Tag: Planning

Mixing Business

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

As a follow-up to my Council report from last week, there were two items I promised to circle back to, like how I circled back to the preposition at the end of that sentence.

English teachers will find that last sentence fun. Hi Mom!

The two items spoke to supporting local businesses and streetscapes. We had a report on Bill 28, and the opportunity for us to explore whether Bill 28-style property tax relief might be a useful tool for our community, and we had a motion from Councillor Nakagawa to review our development and zoning policies to better support local community-serving small businesses. Both of these linked back to some recent chatter in the community around street-level commercial spaces, with people wanting to see more experiential retail and entertainment, and less service and office, to “liven up” the street (I got through all of that without mentioning dentists once). So I want to unpack each item a bit and discuss not just what a city/council can do, but more about the varying ideas about what a city/council should do.

Bill 28 – Property Tax Relief Legislation
I have written quite a bit over the last 9 years about how property tax works (examples here, here, and here). This new legislation changes this a bit for one category of properties, allowing us to provide some short term (5 year) property tax relief for some commercial property owners.

To review, the City sets tax rates, but the tax paid on property is based on BC Assessment Value, determined by “Highest and Best Use” – not necessarily the current value of the property, but the value the property would have if the owner sought to maximize that value. The change with Bill 28 is pretty specific, limited to properties where the “Land-value ratio” greater than 0.95, which means the value of improvements on the land (the existing building) is less than 5% of the total assessed value of the property. Where it is flexible is in how the local government can apply tax relief, and how much.

Some folks would suggest any tax relief for business is good, but we need to be clear this tool provides us a potential tax shift – giving one type of taxpayer some relief transfers that taxation to other taxpayers – not an overall decrease in the revenue on the part of the City. We are taking a more cautious approach here, because not only are there more devils in details, there are likely perverse incentives in there as well.

There is a general feeling that high lease rates and tax rates make it harder from small neighbourhood-serving business to set up shop, and that is surely a factor. The diversity of business types on Twelfth Street is almost certainly a product of low per-foot lease rates. So one part of the thinking here is that if the lease cost (including taxes) was lower, we would more likely get smaller, more diverse, and more interesting business types setting up. Instead of dentists (there, I said it).

One potential challenge with the Bill 28 approach is the recognition that property owners pay taxes, not business owners. Sometimes a business also owns the property they operate out of, but for most small neighbourhood businesses in New West a lease is paid to a landlord. It is the common practice for the landlord to pass the property tax bill directly to the tenant (through “triple net leases”), but there is nothing in Bill 28 or elsewhere that forces a landlord to pass any tax relief savings down to the small business person, so a tax incentive may not get to the small business types we are trying to support, and might actually make the situation worse for the business owner, but better for the Landlord. It may also be a disincentive to upgrading, repair, or improvement of marginal buildings, reducing the attractiveness and safety of commercial spaces.

The City of Vancouver is the only City that has taken on a Bill 28 approach, and we are going to hope to learn from their example as staff bring some data and analysis back to council to see if this approach can be made to help. It may be a useful tool, if we can wield it creatively enough.

Ensuring that ground level retail spaces in new developments prioritize community-supporting businesses and organizations
This motion from Councillor Nakagawa was a bit more all-encompassing, and completely within our jurisdiction. It was asking that the City “review and refresh current policies relating to ground level retail” and “develop policy to ensure that future ground level retail spaces in new development are built to prioritize community-supporting businesses and organizations in alignment with the retail strategy.”

When people ask what Council can do to assure a (insert type of business you want to see) opens in a specific location instead of a (insert type of business you don’t want to see), I often retort with the question: are you sure you want to give me the power to do that?  Council has some power to restrict different business types through zoning, but do you really want 7 elected people picking and choosing the businesses in your downtown? Are we the wisest ones to choose this, or is this somewhere we need to ask “the market” to address? Clearly there is a huge spectrum between completely hands-off and being so prescriptive that we end up with streets full of unleased spaces because Council of the day fails to understand the market. Personally, I would love to see a small hardware store downtown. But we had one for a few years, and it was really great, but it was not supported enough to stay open and now you can buy discount shoes in that spot. The reasons for that specific store closing may be complex and global (as they were part of a nation-wide chain that changed its focus and has now closing many Big Box offerings across Canada as well). The City saying “only hardware stores here” would not change those global forces, and we would likely have an empty space in its place, and angry landlord, and a decaying business district. That said, we do exercise limited powers to restrict uses like cannabis or liquor stores (for example) to address perceived or suspected risks.

Nothing against dentists, but mine is Uptown and on the second floor, which is probably a better space for the kind of use that doesn’t really “activate” the street or lead to good walking-around experiences. One thing we can all agree is that a street is more fun to live near and shop on if we have a variety of interesting retail and service experiences along it. As part of our Council Strategic Priority Plan, we talked about supporting a people-centered economy, supporting retail areas that address the needs of the local community.

When Starbucks made a global decision to close thousands of stores including Columbia and 6th, people lamented this loss. Since that time, three new coffee shops have opened downtown, and the old Starbucks location is a popular Italian deli. There are literally dozens of businesses Downtown that were not there at the beginning of the Pandemic, and there is not a lot of lease vacancy. By many measures, the business environment Downtown is pretty healthy. Still, the community is engaged in a conversation about retail mix, though it’s not clear how the community wants to get there.

