BC to West Van: you have 30 days
West Vancouver city council rejected multiplexes
Trick question: if East Van is the eastern half of the city of Vancouver, what’s West Van? It’s a municipality on the North Shore of Burrard Inlet.
West Vancouver has one of the largest gaps between construction cost and selling price per square foot in Metro Vancouver:
West Vancouver to BC: we’re not going to do it
Last November, the BC government passed legislation (Bill 44) requiring municipalities to update the bylaws by June 30 to allow multiplexes, spreading the high cost of land over more floor space and more units.
In response, West Vancouver staff recommended changing the zoning for just 222 lots (1.6% of all residential lots in West Van). Summary by David Taylor. Staff report.
It’s unclear if the provincial government would have regarded this minimal change as acceptable. On May 27, city council made its rejection of the provincial legislation even clearer, by voting unanimously to reject the staff recommendations. West Vancouver council rejects provincial housing rules. Jane Seyd, North Shore News.
Note that municipalities are created by provincial legislation, and they only have powers over land use and planning that are delegated to them by the province.
Senior planner David Hawkins previously stressed to council the new rules don’t require owners to build on their properties and will only impact property owners who decide they want to build additional housing on their lots.
But after directing staff to prepare the rezoning bylaw in April, on Monday, May 27, council voted unanimously to reject it, with several councillors stating they don’t intend to have local zoning changes dictated by Victoria.
Response from BC
Okay, what happens next?
Do it or we do it for you: B.C. government tells West Vancouver it has 30 days to allow small-scale, multi unit housing. Alec Lazenby, Vancouver Sun, July 25.
The province has given the District of West Vancouver a blunt warning: Change your bylaws to allow multi-unit buildings on single-family and duplex lots within 30 days or we’ll impose the changes on you.
Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon told reporters Thursday that while 90 per cent of communities across B.C. have adhered to the requirements, West Van has flat out refused to make the changes.
“West Vancouver has 80 per cent of their employees that work for them coming outside of their community into town, leading to more congestion, leading to more traffic challenges,” said Kahlon. “So it’s imperative that a community like West Vancouver allows different types of housing so that young families can find a way to live in the community, have access to wonderful schools and work in the community.”
He said that if Mayor Mark Sager and his city council fail to make the required changes in the next 30 days, the province is prepared to install them unilaterally through an order in council.
Why provincial action makes sense
Opponents say that the province is running roughshod over democracy. A couple responses.
The real issue is that the upsides to housing growth accrue across a city, a metro area, or even a state, while the nuisances of new construction (parking scarcity, traffic, aesthetic change) are incredibly local. So if you ask a very small area “do you want more housing or less?” a lot of people will say that they think the local harms exceed the local benefits, and the division will basically come down to aesthetic preference for more or less density. But if you ask a large area “do you want more housing or less?” the very same people with all the same values and ideas may come up with a different answer because they [get] a much larger share of the benefits.
The issue of housing production is not local. It is a regional if not national concern if places that have the most productive jobs and other job centers and have high wages are basically barring people from around the country from being able to access those and then also harming the people who live within the community already by making them pay extraordinarily high rents and housing prices.
And so you need to move the decision-making up and that makes it actually more democratic, not less democratic, because more people vote at the state level. More people vote for mayor than they do for their city council members. They know their mayor and they're more willing to blame their mayor and hold that person accountable than they will local members of government, and that's true across the country. And then when you get to the state level, even more people are willing to hold that person accountable. There's also more journalism that holds that person accountable. When you get to the state level, state governments usually are held at a much higher standard of accountability than any kind of local government, which often has zero journalists even paying attention.
The article makes me wish that the Enterprise would just beam down a 30-story Soviet Concrete Block apartment down into the middle of West Van. After they discovered it was no end of the world, they might loosen up a little.
“West Vancouver has 80 per cent of their employees that work for them coming outside of their community into town, leading to more congestion, leading to more traffic challenges"
I didn't realize the number was that big!