Victoria Residents Asked to Go Big on Housing and Transit; Staff Went Small.

TL;DR: Victoria’s OCP draft is out, and while it goes far, it doesn’t deal with a whole host of issues in getting housing built. Residents can email council at mayorandcouncil@victoria.ca, as the draft goes to Council this Thursday March 6th.

Earlier this week, Victoria city staff published the latest draft of Victoria’s Official Community Plan (OCP). The mammoth draft, comprising over 300 pages, outlines dramatic changes to the city: legalizing up to four-storey multi-family buildings in residential areas, allowing corner stores across residential neighbourhoods, and laying out new parks across the city. 

This document is important. Under new provincial legislation, it will determine legal land uses across the city, as well as priorities for transportation, parks, and other city services. When combined with zoning reform, the new OCP could be the single biggest way to fix Victoria’s housing crisis, one largely caused by decades of tightly restricting the construction of new housing. In a shortage, building new housing lowers prices.

The draft OCP offers a timid vision compared to what Victoria residents asked for in earlier outreach. The draft works hard to block multi-family housing and limits development to large monolithic buildings. It fails to offer a vision for rapid improvements to mass transit across the city.

What did Victorians ask for?

Victoria is a renter city, with around 60% of residents renting. Survey data was highly  skewed towards wealthy homeowners (59% of respondents), making it doubly surprising that 52% of respondents asked for the city to legalize building over six storeys across the entire city. This form of development is some of the most affordable and quick to build in Victoria, although it varies from project to project.

When discussing family housing, over half of respondents reported that more housing with three or more bedrooms is the top priority.

Finally, when asking about sustainable transportation, more than 70% of respondents picked improvements to public transit as their 1st or 2nd priority.

From this feedback, it would be easy to expect that the draft OCP would legalize six storeys across the city. You would expect that it would make sure that family housing is buildable, especially housing with three or more bedrooms. One would expect to see bold proposals to speed up busses and make them more reliable. So what’s in the draft?

The Draft OCP

The biggest surprise when looking through the draft document is that staff are recommending capping building heights at four storeys and lower across large parts of the city. Strangely, the draft shows six storey buildings as permitted only one lot deep along transit corridors, rather than the 200-400m distances used by the province for transit oriented development.

While staff make one small concession to family housing by introducing a requirement to build three bedroom homes in new apartment buildings, they then make it as difficult as possible to build new apartments, by setting out enormous setbacks and tight building size limits that push builders towards small units. Needless to say, these limitations will limit the number of family homes.

The OCP isn’t all bad: it offers many attractive ideas, including the expansion of small mixed-use centres across the city, future linear parks along wide residential streets, and a vision of a more European approach to urban planning, complete with perimeter blocks. But there are significant issues that should be fixed.

Transit

The extent to which transit is not discussed in the draft plan is difficult to overstate. Given the narrow rights-of-way across much of Victoria mean that the addition of full bus lanes on congested corridors would either require road-widening (very expensive) or blocking cars from using particular roads as through routes (politically unpopular).

Changing roads from arterial streets to transit-only corridors is one option for the OCP to better facilitate rapid bus improvements. Another option is de-zoning and a policy of property acquisition at the intersections of “Transit Priority Corridors” and arterial roads, to allow for the future installation of turn turn lanes, roundabouts, and transit signal priority.

While the draft plan identifies a set of “Transit Priority Corridors” it does not identify a clear strategy of how to improve transit for Victorians. Outside of Douglas Street, all of the concepts in the plan show transit as continuing to run in mixed traffic with no sign of priority measures. The extent of improvements listed to entice more residents to ride transit are slight stop relocations and better stop amenities like shelters. Perhaps we will see action on this soon with initiatives such as bus lanes on Hillside, but the plan as presented does not provide a compelling argument for how it will ensure transit makes up “Most Local to Regional Trips” by 2050.

Making these changes is essential as transportation and land use are highly connected. The OCP ties transit access to development, placing greater density along transit corridors. Not only do many of these “priority” corridors have few options for transit improvements, they also force development onto busy and polluted arterial roads, where your transit will also be stuck in traffic (traffic that will only increase if transit services are not improved).