There are two policy areas inherent in this motion we can look at. We can look at how we approve new street-facing spaces in new mixed use developments like 618 Carnarvon, where a brand new dentist office is opening in a space where folks might have wanted to see a coffee shop, or boutique, or other more experiential use. The other is to look at policies that rezone existing spaces to limit the variety of uses possible when businesses turn over, much like we do with liquor stores. To traditional businesses this sounds like a lot of “red tape”, and may result in an incredibly complex zoning bylaw that makes it harder for any business to find the right space. One can imagine this resulting in any new and innovative business types wanting to set up in town having to come to Council to ask permission, because their specific type that doesn’t fit the Bylaw. We went down that path with a video-game arcade that wanted to serve alcohol – and it was a massive pain in the ass for staff, a difficult challenge for the business owner who felt unsupported, and left everyone feeling soured. And that was for a business idea that that everyone on Council liked!

There is a guy I have had lunch with (Hi John!) who suggests the City should simply open more restaurants downtown. I don’t think it is that simple, because I don’t know what the role of the City is in doing that. Restaurants are permitted in almost every business storefont on Columbia Street, there are no rules or regulations preventing them from opening now. At the same time, we cannot force the landlord to kick out the current tenant and put in a restaurant. Reducing taxes of set-up costs will not have any positive effect on a restaurant business model that it doesn’t equally have on a nail salon or dog grooming business model. Further, we are limited by Section 25 of the Community Charter (the part that says it is illegal for a City to “provide a grant, benefit, advantage or other form of assistance to a business”) from directly incenting a specific business owner to do a specific thing. We could, I guess, buy up the land and start leasing it to the business types and business owners we like, but I’m not sure that is the best role of a City government.

All this to say, there is an interesting bit of policy work we can do here, but we are also limited in our powers by legislation and common sense. This also speaks to and augments existing work we are doing around the recently-adopted Retail Strategy.

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!

Year of Work

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Last month I wrote a blog post marking the one-year anniversary of the 2022 election that was mostly personal reflections and not about the work we did in Year One. Now that we are on the one-year anniversary of the new Council being actually sworn in, a bit of a summary is apropos. As I worked on this, I realized there is a lot to talk about, so I need to edit it down a bit and gather by themes. So this is more a list of highlights than a complete catalogue.

Inauguration
We swore in a new Council on November 7th, 2022, bringing in one of the bigger change-overs in recent years. Best I can tell, it has been more than 25 years since we had this large a change-over with a new Mayor and 4 new Councillors elected in the same year. This meant that onboarding for the new members (myself included, because the Mayor role is very different than the Council one) dominated the first few months of work. We held long onboarding seminars and site tours with staff getting everyone as up to speed as possible on everything from how the municipal budget works in reality (very different than how it works on some election platforms!) to details on the various areas of service delivery the City performs.

Following on this, we developed together and adopted a Strategic Priorities Plan that I wrote about here. It has the regular priority stuff – transportation and housing and asset management – but I am more proud in how Council came together to center the residents and communities (yes, plural) we are serving in this plan, and to emphasize community connectedness as a priority. This is what makes New West special, and what will truly address many of the challenges we face.

Housing Approved
The City continues to lead on housing policy, signing housing agreements on almost 700 new Purpose Built Rental units, and giving final approvals to 244 student apartments, 50 supportive housing units, more than 150 new townhouses and about 50 other units in several medium-density forms. We waived Public Hearing on projects promising more than 400 more rental units, and dozens of townhouses because they were consistent with the Official Community Plan and public consultation showed strong support. We are also working through initial phases of several larger developments in the City, as we strive to (and are so far successful at) meeting our Regional Growth Strategy targets. We are still struggling to get 24/7 shelter, transitional and supportive housing funded in the City, even those that we have approved, and continue to balance putting the pressure on provincial and federal purse-string holders while we work with them at the staff-to-staff level to develop fundable projects.

Crises
We have been proactive at addressing the overlapping crises of homelessness, mental health, and addictions that are challenging every municipality in Canada. Back in December, we brought in a Downtown Livability Strategy to coordinate efforts between staff from Community Planning, Economic Development, Engineering, Fire Services, Integrated Services (“Bylaws”), Parks and Recreation, Finance, and Police and added some resources to address general hygiene and cleanliness issues. We have continued to partner with Fraser Health, the Canadian Mental Health Association, BC Housing, and service agencies working downtown, have secured $1.7 Million from the federal Building Safer Communities Fund, $1.2M from the Provincial Government to support our groundbreaking Peer Assist Care Teams, $50,000 from the provincial Ministry of Public Safety to set up Situation Tables and Collaborative Public Safety Programs. We have also launched a new Homelessness Action Plan working with our partners in the Homelessness Coalition.

Staff have been working hard and making progress with the resources available to them. Just last week, we committed to a plan to increase these resources and set up a new structure to assure we are leveraging community partnerships and coordinating our lobbying and communications efforts to best serve the entire community.

It is a difficult time for many in our community, and everyone deserves to feel safe and supported however they live in this community. We are committed to a compassionate, evidence-based approach to addressing the needs of those most at risk, and to address the externalities related to too many people not having access to the dignified supports they need. We have also supported the building of new supportive housing in the community – recognizing the real solution to homelessness is safe and secure homes.

Capital Projects
Our Capital Plan is significant. The biggest item being təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic and Community Centre – a more than doubling of the recreation and aquatic space provided by the old Canada Games Pool and Centennial Community Centre, and the first Zero Carbon recreation centre of its kind in Canada. Considering that procurement and construction occurred during massive construction inflation, the regional concrete strike, unprecedented supply chain disruptions, not to mention a global pandemic, delivering this project within a few months of planned opening, and within 5% of the budget is a significant achievement. We are not across the finish line yet, but opening is planned for the spring, and that will be a great day for New West.

