Link to comment on the Times Colonist website
If you rent or own and have an exterior front door, the new OCP will affect you and your tenure directly.
A commentary by a Victoria resident who owns rental property in the city.
Victoria city councillors will soon decide whether to advance the draft Official Community Plan to public hearing for ratification. Are we ready for that? Are they?
At a recent meeting of committee of the whole, staff needed four hours to present the first part of their summary of the proposed OCP and consultation process to council.
To borrow from the city’s marketing of the project: “It’s. A. Big. Deal.”
Indeed it is: it will change the zoning bylaws which regulate every R1- and R2-zoned property in the city. If you rent or own and have an exterior front door, the new OCP will affect you and your tenure directly.
One would assume, therefore, that careful consideration was given to the structure of the survey and its results.
More than 670 pages of material were posted to the agenda for this meeting less than a week before the matter was to be discussed.
That was the first opportunity for councillors and the public to review the proposals.
Councillors are allowed a total of 12 minutes each to ask questions of staff, and are then expected to deliberate whether to advance the matter.
I suggest that six days is an insufficient review period for such a mass of documents, given the weight they carry.
I suggest further that imposing arbitrary and short time limits on questions from councillors denies them—and the public who elected them—opportunity to clarify, understand, and tune the proposed OCP before its advance to public hearing. There are critical questions to be asked and debated.
The housing demand assumptions underlying the survey is one case in point.
The survey’s first question asked whether respondents support six-storey buildings in all residential zones, or only near community centres, with four storeys permitted everywhere else.
It was a binary question; no other options or nuances offered. The question assumes that 34,600 new homes would be required by 2050 to support a population of 142,000.
Those projections were derived from these inputs:
- Latent housing demand
- Organic growth of the existing population
- Net in-migration of people from other parts of B.C., Canada, and the world
- The need for a 4% rental vacancy rate
Already, the growth projections are outdated. The federal Liberal Party dramatically curtailed its national immigration program in the past few months, and a Conservative government would likely maintain that trend, if not accelerate it.
Our universities and colleges are cutting course offerings and reducing staff counts right now on account of these curtailments.
The vacancy rate expectation is also misguided. Here are two reasons why:
First, a well-constructed control strategy would close the feedback loop around the desired outcome. Are we trying to create vacancies, or housing? If housing, what sorts of housing, and for whom?
What good is a 4% vacancy rate if the least expensive units are unaffordable for all but the wealthiest retirees? Who cares what the vacancy rate is if our community is balanced, healthy, and vibrant for all who live here?
Second, the presumed “healthy” 4% vacancy rate target is predicated on a balance of supply and demand. Cities like Winnipeg and Regina have that; Victoria doesn’t.
There has long been excess demand for housing here, and that demand is unlikely to wane in future.
Wealthy Albertans and Ontarians flock here to avoid winter weather; those without means or housing do too, for the same reasons.
Students come here because we have a first-rate mid-size university; immigrants because we have a stable banking system, democracy, proximity to the U.S. and South-East Asia.
Victoria cannot build its way past or through this excess demand until people stop wanting to live here. A 4% vacancy rate is the wrong objective: it is a developer-driven proxy for profit in the Victoria context.
If we successfully build to maintain a 4% vacancy rate, we will be building quantity forever at the expense of community, affordability, and quality of life, today and tomorrow.
Coming back to OCP questions: When asked specifically at committee of the whole, staff were unable to provide historical vacancy rate data.
When asked what opportunities there would be for feedback from the public, staff indicated the best opportunity under its “single-phase engagement approach” would be at a public hearing—i.e. the hearing where the OCP is to be ratified. That’s far too late.
There are other reasons for concern to be found in the survey, the engagement process, and the OCP as outlined.
I urge Victoria renters and property owners to review the volume of OCP documents sooner than later, as there is not much “later” left.
Remember: “It’s. A. Big. Deal.”