Vancouver real estate: City to look at pre-zoning for bigger buildings

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Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim and all seven councillors with his ABC party appeared at a news conference Wednesday that included plenty of expressions of urgency and desire to build more housing faster, but few details or new ideas.

Taking the stage at city hall behind a podium emblazoned with “TAKING THE LEAD ON HOUSING,” Sim announced his plan to introduce a motion at a council meeting next week, which will include direction for city staff on several measures related to boosting housing supply.

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Some points outlined in the mayor’s news release relate to promises from ABC’s campaign platform last year, like changing Vancouver’s building code to make construction easier, or ideas Sim has repeatedly mentioned in public comments over his first year in office, such as reviewing the city’s shadowing guidelines.

Other ideas in Sim’s announcement involve work already underway, in some cases for several years.

Sim repeated the mantra of getting more housing built faster, a central plank of the campaign that earned ABC a supermajority in the municipal election almost exactly one year ago.

“This work should have been done a long time ago. If it was done a long time ago, we wouldn’t be sitting here today because we’d be talking about other issues,” Sim said.

The mayor talked about adding residential density around the “underdeveloped” existing SkyTrain stations, namely Nanaimo, 29th Avenue, Renfrew and Rupert. City staff have been working for years on doing exactly this. But, as ABC Coun. Mike Klassen acknowledged in response to reporters’ questions Wednesday, densifying these neighbourhoods will require substantial — and expensive — water and sewer upgrades that city hall hasn’t yet figured out how to fund.

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Few details were provided about how to tackle these tricky issues. Asked if Sim wanted to hire more staff or how he planned to expedite progress, he replied: “Look, we’re up to the challenge. So we put it out there, and now that it’s out there, we will develop a plan.”

These directions to the city’s planning staff come at a time when the department is without a director. The city announced last month that former chief planner Theresa O’Donnell was out of the role effectively immediately, with one of her deputies, Doug Smith, temporarily elevated to acting general manager while the city searched for her replacement.

Asked for an update on the search for O’Donnell’s replacement, Sim’s chief of staff, Trevor Ford, said Wednesday that “conversations around that have started.”

Ford also provided more detail about a point in the news release concerning “accelerating the implementation of the 26 village areas outlined in the Vancouver plan.” The goal, Ford explained, is to “pre-zone” these areas to do away with the need for individual rezoning applications for each project.

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The Broadway plan, approved by the previous city council last year, enables larger buildings in that area, but each one must still go through a rezoning process. The rezoning process, which includes a public hearing before a decision by council, can take years. Depending on one’s point of view, it can be seen as a crucial opportunity for public engagement or an expensive, time-consuming barrier to getting housing built.

Now, Ford said, the city will look to do away with the requirement for rezonings on certain kinds of projects — described as townhouses, multiplex buildings and mixed-use low rise buildings of three-to-six storeys — in these 26 village areas.

“It will obviously speed things up,” Ford said.

City hall has been in talks with the provincial government around possible changes to the Vancouver Charter to ensure the city can extract funds from developers for community amenities while skipping the need for rezonings, Ford said, calling the province “amazing partners” in this work.

The Vancouver plan, approved last year by the previous council, identifies these 26 “village” areas as locations along main arterial streets in lower-density, primarily residential neighbourhoods throughout the city. The plan calls for adding more shops and services to these villages, along with medium-density housing in buildings up to six storeys. But it’s a long-range strategy document, and its approval didn’t change actual land use policies.

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Plans for the first three villages could be put forward for adoption by the end of next year, a city spokesperson said. Additional villages could be completed in 2025.

It remains to be seen how this timeline could change if council approves Sim’s motion — which is expected, considering ABC’s majority.

Another point in Sim’s plan has him writing a letter to the B.C. government to express support for legislation the province is expected to introduce this fall around regulating short-term property rentals.

Green Coun. Pete Fry, one of council’s three non-ABC members, said Wednesday’s news conference left him “underwhelmed, especially as it had been framed as ‘bold moves’ … A lot of it was repeating stuff that’s already underway.

“We’re all in agreement that streamlining and reducing red tape is a laudable goal,” Fry said. But some of ABC’s ideas, he said, seem more like “a market-driven, kind of deregulation approach.”

Sim and ABC are sending clear messages about the direction they want for housing development: bigger, faster, more efficient.

Whoever is picked as Vancouver’s next chief planner will have the difficult job of figuring out how.

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dfumano@postmedia.com

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