Flying under the radar a bit was a new $28 Million substation in Queensborough that we cut the ribbon on a few months ago. Not only will this provide secure long-term electrical reliability for rapidly-growing Q’Boro, but the Electrical Utility delivered the project for $2 million under budget, saving all city electrical ratepayers money. Serious kudos to the team who delivered this project.

You also probably noticed there have been a lot of roads torn up over the last year, mostly in Sapperton and the West End. This is the result of many overlapping utility renewal projects by the City and Metro Vancouver, with some of it supported by a $10.4 Million Investing in Canada grant from both the Federal and Provincial governments. Building a City is project that never stops, and we are investing more than ever on things that matter to the quality of life in this community, like sidewalks and trees.

Reconciliation
A Year of Truth is ground-breaking work on uncovering the history of colonization in New Westminster. We are informing a truth-based dialogue about our shared history with the original inhabitants of these lands to inform a more genuine approach to reconciliation. A new relationship with the 6 Host Nations, and a new commitment to co-develop the replacement of Pier Park in a vision shared by the original inhabitants of these lands and the community. This is sometimes challenging work, but we are leading with clear principles, and our entire community will be much stronger for having had these discussions, for having taken the time to listen and to learn. Only once we have truth can reconciliation begin.

Resiliency
Over the last year, we have seen a massive all-department response to the Heat Dome disaster of 2021. Our Emergency Planning staff have partnered with Fraser Health and Senior Services Society to identify and directly support vulnerable residents, have surveyed and identified the most vulnerable buildings in the City and initiated a One Cool Room program. Our Electrical Utility is augmenting the province’s free Air Conditioner Program with an enhanced program for New West residents. Our Parks and Engineering teams have brought a new emphasis on public cooling stations and relief centres to address the bad days when they come. Meanwhile, we continue to advocate to senior government for regulatory changes that will reduce the risk to vulnerable residents in the future.

We have also initiated a new Flood Resilience Plan that adopts the recently-updated 2050 Fraser River Flood Profile to address climate-change driven freshet changes and sea-level rise to the middle of the century in Queensborough, in the Downtown ,and the Braid Industrial area. We have been successful at pulling in senior government funding to support pump station and dike upgrades in Queensborough. This plan will help us direct the next phase of investments.

Climate
We have adopted new Zero Carbon Step Code levels that incent the building of new homes that are both energy efficient and zero carbon, a major step towards our 2030 and 2050 community greenhouse gas reduction goals. We made a major shift in minimum parking requirements in new buildings around Skytrain and frequent transit, to reduce the cost of building new homes and better support transportation and climate goals. Meanwhile, we have been putting together a decision making framework to prioritize spending of the Climate Action Reserve to assure we get the best bang for the buck as we apply that reserve to items in our capital plan that move the needle on climate emissions reductions and climate resilience. We also supported youth leadership in our community by adopting a 15-Minute City Strategy which will guide future development and planning.

Partnerships
As Council prioritized building strong relationships with organizations doing good work in the community, we have put this in practice. This includes building a stronger relationship with Sahib Sukh Sagar Gurdwara through shared emergency management strategy and resources. We are strengthening our relationship with Urban Indigenous residents and Indigenous Youth through partnership with Spirit of the Children Society through Truth and Reconciliation Day and hosting an Every Child Matters sidewalk mural in the centre of our Downtown. We cut the ribbon on the new K.I.D.S. Childcare space in Queensborough – a partnership between the development community, the City, and the Province bringing much needed childcare spaces to Queensborough. We supported seniors advocacy in our community by adopting recommendations that support dignified and affordable Aging in Place after a request from representatives from Century House. For the first time, we recognized Transgender Day of Visibility with flag raising and lighting up City Hall, and were the first BC City to recognize Ethiopian Day by raising the Ethiopian Flag at Friendship gardens and invited representatives of the local Ethiopian Community into City Hall to share food and ideas. Just today I attended the New West Hospice Society dialogue on Death and dying at Century House- an incredible and meaningful collaboration between the City and two volunteer-driven organizations in the City that are making our community stronger.

We also hosted the Mann Cup! OK, Council didn’t get them there, but it was a memorable event that fills me photostream for the year. One thing this Council did to to help was to designate the ‘Bellies as an Event of Municipal Significance, which allowed for a shift in how they manage their liquor license. This helped facilitate a partnership between the ‘Bellies and a local brewery, and providing more secure funding for their operations though an exciting payoff run.

Arts, Culture and Economic Development
Council made a $20 Million investment in the repair and upgrade of the Massey Theatre so this artistic jewel of the community can continue to thrive for another generation. We also secured a long-term operational agreement with the Massey Theatre Society so they can transform Massey Theatre into a multi-purpose arts centre called 8th and 8th Arts Spaces.

Meanwhile, Council initiated downtown renewal plans, including advocating for a Vacant Commercial Property Tax at UBCM, and adopting a new Retail Strategy to be implemented in 2024. We have also adopted a new Site-Wide Liquor Licensing policy to better support major festivals in the City. We have renewed our our Economic Development Advisory Committee by recognizing the importance of Arts and Culture in this space, and expanding the mandate of the committee to include it.

Engagement
We have launched several public engagement opportunities, from the development of a new Queensborough Transportation Plan to the visioning of the 22nd Street Station Area. We are also launching an innovative Community Advisory Assembly model of engagement, where a council of community members that represent the diversity of our city can weigh in on issues important to the community.

