Infrastructure & Servicing

This report from Salt Spring Solutions aims to bring together a comprehensive set of solutions to the housing crisis on Salt Spring Island.

Key insights:

Salt Spring Island’s housing challenges are currently exasperated by several factors, including sprawl, demographic changes and strained infrastructure capacity.

As this report details, Salt Spring Island looks to address these by establishing a local housing framework that advances five strategies:

Strategy 1: Coordinated and Properly Resourced Local Approach to Housing
Strategy 2: Effective Public Education, Engagement, and Dialogue on Housing.
Strategy 3: Preservation of Rural Areas and Nature Space through Clustered Housing.
Strategy 4: Readying Ganges Village for More Housing
Strategy 5: Accessory Dwellings for Housing, in the Right Places

Amongst the key policy actions recommended include:

creating an entity to oversee and coordinate interagency tasks,
developing a public education and engagement policy,
updating policy and zoning regulations to incentivize compact,
clustered housing development,
intensifying growth in the town centre,
and permitting ADUs for long-term occupancy.

Infill Development in Edmonton: Strategies for Success brings leaders to better understand how public support is garnered for infill development in residential neighbourhoods and explore strategies that can be transferred to BC communities (including municipal policies and processes, partnerships, resources and engagement tactics/messages).

In this Gentle Density Network webinar from February 2023, learn how the City of Edmonton garnered public support for infill development in residential neighbourhoods, with insights from Nicholas Rheubottom, Executive Director at Infill Development Edmonton Association (IDEA), and Travis Fong, Co-Founder and President of YEGarden Suites.

Key insights:

There are many benefits to infill development:

More diverse housing stock: Infill helps to create diverse and vibrant neighbourhoods by providing options to meet everyone’s needs, whether it be new families, seniors, students, front-line workers, or more!

Financial Sustainability: Similar to above, by creating more diverse housing options, we can also cater for a greater diversity of financial needs and incomes.

Multigenerational Living: Enabling a variety of housing options in a neighborhood provides families with the choice to age in place, allows young individuals to reside nearer to the city center

Amongst the key barriers to infill include:

Infrastructure: At project inception, infrastructure upgrade costs are unknown and unpredictable.

Financial Feasibility: Medium-scale development from 4 units to 8 stories can be difficult to finance and has high risk brought on by contradictory planning policy, and uncertainty in approval processes and infrastructure upgrade costs

The prospect of upzoning single-detached neighborhoods has planners, civil engineers and utility providers wrestling with how to plan for servicing the increased density, and councils and finance officers wondering how to pay for it all.

In this Gentle Density Network webinar (August 2023), we explore these challenges and offer solutions with the help of a great lineup of speakers.

For more information on the Gentle Density Network, head to our dedicated website.

In this session of the Gentle Density Network webinar series (September 2023), Small Housing assembled a group of parking and transportation reform champions to help the Gentle Density Network explore what parking reform and gentle density might look like in their communities.

Our presentations and respective speakers include:

Edmonton’s Open Option Parking – letting people decide for themselves – Colton Kirsop, Business Lead, Community Planning, McElhanney, and former City of Edmonton planner
Getting to Zero: No-parking gentle density developments – Julian West, Developer, Urban Thrive
Bringing active transportation & car shares to your city – Alison Gu, City of Burnaby Councillor
Parking reform efforts in smaller and car-dependent communities – Nancy Henderson, Sr. Local Government Advisor, Urban Systems

Infrastructure & Servicing

Key insights:

Are you a planner?

Do you have resources to share?

Key insights:

Are you a planner?

Do you have resources to share?

Are you a planner?

Do you have resources to share?

Are you a planner?

Do you have resources to share?