation will be developed to allow cities to require accessible parking for people with disabilities, but overall the number of general parking spots in new residential will be determined by what the market determines it needs, not regulatory minimums.

This will significantly reduce the cost of developing near SkyTrain stations, and is aligned with the City’s Climate Action plans and the provincial CleanBC transportation goals. I am generally in favour, but again there will again be devils in details. It is unclear what this means to goals for off-street EV charging, and what this will do to increase the need for already over-prescribed public EV charging. This will exacerbate pressure for street parking and increase conflict in communities around precious curbside space. Allowing “the Market” to dictate parking need tends to assume people make rational choices, such as only owning the number of cars for which they have parking, and experience indicates this is not how people behave. Further, the “market” relies on pricing signals, and the amount of grief we get for $50 annual parking passes for street paring in some neighbourhoods suggests people aren’t that enamored with market solutions when they are used to getting something for free.

Finally, Transit Oriented Development assumes that there will be transit service at those stations. That assumption will be tested in the year ahead, as TransLink needs a new financial model to sustain its existing service level, even as transit is back to pre-COVID crowding levels, and the Province holds the levers that will allow the system to survive. As this TOD plan rolls out across the region, it is clear maintaining the level of service we have currently won’t suffice, and the $20 billion Access for Everyone plan will need to be funded to keep up with ridership growth.

With those caveats, I will sum up by saying I am glad to see that we have a provincial government who is willing to take serious moves to address a decades-long housing crisis. For a city like New West that has already been doing so much in housing, meeting and exceeding our Regional Growth Strategy targets, getting region-leading numbers of new Purpose Built Rental built, while protecting the most affordable housing, it is positive to see that the load is going to be spread more widely across the region. These are the kind of moves that housing advocates have been calling for, but probably gave up expecting from a provincial government in Canada.

There will be devils in the details, there will be hurdles and potholes on the way, but a decade from now we may look back at David Eby’s first year as the time British Columbia finally took the housing crisis seriously. Yes, the shape of our neighbourhoods will change, but the change will probably be more gradual that you think (there are only so many developers and builders in the region, and they are mostly already working hard), and ultimately, we will have stronger and more resilient communities because of the changes.

Housing & Bill 44

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

There has been a *lot* going on in the housing file in BC over the last month. The announcements have been fast and furious from the Ministry of Housing and the Premier, and the responses from Local Governments, housing advocates, and status quo defenders have been all over the place – from this being the worst overreach in provincial history to a long-overdue response to a crisis 20 years in the making. My own feelings about it are similarly all over the place, so I figured I would take some time to unpack it all from a New Westminster perspective, and from the perspective of a local government elected person who has been advocating for serious action on the housing crises.

Maybe I should do one of those caveats where I say “all of this is my opinion, not the official position of the City or anyone else on Council”.  An additional caveat may be that this is all a work in progress, as the province has not provided the enacting regulations yet. Local governments have been told that more details on implementation of the legislation along with instructions and guidelines are coming over the next few months. So the thoughts below are preliminary, and I reserve the right to be corrected in point of fact or event point of intention as this new landscape evolves.

I will go through by headline legislation, dealing with one piece of legislation in each of three separate blog posts. At the same time, recognize that these are overlapping measures in how they will be applied by Local Governments. They aren’t as separable as described here, and need to be viewed holistically. So with that in mind, the first blog post is:

Bill 44 : Multiplexes and more!
There are several components to Bill 44, but the short notes are that it brings to an end the most restrictive form of residential zoning – single Single Family Detached zoning – and requires local government to permit 3, 4, or 6 units per lot. It also takes away the local government’s ability to require off-street parking for these developments when they are near frequent transit. This bill also requires Local Governments to complete standardized Housing Needs Reports, to update their OCP and Zoning Bylaw by the end of 2025 to accommodate the need outlined in that HNR, and prohibits Public Hearings on residential development aligned with the Official Community Plan.

I’ll start by saying all of these are (in my opinion)  good ideas. Much of this reflects good planning principles. We should be structuring our OCPs around a defensible analysis of housing need, and the OCP should be the part of the community planning process where the bulk of community consultation and input should occur, not the Public Hearing. The question put to the community can then be “how do we want to accommodate the need?” not “How do we feel about growth?”, because the latter has more often than not resulted decisions that don’t address the realistic needs of the community or region, and therefore a Plan that falls short in addressing a crisis. It is also clear that the era has ended where single family living on a 5,000+ square foot lot in the middle of a dense urban core is attainable for most people, or sustainable in the cost to service those lots.

Then come the details.

For New Westminster, this is mostly going to mean 4 units will be permitted as right without rezoning on every current “single family” lot. I use that term in quotes because most lots in New West already permit three units – a main house with a basement suite and a laneway/carriage house – although there are a variety of restrictions on overall size of the combined units and each component. We use the Development Permit process to manage the size, shape, and scale of laneway/carriage houses, based on guidelines developed through a lengthy process involving a lot of public consultation. We also permit (through Rezoning, Heritage Restoration Agreement or Development Variance Permits) some variance on these guidelines on a lot-by-lot basis.