Incomplete as it is, for the first year of a mostly-new Council, I am pretty happy with this list. There are also many things that Council has expressed interest in working on that we have not really started yet. It’s a busy time in the City, in every City when I talk to me colleagues around the region, and we are still in a place where we need to balance the desire to get lots of things done while we are challenged for resources and staff are already fully tasked, and then some. Council recognizes that this work is being done by more than 1,000 hardworking people in City Hall, the Works Yard, the recreation centres and out in the community, and their dedication is appreciated.

It has been a year of excitement and frustrations, and more than one distraction, but the work never stops. Building a City is not a job that is ever completed, nor is it something a Mayor can do – it requires a team effort. I am so fortunate in this role to have a great team surrounding me, doing the work to make New Westminster more active, more connected, and more nurturing. I’m looking forward to what we can accomplish in 2024.

On the Curbside

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

The second item from last Council Meeting I promised a follow up on deserves a deeper dive for a very different reason than the last. In this case, the public policy and outcomes are comparatively simple to understand, even if for some they are counter-intuitive.

There was a motion brought to Council that would not only cost the City significant revenue on the order of $1 Million, but also stands in contrast to our City’s Official Community Plan, Master Transportation Plan, Downtown Parking Strategy, the recently-adopted Retail Strategy, our Climate Action goals, and various other city policies.

Under the guise of “supporting local business”, the proposal was to provide free street parking for an hour in all business areas, expand free evening parking, and make parking free on Sundays. Besides taking a significant chunk out of our parking revenue (which would presumably need to be offset by Property Tax increases), there is simply no evidence that free street-parking initiatives like this help local retail businesses in urban communities like New Westminster. The studies have been done, the evidence does not exist. The idea of free street parking may be populist, but it won’t work.

It’s not just me saying this, and nothing makes New Westminster unique here. I like to paraphrase/quote Donald Shoup, the acknowledged global expert on exactly this topic and author of “The High Price of Free Parking” when he says the curb lane on a commercial street is some of the most valuable land in any city. It is the biggest mistake a city can make to take that most valuable land and give it away, for free, to cars. Underpriced street parking drives traffic congestion, it drives emissions, and it makes a place less pedestrian friendly. It also, ironically, acts to make parking less available and harms the businesses it purports to serve.

Like most things involving cars, free parking works great until everyone wants to use it. This is because cars are massive consumers of space compared to their utility when compared to any other mode. You can have abundant available parking or you can have free parking, you cannot have both without turning the majority of your public space into parking lots. This works (at abhorrent cost) at suburban malls, but in dense urban city centres, the space simply doesn’t exist to make it work without loss of all of the things that make a community walkable and livable.

This is why the City of New Westminster, much like Vancouver and other modern cities, work to adjust commercial street parking rates based on needs assessments and the principle that correctly priced parking makes it more available for critical users, and properly prioritizes it in the hierarchy of needs for that most valuable curbside real estate.

In practice, this means setting a price for street parking that is higher than adjacent off-street parking. If street parking if free or too low priced, it will immediately be overwhelmed, and the off-street parking that was expensive to build and maintain will be underutilized. Ideally, on-street parking prices should be set so about 15% of spaces are open at any given time. Price it too low and people will circle the blocks in frustration not being able to find parking. When this motion first appeared in our Council agendas, I went down to Columbia Street on a regular Friday afternoon to see where our parking utilization rate was. I found about one empty parking space per block – or about 90% utilization. This is of course anecdotal, but there was no sign that pricing is out of scale with idealized price. This is because the price is based on a well-developed and evidence-based policy.

The City spent significant time putting together an updated parking pricing policy in 2019, including consultation with the business community, and that policy clearly lays out priorities and goals of the community, and sets a pricing policy to move us towards those goals over a 5-year implementation period. Let me quote from that October 2019 policy document:

“On-street vehicle parking is a valuable resource in urbanized communities, especially in commercial districts, around major institutions, and near rapid transit stations. Like other economic goods, when parking supply and pricing are not managed, demand for on-street parking often exceeds the amount of street space available. Complicating this issue is the growing demand for existing and potential designated curbside uses, such as transit stops and priority measures, taxi and ride-hailing zones, loading zones, accessible parking, car-share parking, protected bike lanes and bike parking, bike-share and other shared micromobility docking areas, parklets, and so forth. These uses – all of which are consistent with the City’s sustainable transportation and other goals – will continue to constrain the finite supply of onstreet space for the storage of personal vehicles.”

But our parking pricing strategy does not exist in a vacuum. It builds on the principles of the Official Community Plan, the Master Transportation Plan, the City’s Downtown Parking Strategy, our Community Energy and Emissions Plan, and other city policies. All of these are undermined by an arbitrary motion that re-prices this valuable public resource on a whim or a political promise.

In my opinion, this motion only represent bad public policy, it is regressive public policy that will (and this is actually the bigger point) not achieve the goals it claims to seek. I was not able to support it, nor was the majority of Council.

It is perhaps a coincidence that this motion arrived at Council as I was finishing reading a great book on this topic. Not Donald Shoup’s bible of parking policy, but Henry Grabar’s “Paved Paradise” which somehow makes the discussion of parking policy interesting and funny. The subtitle claims that parking explains the world we live in, and as you read he clearly makes the case that “parking is the primary determinant of the way the place you live looks, feels, and functions”.

