Eyes on Council
Eyes on Council – OCP public hearing
Hello everyone, and welcome to the inaugural post for Eyes on Council, a Burnaby REALTOR®’s view towards what’s happening at city council and how it effects the local housing market. This will normally be a twice-monthly blog posting the same week as council meetings, with occasional bonus posts if something happens that’s worth having a look and its impact on the local housing market.
Today happens to be one of those days! This past Monday we had a public hearing for the Official Community Plan update, which is a bylaw amendment replacing the 1998 Official Community Plan for Burnaby with the updated Burnaby 2050 plan. An official community plan is a legal document required for municipalities under provisions of the provincial Local Government Act. The official community plan, or OCP, is the document that outlines the long-term vision of the community. It is meant to be a high-level document that outlines the plans for development in a municipality, and addresses long-term planning goals including placement for commercial and employment locations, appropriate location and density for housing, and provision of community amenities. Any work done, or any bylaws approved by the municipality must be in line with accomplishing the goals of the OCP.
It's an important document, and municipalities do refresh their OCPs on a regular basis based on changing conditions in the city and what the new goals of the city are going to be. As you can expect, this is a very long process, with Burnaby starting its process in 2022 after the 1998 plan called for a revision in 2021. As you might expect, changes to the OCP can be very emotional for the local residents, and municipalities do take the time to make sure they consult as widely as possible. However, Burnaby’s process was interrupted by a change in provincial legislation, namely Bill 44 and Bill 47, the Housing Statutes (residential development) Amendment Act of 2023 and the BC Construction Industry Payment Act of 2023. These pieces of legislation significantly altered the framework for zoning and residential density in British Columbia, and these changes were to be implemented by the municipalities.
The timing of the provincial legislation required Burnaby to significantly alter its OCP plan to become in line with provincial guidelines. In particular, Bill 44 allows for small-scale multi-unit housing on lots currently zoned for single family developments, and applies to all municipalities with a population greater than 5000. Because many of those areas are currently zoned for single family development, this has required the city to blanket rezone neighbourhoods to allow for multi-family development. Bill 47 also creates transit-oriented areas where even greater density is permitted. The goal of both pieces of legislation was to increase the amount of housing supply with a hope of increasing affordability by creating additional competition for buyers, driving down prices to ensure a sale.
Lost in all the noise is that while municipalities are required to bring zoning bylaws into force that allow for the increased density, there are no provisions forcing the redevelopment of property into multi-family unit dwellings. What the legislation does is permit additional development, but it doesn’t force it and it is up to individual lot owners to decide whether they wish to redevelop to higher density. Of course, there are tax incentives for doing so since property taxes are assessed based on highest and best use of the land, and that’s changed from being a detached home to being a multiplex situation on the property. But again, there is no legal requirement to demand higher density, only a series of incentives that promote higher density.
All of which brings us to the meeting this past Monday for Burnaby’s OCP. It is important to note at this point that the provincial enabling legislation has received royal assent, and that municipalities were required to bring their bylaws into compliance in 2024. Effectively, this means that the rezoning has already started in those single-family housing neighbourhoods, and the OCP amendment is a matter of bringing the OCP into compliance and to start planning for what that increase in residential density will look like throughout the city, and how to plan the necessary infrastructure to handle the increase in population and utilities usage.
A significant majority of the speakers were opposed to the changes to the OCP. The vast majority feel that they were not properly consulted about the scale of the changes and what it could mean for their neighbourhoods or even their own properties. Many of those in opposition who did live in detached single family homes expressed concerns about what would happen to their privacy if increased density was brought into their neighbourhoods, and that there would be negative changes to the character of the neighbourhood such as increased crime, more traffic and reduced safety for the members of the community. Other community members expressed concerns for what will happen to parking access in their neighbourhoods if there’s a significant increase in density without a corresponding increase in parking availability, and that the city ratepayers will be forced to pay for the necessary infrastructure upgrades the potential increase in density will require. Finally, with respect to the concerns of having small scale walk-up apartment units in these single-family development neighbourhoods, there were concerns that the size of the apartment buildings would be inappropriately large for the neighbourhood, and that they do not aesthetically fit the rest of the neighbourhood.