Remember, the end of “Single Family Zoning” does not mean the end of Single Family homes. You will not be forced to build a fourplex if you would rather build a house, and you will not be forced to knock your house down to build a fourplex. These changes increase the variety of housing types that can be built, they don’t take options away.

So the switch from 3-units to 4-units might not seem that big, but the work to develop new replacement guidelines on what can be built is actually a significant piece of work. Everything from set-backs (how close to a property line you are allowed to build), maximum heights, FSR (Floor Space Ratio – how many square feet of living space you are allowed to build relative to your lot size), maximum lot coverage (we currently only let you cover half a lot with a building or impermeable surface – change that and you need to change how our storm drainage network operates) will need to be worked out through guidelines. There are engineering and utility considerations to all of this, and more important details than you might think. We may need to set standards around how driveways cross sidewalks (we don’t want driveways every 33 feet on major roads or greenways), how solid waste receptacles will be stored and picked up by the City, and how we will address our Tree Protection Bylaw, etc.

All this to say, there is a lot of work to do to build these guidelines, and it matters a lot to how the City functions if we don’t get them right. This is also work that impacts not just our Planning staff, but folks in Engineering and Parks and Open Spaces. Our overall desire to have public consultation around the shape of guidelines that impact every neighbourhood is another timeline challenge. As currently proposed, we need to do all of this by June, 2024 – 6 months after the regulations that point us here are released in December. That is an incredibly tight timeline, and I fully anticipate we will not able to make it.

New Westminster is still a smallish city, and our planning department is a small team. We don’t want to move people off of new development approvals, affordable building projects, and major projects like the 22nd Street Visioning process to do this work, because those projects could bring hundreds of new units on line every year, while four- and six-plexes may bring on dozens a year in the most optimistic model. The long-term benefits are huge, I worry about the short-term capacity issue.

The deadline for a Housing Needs Report is December, 2024, and I am more confident we can get this done, as it would build on one we recently completed. We have yet to see what the Province’s “Standard” HNR looks like, but there is already a grounding for this work. One potential challenge here is that we, like many medium-sized cities, relied on a consultant to help with some specialized components of this work, and those consultants may be harder to hire (and more costly) when there are 100 municipalities on BC all clamoring for the same work on the same deadline. I’m not sure there are enough people in the province trained to do this work. I would hope the Province would look to the “Naughty List” of cities to be prioritized here, and may relax the deadline for cities like New West who have already been meeting their needs targets if there is a capacity crunch next year. We shall see.

Once we have the HNR in hand, we will need to update the three OCPs in the City (Yes, we have three – the main one, and separate ones for Queensborough and the Downtown) by December 2025 so the OCPs reflect a plan to meet those identified needs. This is a relatively straight-forward process, and should be doable, though again the public consultation part will be the critical path. Last time the City completed an OCP re-write, it took us two years because we really invited the public in for a conversation about the future of the City. I don’t see a reason to do less his time around, especially as how the OCP is going to inform the shape of zoning more now than before, with so much pre-zoning of higher density areas. We will not have two years to do this, so it will be an intense period of public engagement. And intense means staff resources and stressed out community wishing to engage.

The impact this will have on current OCP-related projects like the 22nd Street Visioning, Master planning the Lower 12th Street area, or Sapperton Green is unclear at this time. There is a similar concern here as with the HNR about province-wide resources available to do this work. Significant OCP re-writes often require consultant support for economic modelling, public consultation, utility planning, and such. If 100s of Municipalities in BC are doing this all at once, it might be a very good time to be graduating from planning school.

Coming next – Bills 46 and 47…with maps!

HRAs and HCAs and Housing Priorities

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

There were two items I promised follow-up from last council meeting. This one deserves a deeper dive because it was a complicated conversation that resulted in a complex discussion at Council with several amendments and re-directions, all because the public policy and eventual outcomes were not obvious.

This is a result of a decision back in 2021 by Council to put a “freeze” on HRA applications in the Queens Park HCA, and a staff recommendation that we now lift that freeze.  And yeah, those acronyms are confusing. So I’ll try to unpack.

The residential neighbourhood of Queens Park has been designated a Heritage Conservation Area (“HCA”); one of the largest in the province. Because of the unique and provincially-significant collection of pre-1941 single family homes that meet the standard of having “heritage” merit, the neighbourhood and the Community Heritage Commission recommended the City put in an HCA a few years ago to provide extra protection to those homes. If you really want the background, here is my blog post from when it occurred.