We have work to do to make our curb spaces work better in Downtown New West, Sapperton, and Uptown. This work is ongoing through updates to our Master transportation Plan with a new area of focus on “curbside management”. We need to create better accessible parking for those who require accessible spaces, we need to change our pick-up/drop-off spaces to recognize the new emphasis on direct good and food delivery, we need to finds c at the curb for new mobility, for improved transit efficiency, for placemaking. This work will help businesses in our business districts, and it will help our residents better and more safely connect with those businesses. This is where the where the good public policy that supports local businesses is found. Alas, it doesn’t have the populist cachet of “free parking!”

Strategic Priorities Plan

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

A Strategic Priorities Plan was recently endorsed by Council. I wrote previously about the process we went through to get here, this is the meat in the middle. The Plan sets out the five priority areas for our work in the next few years. One of the principles we took into Strategic Planning was a recognition that these kinds of plans need to be aspirational and values-based, not necessarily prescriptive. The last 4 years taught us that even the best laid plans can be shifted by events, and we need to be ready to pivot when events conspire. A clear understanding of our common goals and the values that guide us toward them helps us with that pivot.

The core of the plan is five priority areas, four fairly straight-forward, one more abstract. In each of these, we have objectives and some example outcomes.

Homes and Housing Options. Our Community has been a leader in full-spectrum housing policy, from shelter and supportive housing through purpose-built rental and family-friendly transit oriented development. Still, secure and affordable housing is the #1 regional priority, and we have work to do. Our focus this term will be on implementing the Homelessness Action Strategy, and better targeting our affordable housing efforts to align with senior government funding opportunities. We will continue to prioritize market housing development on and near Transit, and will update our infill density program to bring more diversity of housing in every neighbourhood. Finally, facing the labour crunch, we are going to implement a simplified and streamlined approvals process to get more built sooner.

Safe Movement of People The ways people move around our region are changing, as people want more choice and equity in how we allocate transportation space and we are starting to make the shift necessary for us to meet our Climate Action goals. To reflect this, we are emphasizing increased safety for all modes, and measuring transportation success by our ability to move people more than traditional transportation models related to moving specific types of devices. Along with generational investments in our Active Transportation Network (again, to align with senior government funding opportunities), we are going to bring a new focus on the safety and comfort of our transportation realm – we don’t want choice constrained by lack of safety. This will be inter-departmental and culture-shifting, whether we brand it “VisionZero” or not.

People-centred Economy Continuing the trend of centering the people we serve in our work, we are framing our Economic Development focus around people. This means supporting vibrant retail areas that are focused on local needs. This means assuring our jobs-creating spaces (Commercial/ Industrial) are able to support local jobs. This also means assuring the economic benefits of our strong Arts and Culture sector are shared here in the community. This is an area where relationships and partnerships will be key to our success.

Assets and Infrastructure This doesn’t get everyone excited, but the City has a 5-year capital plan I can only describe as aggressive, which means we are investing in core infrastructure like never before. Asset Management is a the practice of assuring you understand your long-term asset needs and the lifecycle of existing and new assets, so that you can properly plan the finances needed to keep your assets in good repair, and renew them when needed. We are advancing a structured Asset Management strategy in the City, department by department, and though this will be better positioned both to score senior government grants to support infrastructure growth, and to set priorities when the inevitable call for more stuff but less spending arrives.

Community Belonging and Connecting This is the slightly less tangible priority area, but through our Strat Plan discussions, it was a theme we kept coming back to organically. What makes New West unique is the way residents and businesses feel connected to the community, to each other, in a way many other municipalities in the Lower Mainland don’t. We have a culture of connections, and Council wants to foster that. This means supporting the many community organizations that are bringing people together around, arts, around culture, around sport, or around an activated street.

These are the focus areas, but the way we do this work is as important as the work itself, so this Strategic Plan includes context statements that describe the organizations foundations we work upon, and the lenses through which we view our work. That can all sound a bit like Management Consultant Speak, but let me unpack it a bit using Climate Action as an example.

We are in an era where people expect their government to take action on Climate Change mitigation and adaptation. The existential aspect of this work is such that it impacts every department in the City. We cannot achieve our 2030 and 2050 GHG goals unless we engineer our public spaces differently. We cannot be resilient in the face of climate disruption unless our Emergency Services understand and adapt to the new threats. The buildings we approve today will be the affordable building stock in the zero-carbon future, we better assure they are built for that future. It goes on. Everything we do from this point forward must be viewed through a climate lens – are we doing this in a way that reduces GHG emissions? Is what we are building going to be appropriate in 20 years? Does this move us towards mitigation, or away from it?

Lenses like this will be applied to assure we are being true to our goals for Reconciliation, for Public Engagement, and for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism (DEIAR). It is what our community expects, and it is the right way to approach this work.

Finally, all of this work will be done on the foundation of Organizational Effectiveness. This means supporting our professional staff to do their work, assuring they have the resources and tools they need to do it, from IT to HR to the building in which people work.

And that is the plan in a nutshell. It is meant to be aspirational and realistic, and it is flexible enough for us to shift emphasis as needs (and senior government supports) shift over the next 40ish months. We will be monitoring and measuring the success transparently so Council and staff can be kept accountable to deliver on it.

Now go enjoy your long weekend, and Tuesday we get back to work.

Strategic Planning

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

As I reported last week, New West Council completed our Strategic Priority Plan. You can read the plan here, and I will write a second post about the content of it, but first a bit about the process that got us here, and the next steps. In the Strat Plan Blogging sandwich, this will be about the bread, and we can talk about the meat in the middle in the next post.

