I had a lot to say Thursday as Council was deliberating on adoption of the Official Community Plan and Zoning Bylaw Update. Of course, I could have said much more about the wide range of subjects in the Update, and there is no way to cover all 1,096 pages of report, plan, bylaws, policies etc.
Below are some of my remarks. Andrew Duffy wrote a good column on Thursday’s discussion. You can also watch the video of the meeting and read the materials or read Staff FAQs. And of course I have other posts on the OCP. Updating the OCP and Zoning Bylaws was a campaign promise for me in the 2022 election.
A minor amendment – greater ambition on building more hotel rooms
There was only one amendment on Thursday, which I moved in order to support the vitality of our downtown and our tourism economy. This was a motion to add a tangible, aspirational goal of building 1,500 hotel rooms by 2035. Our shortage of hotel rooms is acute, and limits regular-income travellers and families who can’t find affordable rooms. The motion also had the support of the business community, as represented by the Downtown Victoria Business Association, Destination Greater Victoria, and the Chamber of Commerce.
This type of minor wording change can be made in one location in the documents, and doesn’t take much staff time. It passed unanimously.
Motions that would have delayed the OCP
There were some motions that would have resulted in a delay of the OCP. Some of these were to introduce major changes that would take a lot of time to process via amendments to the various inter-linked plans, bylaws and policies, which would have taken us past the year-end statutory deadline for completion. Some even would have gone on further, with a repeat of the entire notification and public hearing process.
These major motions could have been brought earlier. The draft materials (plan, bylaws, policies) have been with Council since February 2025, so we’ve had more than 6 months to make changes. And before that we had the draft directions of the Update since February 2024 – a year prior to having the draft materials. We could have brought motions with creative direction any time after that.
One of my colleagues is fond of saying that certain motions are just games and politics, and the reader can draw their own conclusions about the motivation behind some of these major 11th-hour motions.
Thanks to the public, to staff, and to my colleagues
I thank the dozens of people provided their input through the public hearing – in person, by phone and by recordings – and the thousands gave their input prior to that.
Of course staff did a huge amount of work, across multiple departments. And my colleagues and I have questioned staff and deliberated on the elements of the Update several times as it moved through the process.
Public input – lots
I’ve been encouraging input on the Update for more than two years, and receiving it. I’m Council’s Downtown Liaison and I was encouraging the Downtown Residents Association, and others, to provide input starting in the summer of 2023. The DRA did some planning and organizing and got their community together in January 2024 to develop and gather input, and provided that to Council. I attended to observe and it was a great session with a lot of discussion. Other neighbourhoods followed suit: I attended the session of the Fairfield Gonzales Community Association, which was similar to the DRA one.
City staff posted materials on the City website, in February 2024, and we began receiving all sorts of opinions on a wide range of topics – via emails, phone calls, meetings, coffee chats and conversations. There were no limits or constraints on this input; it was completely open as to what topics the public could address, what they suggest on those topics, and how they say it, for 18 months. And we received a wide range of views on a wide range of topics.
In addition to this, staff created a number of other avenues for input: open houses (I attended a couple of these, and conversations with participants were wide ranging, lively and informative), community pop-ups, focus groups, community partner meetings, online information sessions, a survey, and more, with a total of 2,500 in-person interactions:
(If you just read some unfortunate corners of local social media or the letters-to-the-editor page, you could hear a claim that it was mainly a survey and a few events. If you are hearing that, your source is unreliable. Staff corrected some misinformation about the engagement, as did I.)
What did we hear from the public?
That is not something that can be summarized in a blog post. The staff report on the portion of engagement that they led was over 100 pages long. And Council received a lot of input directly, as well as via the public hearing. Suffice it to say that we we heard about wide range of the topics in the Update and beyond, and different perspectives on each topic.
And that’s normal – we listen to a wide range of opinions on every topic. There truly is nobody who “speaks for the neighbourhood.” And we saw that in the public hearing too – with views ranging from “my neighbourhood is full” to “I want more people in my neighbourhood so it can be more vibrant and support more businesses” – for the same neighbourhood.
Content of the Update
The Victoria 2050 OCP touches on a lot of topics. It reflects what’s in Council’s Strategic Plan, in which this Council gave direction to staff on housing, climate action and more. And it reflects what we heard on the doorstep during the election, and the election results.
To me, the overarching theme is about building community, now and in the future. It’s about having a city:
- Where workers can find jobs, and can afford to live in Victoria
- Where seniors can age in place
- Where kids can get to school safely
- Where we welcome immigrants, newcomers, and diversity
- Where young adults can get a start on careers and families.
It’s about Victoria returning to being a place where all sorts of people can thrive.
Reconciliation is a key theme and the first chapter. The Nations and the Mayor have spoken eloquently to this issue, and I can only add my own respect and gratitude for this land, and for willingness of nations to continue the reconciliation journey with us.