Heritage Restoration Agreements (“HRAs”) are a planning tool that can be (and are) applied anywhere in the City. They are rather like a rezoning, in which a property owner asks to do something that is not permitted in the current zoning (i.e. build a duplex on a single family lot) in exchange for providing some value to the community or meeting some City policy goal. In the case of HRAs, it is essentially a rezoning where the “value” being exchanged is the permanent preservation of a heritage asset.

It is important to note that “designation” of a preserved heritage asset under an HRA is the highest level of heritage protection available to local governments in BC, and a much stronger level of heritage protection than is offered to the pre-1940 “protected” houses in the HCA. For this reason, alterations of heritage properties in the HCA usually come about through an HRA. If the owner of a pre-1940 HCA-protected house in Queens Park wants to make an exterior alteration, add a carriage or laneway house, lift the building to put in a full basement or put in dormers that increase the livable square footage of the home, they come to the City to ask for an HRA. Through an extensive review to assure the heritage merit is protected, and through a  (by regulation) Public Hearing, the Council either permits the change in exchange for “designation”, or does not. HRAs are also used outside Queens Park, but within Queens Park HCA they are essentially the only tool to allow alterations of pre-1940 homes, so they are more common there while other neighbourhoods are more familiar with other rezoning tools.

Since the adoption of the HCA, some members of the Queens Park community felt that HRAs were being applied in a way that was not complimentary to the HCA principles. I’ve heard criticism that HRAs were being granted with no benefit to the community, that they were an “end around” of the regular rezoning process. I don’t agree with these assertions, but they did lead to a few fractious HRA Public Hearings, and staff suggested we “pause” the processing of HRAs in Queens Park for a bit of time to let some policy work be done to update HRA principles across the City.

Unfortunately, this HRA process work has been repeatedly delayed by staff shortages and Council’s decision to prioritize other housing work – putting together affordable housing applications, an inclusionary housing policy, 22nd Street Area master planning, and applications coming that will help us meaningfully address the critical housing needs identified in our Housing Needs Assessment. Frankly, the HRA work was going to take up too much staff time and consultation energy for the value (and number of housing units) they provide the community during a housing crisis. Because of this, the “freeze” on new HRAs in Queens Park has dragged on for two years. Staff brought this report to us recommending we lift the freeze, because the work to update the HRA system (now wrapped into a more comprehensive Infill Density Policy Review) is not resourced to happen until 2025.

This is a question of balancing procedural fairness (people should be able to apply for rezoning or HRAs and understand the process that is available for them) with the common-good and heritage protection principles of the HCA.

During the conversation at Council there was a proposal to refer this question to the Community Heritage Commission – an advisory commission the city has to bring subject matter expertise to exactly this question: how to best evaluate heritage merit and balance its protection against other City policy and priorities? There was also a suggestion that applicants caught up in the “freeze” in 2021 be unfrozen to allow them to proceed with HRAs if they are still so inclined, but to maintain the freeze otherwise until the policy work is completed. Finally, the recommendation from staff to lift the freeze was put on the table, with the proviso that HRA applications not be prioritized over more critical housing work reflected in our Housing Needs assessment and overall housing policy direction.

This was a lengthy conversation, and I don’t want to speak for others at Council here, because the votes were split in different ways as we moved through the amendments, and everyone clearly had different comfort levels on this balance we were trying to strike. Instead, I will speak to my motivations for voting as I did.

When the HCA was introduced back in 2017, I supported in on the strict proviso that it would not stop all housing change in Queens Park – that the HCA should work to facilitate heritage-informed development of more housing diversity in Queens Park, and not act as a tool to prevent housing diversity in the neighbourhood. In the blog post I linked to above, I said it this way:

“the HCA policy cannot stop all development, infill density, or other ways of increasing housing choice in the Queens Park neighbourhood. We need to accelerate our work towards increasing laneway and carriage house infill, stratification of large houses if they wish to re-configure into multi-family buildings, and protecting the multi-family housing stock that already exists in Queens Park. The HCA as adopted will not prevent that progress,”

On a similar vein, I voted against the HRA freeze in 2021 because I felt it shifted the balance too far towards stopping the evolution of Queens Park by not even allowing change if it worked to improve heritage asset protection.

My position has not changed much here, and I voted with the slim majority of Council to lift the freeze, as recommended by Staff. I was not opposed to referring to the CHC for feedback prior to the lifting of the freeze, but that was defeated by another slim majority of Council. I also support the general direction to staff that we don’t need to prioritize this type of low-density infill at this time, and that is NOT consistent with my previous feelings and votes at Council.

Simply put, we are not in the same place now as we were in 2017 when we approved the current Official Community Plan. At the time, infill density was seen as an important part of our housing strategy, to bring more affordable but still market “family friendly” housing diversity in the community. In the last few years, land values in New West have grown to the point where infill is going to play less of a role in meeting our housing needs in the next few years, as higher-density forms re going to be needed to hit that lower-end-of-market and family-friendly sweet spot.