This Strategic Plan is the work of all of Council, with significant support from staff in preparing it. This is a new Council, with 4 new members and a new Mayor. We have also seen some significant changes in the last few years, between the persistent impacts of COVID-19 on our program delivery and the generational scale of our capital plan. Though it is common for a new Council to adopt a new strategic plan to guide staff work for the term, I felt it was important that this time we take a bit of time for the new Council to get their feet under them, and that we do intensive onboarding and training to assure all of Council are adequately informed to take a meaningful part in the Strat Planning.

As both Strategic Planning and budget planning take a lot of work, I did not want to rush through the former before we started working on the latter, and the budget has legislated timelines we needed to meet. The timing we followed allowed Council a chance to go through their first budget cycle before we buttoned up the Strat Plan – an important lesson in compromise and priority setting. The Strat Plan (and future budgets) will be stronger because we did this learning, but we also needed to recognize that our Strat Plan will not be fully demonstrated in our budget until next year.

The Strat Plan process included a weekend workshop, it was embedded into the many onboarding workshops we held, and there were early written drafts that all of Council opined on, as staff were able to frame and make sensible from all of that input. This was a good exercise overall, as members of Council were free to discuss technical and legislative policy limits with staff in a way that they feel free and unencumbered to ask the “bad question”. There was also space to debate values, ideas, policies, and challenges in a way that is mostly free of the political fray. I think we grew as a Council through this.

All that said, there is a responsibility that Council make decisions transparently, which means that the Strat Plan comes to an open meeting, and all of Council have an opportunity to speak to it. You can see this process (closed development discussion followed by open release and endorsement) is the standard practice for Municipalities that do strategic plans, and you can see other Munis reports here, here, and here.

Now that the Strat Plan is adopted, we will use it to guide future budget discussions, and will integrate it with our other major planning documents, from the Official Community Plan to our Climate Action Plan and Parks and open Spaces Strategy. When Staff or Council bring ideas forward, they will be discussed in the context of this plan – either the new work should match our priorities, or we need a compelling reason to adjust those priorities.

To bring the Strat Plan to function, we will likely be making some changes in the operation of the City. We had a report last week about Advisory Committees, and are beginning the work to assure they are structured to serve the priorities of the Strat Plan. It is also possible that we will make some organizations changes at the staff level to assure that workplans are better aligned with Council’s priorities and that the reporting structure is designed to provide oversight and accountability to the goals of Council as expressed by the Strat Plan. This is the work of the months ahead.

We are in a time when Local Governments are being asked to do more things for more people all the time. We are also being asked to do more with less, in the sense that our budgets are strained and the regional labour shortage means fewer people are available to do the expanded work. To achieve our major strategic goals, we are going to have to set priorities. This is a hard thing for New Westminster (the City, and the community) to do – we are the small city that does a lot, and we are proud of our level of achievement. Yes, there are a lot of great things we could do but we simply cannot do it all. This is called a Strategic Priorities Plan for a reason, and I’ll write in the next post about what those priorities are.

Finally, it was disappointing that the work of the last few months was not endorsed by all of Council. I assumed everyone was in those meetings and discussions for the same reasons, to work out a shared sense of principles and priorities. I thought we had got there, and it was communicated to me that we got there. To have a last-minute amendment on a parochial item seemed performative to me, and to use the lack of support for this performative gesture as an excuse to oppose the result of months of staff and Council work seemed to disregard the collaborative approach Council had taken into this work. I am disappointed by that, but will learn from it.

on reserves

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The discussions about municipal budgets are ongoing across the region, As it is budget time, and as the Province has decided to flip $1 Billion to local governments right in the middle of that budget period, which will lead to some interesting conversions in every muncipal hall. Some Councils will see it as a windfall to be spent on new things, some will use it for political cover for questionable decisions, some will prudently invest, others will go full populist. A real Marshmallow Test for local government.

Among the stories, this one popped out to me. PoCo is getting a reputation for artfully blending populism with prudent investment, but the bigger question about balancing reserves is something that every city neeeds to grapple with. The McElroy story caused me to dig deeper into reserve levels across the region, so I can test my preconceived notions about New Westminster’s relative financial health. As always, I want to preface this by saying it is not a competition, as every municipality has its own pressures, its own priorities and its own way to serve their populace. In comparing ourselves to our regional cohort, I want to get a sense of where we are doing better or worse to inform our priority setting while approving a budget.

I am once again leaning on the BC Government Local Government Financial Statistics, which are reported in a more-or-less consistent way every year. This is not my data, but the data provided by law to the Province by local governments every year. When it comes to Financial Assets, Reserves, and Tangible Capital Assets, all data is pulled form Schedules 301, 302, 404, and 503. Got a problem with the numbers? Take it up there.

Every City reports Financial Assets (the money in their savings and chequing accounts) and their financial liabilities (their mortgages and loans). The difference between them is reported as “net financial reserves”, which is the number McElroy was pointing to in that story above. These are the reported numbers for the 17 major Municipalities in Greater Vancouver (sorry, Belcarra) in the most recent reporting year, which is the end of 2021:

But perhaps a better way to look at it is to subtract the liabilities form the assets, so you can compare the Net Reserves:

Some things are not surprising: Vancouver has the most money, and the most debt. Burnaby has the highest net neserves, and Richmond and Coquitlam are both doing really well if money-in-the-bank is your preferred measure. Indeed, PoCo has the lowest net, with New West a little below the middle, but there is a trend following population, as you might expect, with smaller Munis over on the right, larger towards the left. So let’s calculate the net reserves per capita using 2021 Census data:

Burnaby still way up there (with $7,700 in net reserves per resident), and New Westminster shifting further over to the right (with $972 per resident). PoCo in this measure is not the lowest, but is pretty closely clustered with Surrey and the Township of Langley at under $500 per resident.

