Happy City’s draft report on the City of St John’s changes to its planning regulations

Below is an executive summary of our report on the city’s proposed changes to housing planning regulations, co-authored with Streets Are For People. The full text of that report is available here and anyone reading it who wishes to can comment on it and make suggestions. We hope that this will be the start of a more thorough and broad discussion about the future of housing policy here in St John’s, and our research into this area in collaboration with Streets are For People has not ended. While the formal public engagement on this set of regulatory changes has now ended, there will still be plenty of opportunity for further discussion and analysis in the coming months and we expect to produce a more detailed version of our report.

The planning changes proposed by the city appear to have been proposed mainly in order to comply with conditions set by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF). They will enable the city to receive $10.4m over three years, but only the broad outlines of what that money will be spent on are currently available. It’s important to note that none of that money will be spent directly on building particular homes – the money and planning changes are meant to encourage mainly private developers and homeowners to build affordable housing. Tellingly, in the documents we have seen, no additional housing units are projected to be built solely as a result of the regulatory changes proposed here.

While the rule changes outlined here remove some barriers to making more of the affordable housing studies indicate are required, we found:

    • Many technical and economic barriers remain unaddressed. Unless supporting changes to engineering and other requirements are also examined, several in the development community have suggested to us it seems unlikely that most of the additional housing now legally allowed will be feasible.
    • While the city is now starting broader discussions with developers it appears the development community had little voice in the initial drafting of the city’s proposals. Since these changes are meant to encourage developers to build more and differently, why were they not brought in to the discussions earlier to learn from them directly what changes to development and design regulations they say would be most effective in encouraging and enabling them to meet housing needs? The same could likely be said of other communities of experts outside the city’s staff.
    • Looking at other jurisdictions where similar changes were proposed to enable homeowners to renovate their homes to enable more housing units to be built on their properties, takeup has been very modest. Even where such changes would be technically feasible and cost effective, homeowners may simply not be interested in taking up these opportunities.

Given the large existing shortage of affordable and appropriately sized housing, and the demographic shifts that are expected to make the gap worse, these regulatory measures alone will do very little to address the problem. Not enough is publicly available about what the city plans to do to accompany these changes with other actions, but it seems clear from the city’s own estimates that these changes will at best result in hundreds of additional affordable homes in the next few years when all researchers suggest thousands are required. When the city made a bid for $18.5 million in October, it claimed that that funding would result in 475 additional units being built, 175 of them affordable – over the following three years. The city’s own housing needs assessment found that in 2021 there was already a need for 7,200 more affordable units, and that the number was only set to increase.

Other Canadian cities have been much more ambitious in their planned regulatory changes in response to both their ongoing housing needs and specifically in order to release more Federal funding. For example, Edmonton now allows up to 8 units on a lot citywide and has eliminated minimum parking requirements for residential uses. And in the suburbs of Halifax, the city plans to reduce parking requirements for multi-unit dwellings from 1.5 spaces per unit to one for every 3 units. Halifax has received twice the funding per capita that St John’s is getting.

While it is beyond the scope of this report to suggest what further regulatory and other changes should be considered and would be appropriate for the city, it is clear the changes proposed go nowhere near far enough to address a crisis that blights the lives of many residents today and stands in the way of a prosperous and happy future for the city and province. At the first public engagement session, a senior staffer explained to those gathered these proposals were not more sweeping because, “we want to walk before we can run”. Is this really reflective of the council’s views on the crisis that confronts the city? We don’t know what kind of solutions are needed but surely strolling along is no longer a tenable position.

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