SHBC

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

In this edition (March 2023) of Small Housing’s Gentle Density Network series, we seek to learn more about our policy proposals to expand the supply of affordable and attainable housing in British Columbia.

Featuring Jake Fry, Founder and former director of Small Housing BC; Akua Schatz, Director of Small Housing BC; and Tamara White, Associate Executive Director of Small Housing BC, the panel explores the policy levels available to release the potential of single-detached neighbourhoods and encourage the creation of housing that will meet the needs of today’s families and communities.

Key insights:

• Is the solution to more attainable housing located right in our backyards? By subdividing properties, strata titling has the potential to deliver creative, smaller-scale homes that can unlock doors to attainable housing and expand options for aspiring homeowners.
• Strata-title for accessory dwelling units could not only unlock more housing options for first-time buyers, it has can play a key role in supporting the financing of new supply.
• The panel explores how a Permanently Attainable Home Ownership (PAtH) model can support both attainable home ownership and secure affordable housing for middle-income earners. PAtH is an innovative homeownership framework that blends non-market and market units within a single houseplex configuration or infill layout. The approach utilizes existing assets (land from homeowners), planning tools (density bonus and strata-titling) and affordability enablers (covenant on title for non-market units) to incentivize the creation of attainable housing. You can read more about PAtH in our Small Housing Guidance Paper on the topic.

Local governments continue to face challenges with respect to housing supply and affordability. Gentle density infill housing strategies provide a promising way to increase housing supply in already built areas, but the question of affordability still remains.

To address this challenge, James Moore (City of Kelowna) and Matt Thomson (Urban Matters) joined Small Housing in April 2023, to share their insights with the Gentle Density Network on how the City of Kelowna has approached its efforts to increase gentle density supply and affordability.

The webinar also discusses Small Housing’s Guidance Paper (2023) that explores existing and emerging tools for local governments to increase the supply of gentle density and enhance its affordability.

Key findings:

• Gentle density housing is more attainable than single-detached homes due to shared land costs, smaller square footage per unit, and shared building surfaces.
• The local government tools listed can make it easier to build this form of housing, and can help to bring down the costs of development. This, in turn, will help to incentivize the production of new supply. As more supply comes online, housing prices cool.
• If local governments stack the tools (and their related cost reductions), they may be able to create sufficient incentives to make the inclusion of below-market units viable within a development.
• There are additional tools that can be leveraged by community partners, such as non-profits, lenders, and other levels of government, that can further support the creation of new and affordable gentle density homes.

Did you know that over a fifth of homeowners across urban areas and over a third of homeowners in rural areas would consider building a small secondary home on their property in the next five years? That’s according to Small Housing’s province-wide public opinion study (April 2023) that sought to understand how British Columbians perceive small-scale infill housing in single-detached neighbourhoods.

In this video (June 2023), Avalanche Insights presents Small Housing’s survey results, detailing the key barriers and opportunities that the public face in regard to engaging with gentle density housing solutions.

Key insights:

• Half (52%) of respondents are very concerned about lack of affordable housing in British Columbia. 73% are at least somewhat concerned.
• There is little consensus on the cause of the housing problem. Those most impacted say economic intervention would solve the issue (49%). Those least impacted are more likely to name building more housing generally as a solution (34%).
• Nearly half (47%) of respondents cite a positive emotion in reaction to the small housing solution, 10% say they feel hopeful.
• Over a fifth of homeowners across urbanism say they would consider building a small secondary home on their property in the next five years, including 33% of those in rural areas.

For access to the full presentation, click here.

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