This is interesting, but does not really reflect the purpose of reserves. Part of it is to demonstrate financial health to make it easier to borrow money, but part of it is also to have sufficient cash on hand to address unexpected future costs. Mostly those costs are related to capital replacement, so it is more useful to compare your reserves to the value of your capital assets. This is the value of the roads, buildings, pipes, computers, vehicles and all of the “stuff” your City owns and operates. Schedule 503 provides these numbers as reported by the City every year. This chart shows the reserves as a percentage of the net book value of our tangible capital assets:

There needs to be a big caveat here. Though a fundamental measure of your reserves vs the value of your capital assets is a measure of financial resiliency (our finance staff have suggested 10% of the asset value is a good minimum benchmark), the denominator of the equation needs to be viewed with a certain skepticism. This is because local governments have not historically been very good at evaluating the true value of their capital assets, and that might take me down the rabbit hole of talking about asset management, which is probably another blog post on its own.

Just to create a sense of comparison, here are the net reserves per capita and relative to tangible capital assets, plotted as a scatter. Somewhere in here is a trend. I added the green dot to show the “average” for the region:

Finally, part of the conversation about reserves is the direction they are moving. Are we building them, or are we depleting them? Luckily the province provides data going back a few years in their Schedules 404. To compare across cities of varying size, I indexed the reserves value based on their 2012 value so we can see the decade-long trend. Problem is, a couple of Municipalities (Vancouver and West Van) had negative reserves in 2012, which makes it hard to compare this way, so I removed them from the data set. Suffice to say, their increase over the last decade has been proportionally much higher than all others (they would be well off the top of this chart). But for the rest of us, you can see most Munis are in building phases, and only one has fewer reseves than a decade ago:

The comparison over a decade is valuable, because reserves serve another function – they are where a City stores some money for big capital investments, like a recreation centre or a new City Hall. And when a City borrows to build a new capital asset, that downward pressure on net reserves is felt for several years. New West has been growing reserves in the last couple of years in recognition that təməsew̓txʷ and it’s $114 Million investment will have this impact on our net.

So, comparatively? New West has lower-than-average reserves by most measures, has been building them, but has a big capital investment that will put downward pressure on these reserves in the years ahead. That should inform some of our thinking about future investments in the City and our ability to make expensive promises.

Housing Book

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Who else spent a rainy long-weekend day digging through regional housing stats?

Metro Vancouver tracks regional population and housing numbers in order to meet their mandate and track progress on the Regional Plan that the 21 member municipalities share. One of the public-facing parts of this tracking is the Housing Data Book they recently published, building on 2021 Census data and other data sources. There are graphs, maps and the tables of numbers to back them up. Its a great resource.  Following on Mayor Pachal’s lead, I thought I’d look at it from a New Westminster perspective.

Thing is, regional planning is not a competition. Though I have been oft quoted suggesting that New West is more than pulling it weight on the housing front, I look through these regional stats to help understand where we are doing well, and where we need to find better solutions. So here are some graphs and maps pulled right from the Metro report, with a few comments.

There is no secret New West is growing fast. At 11.2% growth between the last two censuses, we are one of the fastest growing communities in the Lower Mainland, and growing faster than the overall regional average of 7.3%:

One interesting point about our demographics is that New West is not young or an old city, but is a millennial city. The proportion of our population between 25 and 44 years old is second only to Vancouver proper:

And a you might expect for a City with lots of people in that parenting age, we are one of the fastest-growing communities for the 0-14 age range (and if you want to know how we differ from Port Moody – look at that number!):

New West continues to have a proportion of rental households (45%) well above the regional average:

And probably a combination of those last few data points results in New West having a median household income a little lower than the average for the region ($82,000 compared to $90,000, or 9% below):

but our median household income is growing faster than the regional average:

Now, that number is interesting. Between 2015 and 2020, median household income (inflation adjusted – using 2020 constant dollars) went up 17.1%. For the fun of it, I pulled up the data from the BC government on residential property tax burden (Schedule 707 available here) and found that per-capita property taxes over the same period rose about 13%. Using this calculator to adjust for inflation, per-capita property taxes only went up 8%. In short, incomes are rising much faster than property taxes.

Now on to this pretty cool bubble chart, that shows the correlation between population growth and growth in the number of dwellings, with the size of the bubble representing population in 2021. I added the red lines to show what parts of the region are growing in people faster than in homes (Surrey, Langley City, West Van, and yes, New Westminster ) vs the cities where homes are being built faster than population is growing (Richmond, Burnaby and Vancouver). Again, Port Moody’s quixotic lack of growth stands out.

I’ll jump ahead here to housing types, and one of the big headlines is that only 14% of New West households are in a single detached home, one of the lowest proportions in the region, Note that people living in secondary suites in those homes would be counted as “other” in this statistic. The 70% living in apartments is second only to Electoral Area A (which is predominantly UBC campus, so would include a lot of student housing):

And as you might expect, almost all new homes being built in the City are in the form of apartments and rowhomes (including attached and stacked townhouses) with no net increase in single family homes (but also no real decrease either, like we see in North Van District):

One place New West has been doing well is Purpose-Built Rental. We are getting more new rental built per capita than any other Municipality in the region, and more in raw numbers than any but Vancouver, while we are protecting the most affordable older PBR stock and are not letting it be replaced with condos (see the left part of the chart).

