Missing Middle housing forms (townhomes, rowhomes, and houseplexes) are generally more family suitable than apartments, and interact with the street better, leading to more vibrant neighborhoods. Additionaly, Missing Middle housing allows local builders to contribute to our housing stock instead of multinational megacorporations like Starlight, meaning that the homes in our community are built by our community. Unfortunately, in the four years since we passed the MMHI bylaw, we’ve seen very few of these projects come forward. I personally know parents who wanted to stay in Victoria, but bought a townhome in the westshore because they couldn’t find a suitable option here. The city should make it easier to build Missing Middle housing, so that nobody is forced to choose between living in Victoria and raising a family. We should also change other city regulations which currently encourage small studio and one bedroom homes, tilting the scales in favor of larger homes with more bedrooms.

Having built many of them myself, I can say with confidence that new construction single family mansions are the most expensive and luxurious form of housing in the city. Since they’re a very inefficient use of land, they also don’t contribute enough in property tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure they require. To compensate for this, the city should tax the construction of mansions, and use the money collected to build deeply affordable housing.

Research from the federal government has shown that, in tight housing markets like Victoria, taxes and fees on new homes are not paid by developers, they are passed on directly to new homebuyers and renters, and they drive up the cost of housing for everyone. Increasing the cost of housing during a housing crisis is a bad idea. The city should commit to not further raising taxes on new homebuyers and renters.

Simple housing projects like townhomes often take over a year to get approvals. This makes housing more expensive and harder to build. While longer timelines can make sense for very large projects, it should not take a year to get approval for a simple townhome project. The city should introduce guaranteed response timelines, where the answer is an automatic yes if no response is received from the city by the deadline. This could start at an easily achievable timeline (say, 8 months), and ratchet down as we increase improve our processes.

Community driven co-op development is common in other parts of the world, but financing is a significant barrier here. The city should pilot a financing program for these co-op projects, and once successful, the provincial government can adopt it province-wide. This would effectively be revenue neutral for the city, increasing the supply of co-op housing without spending much taxpayer money to do it.

While it is critical that we increase our housing supply to accommodate a growing population, we must ensure that we aren’t doing so at the expense of tenants. The city should strengthen the tenant protection bylaw, to encourage development of owner-occupied housing. This would mean that nobody would be displaced, since the owners would be selling voluntarily.

Item descriptionThe province has introduced a small catalogue of pre-approved housing designs. We should make it easy to build the kind of housing we want to see in the city by expanding on it. Building townhomes should not require a bespoke application process every single time. That wastes staff time, and therefore taxpayer money.