The Nitty-Gritty 

(A quick section TL;DR for those who fall asleep reading technical language: Victoria staff seem determined to bury family apartments in a pile of strict requirements that make them extremely difficult to build)

It appears as if planners wanted to use “lot coverage”, the maximum percentage of a lot a building can occupy, to regulate the size of buildings in residential areas. Tight lot coverage is an extremely effective way to prevent new apartments, which is perhaps why planners chose not to use the metric in the draft OCP.

Still, Victoria planners were able to create a series of other rules which effectively limit lot coverage: required lot width, Floor Space Ratio (FSR), maximum storeys, and minimum setbacks (minimum distances from the edge of a lot). 

Using FSR, (the ratio of finish floor area to lot size) and maximum storeys we can calculate the effective lot coverage:

Looking at provincial policy standards, we see that the allowed lot coverage is far below recommended minimums. Keeping lot coverage low means that builders need to acquire and demolish multiple homes in order to build family homes. This maximizes the displacement of current renters, drives up costs for new-built homes, and limits new development to large developers who can handle managing large projects. 

As if FSR alone wasn’t enough, planners also used lot width to restrict construction. Through this, the draft OCP mandates acquiring at least two or three lots to build new five or six storey apartments.

The draft OCP also calls for large 4m front setbacks and enormous 8m rear setbacks, alongside 1-2m setbacks on the side. Given the relatively uniform shape of Victoria lots (around 14×36 or thereabouts), this would drastically limit the shape and size of new buildings if FSR and lot width didn’t already preclude building a larger-shaped home. Still, these setbacks represent a third barrier to new homes.

These rules represent a substantial barrier to building particularly new family homes. Consider these two “typical” floor plans from a BC housing report on buildings with only one exit stair, a newly re-legalized affordable form of construction:

The first floorplan, designed for a 15m x 30m (50 ft x ~100 ft, a common size in Victoria) lot is not buildable in residential areas under the draft OCP due to setbacks on the front and sides, FSR (it’s over 1.6 for three storeys, and at six storeys it’s at 2.7-3.3). On top of that, despite being designed as a six storey building with ground floor commercial, the OCP would cap it at three storeys due to lot width, even in “priority growth areas.”

The second floorplan is designed for a 20m x 37m (66ft x 120ft) lot, another common lot size in wealthier areas of Victoria. The OCP draft would cap it at three storeys due to lot width and FSR limitations on many Victoria lots. 

These strict limitations on height directly affect the possible amount and quality of family housing. Capping these floorplans at three storeys across the city effectively halves the number of 3 bed units in this footprint. 

What to do?

The best way to contact council about your concerns is to email council at mayorandcouncil@victoria.ca. The OCP is on the agenda this Thursday March 6th.

For your email to council, here are some of the key changes that need to happen to allow more housing:

1. Provide direct incentives for 3+ bedrooms
   Builders often choose to build smaller units as they are more profitable per square foot, and their financiers set extremely tight restrictions on how much money they need to make. If we want more family housing, we need to incentivize it. Eliminating third (and above) from the FSR calculation, providing extra storeys or smaller setbacks in exchange for more bedrooms could incentivize builders to build more family units.
2. Remove or replace the lot width requirement.
   This requirement seems to exist purely to limit the presence of tall buildings next to single family dwellings, but goes much farther in limiting what builders can build, period. A start would be exempting any new building going up next to an existing building of four or more storeys (allowing a density ratchet) and allowing a six storey building on a 30m lot.
3. Institute a “housing first” policy.
   Currently all housing applications go through a drawn out process of negotiation with each city department (parks, transportation, engineering, etc.) The OCP should make clear that housing is the #1 priority.
4. Add all public amenities to DCC contributions.
   Currently many public amenities provided by developers do not count towards Development Cost Charges, the charges that the city levies on new development. This often creates perverse incentives such as providing extra parking, rather than providing a carshare spaces or bike parking.
5. Exempt all non-market housing from all form and size restrictions and development charges, permanently.
   Victoria desperately needs non-market housing, but the city forces non-profit builders to restrict their projects to many of the same rules and costs as for-profit development. The city should permanently exempt non-market development (co-ops, non-profit builds, and public housing) from development charges, form restrictions, and FSR.
6. Combine the development permit process with building permits, and establish a time limit for approvals
   The development permit process represents another expensive and slow step in getting housing built. The city should also combine building and development permits into one application, and set a maximum 60 or 90 day approval deadline after which projects are automatically approved.