A big part of OCP update is of course homes. I was saddened to hear from seniors that their children and grandchildren are moving out of the city because can’t find housing here in their budgets. This is because we have a shortfall of more than 8,000 homes for Victoria residents (latent demand). That’s more than 10% of number of homes we have. And there are always new arrivals – the Charter contains a constitutional right to move.
The housing shortage drives up costs. We sometimes hear the claim that what we “actually” have is an affordability shortage. Well the truth is we have both, and the housing shortage causes the affordability shortage. We’ve mainly had a landlord’s market – a 1% vacancy rate – for decades, far below balanced 4% level, and the majority of Victoria residents are renters. The vacancy rate has been up to 4% once, only very briefly, in recent decades. It’s currently at 2%, which is promising. And we have more inventory for purchase – up 10% compared to last year.
This shortage exists because like other cities, we made it illegal to build homes, especially the more affordable homes – multifamily aka apartments and condos – in all but a relatively small portion of town.
This was not always the case. There are some lovely older apartment buildings and corner stores, which are part of our heritage. Then in 1980s blanket rezoning made that illegal. To paraphrase a quote about another city: “the neighbourhoods we cherish the most are illegal to build today due to blanket exclusionary zoning”
This OCP Update takes a page from our history, our heritage. We are going to go back to allowing homeowners a wider range of choices on what to do with their property. We will allow a wider variety of homes, and yes corner stores, in more neighbourhoods.
Will this mean that every homeowner in the City can put up a 4 or 6 storey apartment? No. They still have to comply with a range of requirements, such as space for trees, ensuring the lot is large enough, etc.
Will more homes have an impact on rents and prices? Yes. It will help balance the markets, and thus tame the wild rent increases we’ve seen.
It will also allow wealthier people to move into new homes, leaving their older and generally cheaper homes vacant for others. There is data from cities around the world showing that this happens within months. I strongly recommend readers check out the CMHC reports on this, linked in this post. (Their Fall 2024 Rental Market Report contains clear information – a sharp contrast to the convoluted, misleading and often rage-bating comments of media personalities and their followers.)
And yet another process helps provide more affordable homes in the longer run: aging. New buildings over decades age into affordability. This is where most of our affordable housing came from. Unfortunately, as noted above, blanket down zoning in the 1980s made it very difficult to build apartment buildings for several decades, and so we have a severe shortage of affordable housing.
What about the distribution of homes? Prior to the public hearing, I heard from one person who lives in a traditional residential neighbourhood (dominated by single detached houses) that they want to see development take place in existing built-up areas like downtown and James Bay. I also heard from folks living in those built-up areas that they want to see more development happening in other neighbourhoods. And of course not everyone in those neighbourhoods agrees with either of those views.
Staff noted that actually Downtown, North Park and Fernwood all had more density than James Bay, not that this matters a great deal. The point is that this OCP Update would increase housing in all neighbourhoods, but in James Bay less so than the city average. What I said to some James Bay residents before the election was that I’d like to see other neighbourhoods catch up, and staff have advised that that’s exactly what this OCP Update does.
Of course the update is not just about homes. It also addresses climate change, helping strengthen our policies and advance us toward our targets. The most important tool cities have to reduce climate change emissions is building in the right places: walkable, transit-rich, and served by safe active transportation infrastructure. As a region we cannot continue sprawling into outlying areas that are car-dependent and result in more traffic, GHG emissions, congestion, and crashes, as well as clear cutting of forests and loss of local agriculture and food security.
The update will also strengthen our work toward improving the city’s provision of trees and greenspace, with the innovative addition of linear parks and the blue-green network. We need more trees particularly in public rights-of-way, and areas that are underserved, like downtown and other areas with a lot of population and few trees currently.
Going forward we need to remember that it is not not “trees vs housing;” its trees and housing. Victoria has added over 100 soccer fields worth of tree canopy while adding 8,000 net new homes, almost all of them multifamily apartment or condo. We also protected entire forests and agricultural land by adding those 8,000 homes here, and not in low density sprawling suburbs.
The Update also addresses transportation, with planning for mobility hubs and networks, and dense housing that is needed to justify good transit service levels. It also addresses a whole range of other topics from economic prosperity to heritage to arts and cultural vibrancy, and so much more. I urge members of the public to move past the hot takes and negative narratives of social media and letters to editor pages, and get to the truth by reading the OCP materials. Again, it’s about building community, and thriving people, families, and businesses, and a clean environment.
More work needs to be done on the OCP, and we will have that opportunity soon: new legislation requires that we update it every 5 years.
Many thanks again to the public, City staff, and my Council colleagues. It’s been a lot of effort over a long time. The next one, due in just over five years, should be easier.