The remaining quarter of speakers were broadly supportive of the changes in the official community plan, but also had some changes that they would want to include in order to make the bylaw more broadly acceptable. Several noted that land remains one of the biggest development costs for housing construction, and that allowing a single lot to include multiple units can allow for the housing units themselves to be smaller and more affordable. Most of those in favour noted that Burnaby’s population is going to keep increasing, and that the density being suggested allows for a balance between preserving the character of the neighbourhood and ensuring that there are enough potential homes for people to live in. There was also an acknowledgement that the push to create more affordable housing cannot come at the expense of damaging the property values of existing homeowners who may require that equity in the future, and that many of these small-scale units are the only affordable options for young families.
Let me preface my commentary by saying that I am broadly in favour of the changes to the OCP. I think that increased density and creating those missing middle homes and more effectively using property lots to create a wider variety of homes is a good thing. I strongly support increased density near transit, and I appreciate that the city is, by and large, not picking and choosing who is affected by the bylaw changes. I can also accept that many of the criticisms of both the process and the policy itself are valid, and that there are strong feelings on both sides of the issue.
With respect to issues around process and how the OCP has been rolled out, I’m sympathetic to those in opposition but also don’t really know where the city could have gone. The city did start its process three years ago, and that was done in good faith. It is wholly outside the power and purview of the municipal government to stall, interrupt or block provincial legislation, so when the provincial laws were brought into force the city had no choice but to amend its policies to be in line with provincial law. The unfortunate effect of that was to throw away a lot of the work that was originally done for the OCP, rendering all of those consultations and public outreach moot. For people who have concerns about how much of an opportunity they were given to talk about these new changes that were caused by provincial legislation, it’s unfortunate, but the city is stuck and the fact that public hearings aren’t continuing does not mean there’s no option to let council know your thoughts.
The policy concerns are worth addressing, and quite a few of them are worth addressing and could be changed by the city without causing too much of an issue within the larger OCP. Many of the speakers talked about how the change from having one home on a lot to as many as six homes on a lot will significantly increase the number of vehicles used by the lot, and that there’s not enough parking allocated for those homes. Right now, the OCP allocates 0.5 parking spots per unit for these new multi-family zoned lots. Potentially, that means six homes will have a total of 3 parking spots allocated to it. For areas that do not have reliable public transit access, this can be prohibitive and prevent lower income families from being able to live in homes that were meant for them to purchase. Many of the speakers suggested increasing the allocation to 1.0 parking spots per unit, which would be more in line with how many families live their lives and still works to ensure that residential roads are not overwhelmed with parking issues.
I want to talk about height restrictions in the new OCP, and why they were such a common topic of complaint at the public hearing. Many of the presentations talked about how, thanks to the provincial legislation, there would be provisions allowing walk-up apartment buildings of up to four storeys that could be built. These were presented in terms such as “monstrous” and “monster homes”, suggesting that these properties would be disproportionately oversized compared to other housing in the area. Again, this is according to the opponents of the OCP that a forty-foot height restriction is too lenient for builders and takes away too much sunlight for other properties. I grew up in a single-family development neighbourhood in the Montecito area. In fact, I lived in a fourplex unit which meant that the building itself was two storeys. Down the road from me was one of these small-scale apartment buildings. It’s a walk-up, and I had to walk by it all the time to get to the bus. Was it bigger than the other houses in the area? Yeah, it was. Was it some monstrous eyesore that blotted out the sun? Not really. It was four or five storeys, and to my knowledge no one ever had a problem with it being there in the thirty years I lived in that neighbourhood. One of the speakers at the hearing mentioned another property that’s currently under construction on the same street. It’s also going to be a four or five storey building. Again, yes, it’s larger than its neighbours, but it hardly blocks out the sun on all sides and it certainly isn’t dramatically oversized compared to other properties in the area. It’s a logical use of land space to increase density, nothing more and nothing less.
As a local resident, I’m aware of how people feel about their neighbourhoods changing and the possibility that Burnaby will change as its population increases. However, Burnaby’s population is going to continue to increase, and the OCP is an opportunity to try and deal with that growth in a way that is smart, and attempts to plan out the necessary infrastructure and housing density needed to keep up with regional growth. The lack of public consultation on the changes made by provincial legislation was unfortunate, but these changes are necessary and will eventually be found to have limited effects on the character of local neighbourhoods while also providing a significant influx of new affordable homes.
