A commentary by a Victoria councillor who is also a Capital Regional District director and vice-chair of the Capital Regional Housing Corp.
The province has brought forth a raft of legislation to streamline housing development. These much-needed provincial laws will fundamentally change the way that housing gets built.
When combined with policies and regulations that Victoria has recently enacted, we have the necessary tools to respond to the housing crisis, which means, amongst other things, rapidly adding market and non-market housing.
Let’s review some of the provincial laws that are coming into effect during the fall session.
Bill 43, the Housing Supply Act, gives the housing minister the authority to set housing targets for a municipality, and to issue specific directives to require the municipality to enact or amend bylaws, issue or reject permits, and ensure that a sufficient housing supply is built.
Of note, the minister has identified not only housing targets — Victoria’s overall housing target is 4,902 homes over five years — but also supportive housing targets for CRD jurisdictions.
Saanich has been given a supportive housing target of 131 units, Oak Bay a target of 20 units, and Victoria 102, suggesting that the province understands that ending homelessness is an obligation shared by all municipalities.
(Victoria already possesses 680 supportive housing units, or 82 per cent of the region’s total, which explains our relatively low target.)
Bill 44, the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, if passed, would enact sweeping changes to zoning laws, official community plans (OCPs), and public hearings.
Single-family zoned properties will be allowed to have a secondary suite or accessory dwelling unit by right. Depending on lot size, many urban properties will be permitted, by right, to build a multi-unit building of three to six units, which creates a kind of province-wide missing middle policy.
Further, cities will need to update their OCPs every five years, which has never been done before, and they must do so in ways that respond to the “20-year total number of housing units required to meet anticipated housing needs.”
Most impactfully for Victoria, public hearings for proposed buildings that comply with the OCP will be a thing of the past. Not only does the law allow such projects to bypass public hearings, it actually “prohibits” municipalities from holding them.
Bill 46, the Housing Statutes (Development Financing) Amendment Act, if passed, would expand the list of what development cost charges (DCCs) can be spent on, and establishes a legislative framework governing how municipalities acquire community amenity contributions (CACs) from developers. Much more predictability will be brought to the revenue agreements that development brings to city coffers.
Victoria has done its part to streamline housing development, too. In recent years, the city has, amongst other things, created the Rapid Deployment of Affordable Housing policy, which allows affordable and non-market housing proposals to bypass public hearings and a lot of red tape, and the Missing Middle Housing Initiative forever changed zoning laws in the city.
Passed in March and updated in October, this policy upzoned much of the city, allowing for up to six units on midblock properties, and up to 12 units on corner properties, without the need for a rezoning or a public hearing.
The common theme amongst these momentous changes is a shift towards building policies and development practices that are statute-based, streamlined, predictable, and intended as corrections to restrictive, illogical, and byzantine rules that absolutely contributed to a devastating undersupply of both market and non-market housing over the past 30 years.
One of the main takeaways of these systemic changes is that the OCP becomes a much more important document. Since rezonings and public hearings are becoming rare birds, the OCP had better be an excellent reflection of the community’s shared vision for development.
Requiring updates to the OCP every five years should, in theory, ensure that these living documents remain relevant and compelling. There is an opportunity to shift away from a system in which public input came late in the game (e.g. at public hearings for proposed developments) to a system that emphasizes enormously important community input earlier, such as part of OCP engagements and consultations.
Victoria’s OCP is being reviewed and updated, and we want to craft a shared vision for Victoria’s future.
Moreover, the unprecedented streamlining of development processes means that there’s much less of a rationale for developers to challenge the OCP.
Until now, development has been a long, cumbersome, and risky proposition for builders and developers of both for-profit and non-profit housing. In a system based on the subjective views of elected officials, in which rezonings and public hearings are essentially unavoidable, many developers have ended up with a gambling mentality.
“Might as well push the envelope and add a few more storeys to the building proposal, and see what council thinks.”
Indeed, the long and costly development process has driven the rationale for higher density and greater profits, to compensate for the losses engendered by the system.
The new laws and policy changes should flip this logic on its head.
In a statute-based system, in which both neighbourhood input and the will of council is minimized, developers have much less of an incentive to challenge the OCP and roll the dice on a risky public hearing. It’s much safer, cheaper, and more predictable to build to the OCP.
Not only is it much safer, it’s also much better for the community. Countries with the best and most progressive housing policies, including Japan and Denmark, operate in this way. Building decisions are based on statute and delegated to professional staff, and political involvement enters the fray only for very large or very complex proposals. Depoliticizing housing decisions is a good thing.
This approach to development is exactly what I’d like to see in Victoria. Now that these corrections are being made to the system, developers really ought to stick to the OCP.
Everyone will be happier with a more predictable and rules-based development system, including elected officials, city staff, neighbours of developments, and (hopefully) the development community itself.
There are still some “legacy,” non-OCP-compliant development projects that council will need to make decisions on. And there will continue to be public hearings on OCP updates and for large and complex proposals — as there should be — including the forthcoming Bayview/Roundhouse proposal.
But my hope is that the development community will take advantage of these far-reaching changes and make every effort to stick to the OCP, which means aligning with the community’s vision for change, as well as adhering to technical rules established by professional engineers and urban planners.
I will want to see good rationales for challenging this new statute-based development environment.
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