As a result, we now lead the region in Purpose Built Rental, with almost 26% of households in that housing type. This matters in a city where 45% of households are rental households, because PBR has one big difference over the “secondary” rental market (people renting out their condos or basement suites). That is in how they provide long-term housing security to renters. Any secondary market rental unit can leave the rental market at any time at the whim of the landlord, which is a precarious situation for the renting family. PBR brings increased housing security for the increasing number of working people in our community who cannot afford to buy.

This is especially important as the Vacancy Rate is still dire:

Which means upward pressure on rents is still a problem. Though, notably, New Westminster rents are not “in the top 10 in the country”, as they are not even the top ten in Metro Vancouver:

And here is why. New West cannot do it alone, our work to get us way over on the right side of those graphs above by building and protecting rental has not moved the regional needle, because we are only 3% of the population on half of 1% of the land area. When you look at rental inventory across the entire region this is the trend:

No meaningful change in raw numbers over 30 years. As the region’s population has gone from 1.5 Million people to 2.6 Million people, we have had no meaningful increase in the number of purpose-built rental homes. No wonder we are in a rental affordability crisis.

But cities don’t own all the blame here. This is largely a result of those destructive 1990’s Paul Martin budgets, when the Federal Liberal Government decided to get out of the business of housing, and of subsequent Provincial governments not stepping in to fill the gap. Without CMHC policy driving the building of new rental, with the province relying on the “the market” to fill rental need, with decades of being told home ownership is the path to financial success and tax structures that emphasize that, the market does what it does. The upward trend you see at the end is a result of the Province finally changing that two-decade practice, and (some) Local Governments shifting how we incentivize new building to make Rental viable again. But we have so much catching up to do.

CMHC & PBR

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Last week there were a few stories in the regional media (traditional and social) about CMHC’s recent release of housing data. One story that got my attention was this graph posted on Twitter by census data guru Jens von Bergmann (@vb_jens):

This appeared to show New West losing a large number of bachelor and one bedroom rental suites over the 2021-2022 survey period, while 2- and 3-bedroom numbers went up, resulting in a small net increase of units. A few people asked “what’s up with New West?”, and I honestly had no idea.

Not to bury the lede: there is no way New Westminster lost hundreds of rental units over this period of time. For this to happen, there would have to be either some massive conversion of rental units to condo (not something we permit in New Westminster) or major demo- or reno-victions (both of which are tightly regulated here, and we simply have not had any such applications).

So I had to look into this, and City staff looked into it as well, and conformed what I suspected. It seems like this was a data anomaly, thought it was not immediately clear what the source of the anomaly is. This did give an excuse to dig a bit into the data, which is available here.

I took the numbers for rental units for not just 2021 and 2022, but for the last 8 years, essentially since I was first elected to Council. Here are the raw numbers, and I highlighted the numbers that show a decrease in the last year that is reflected in the original post:

It appears that a couple of larger Purpose Built Rental buildings were misclassified in their unit counts when they were opened in 2019 and 2020, showing the significant jump in Bachelor and 1-bedrooms over those two years, and for some unknown reason, the more accurate data is being presented now. It’s a bit complicated how we can tell this, but the short version is that CMHC also provides unit counts by census tract and by construction period (e.g. “built in 2000 or later”). This allows us to look at how a couple of larger and recently completed PBR buildings were reported in the year they opened, and in there found an anomaly. It appears both 900 Carnarvon (Completed in 2020, 172 studio, 72 1-bed, 132 2-bed, and 22 3+bed) and 228 Nelson’s Crescent (Completed 2019, 0 studio, 85 1-bed, 77 2-bed and 24 3+bed) appear to not have been entered properly, as the number of new 2- and 3-bedroom suites added do not even add up to those provided by these two buildings (and they were not the only buildings to come on line during that period). This also explains some anomalous numbers reported last year about how New West was building way more bachelor and 1-bedroom rental units than our Family Friendly Housing Policy would allow – it is the same data error, now corrected.

As these numbers appear to have now been adjusted, it does show that looking at one year of unit completions from CMHC data may not be the best way to compare communities or track construction/approval trends, especially for smaller cities where one or two units opening (or being mis-reported) can skew annual numbers, and hide the deeper trend. To broaden the data a bit, I looked at the last 8 years (2014- 2022), non-coincidentally the time I have been on Council. I tried to re-create Jens’ chart with the unit count change over that 8 years, divided by 8 to give us an average annual unit change over that time:

And you can see why I have been saying no-one (except Vancouver) is building more PRB than New West. Of course not all of these communities are equal in size, or in population growth (see more on that here), and these net count numbers are not adjusted for those pressures.

If you want to look deeper at the numbers, they are here , and you can select by City. The numbers I have used are under the “Rental Universe” tab on the left. And just for fun, and if you want to check my math, here are the total numbers I found for over the 8 years (not the per year average presented above):

In summary, one part of the housing crises that New Westminster has been very effective at addressing is the paucity of Purpose Built Rental. There were a couple of decades there from the hollowing out of Federal Housing programs to the early 2000’s where almost no new PBR was being built, and indeed it was being lost. By policy and intention, New West has turned that tide and brought more rental to the market, while preserving the older more affordable rental, with visible results:

None of this changes that rents are going up at what looks like an unsustainable rate, and a rate disconnected from regional wages. Rental availability is fundamentally regional issue, not one New Westminster (with 3% of the regional population and 8% of the regional rental supply) can solve alone. Everyone needs to build more PBR, there is no new news there.