Zoning changes necessary, and not a crisis

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/11/2023 (704 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Recently, the federal government’s request that the City of Winnipeg change its zoning bylaw in order to access $192 million of housing money became public. The proposed changes would allow, by right, up to a fourplex to be built on any lot in the city, up to four storeys within 800 metres of frequent transit, as well as residential construction on commercial mall properties.

Many other cities, like Calgary, Halifax, Guelph, Moncton, Mississauga, and Kelowna, have already done it.

But there have been concerns that these changes will remove public consultation, leading to a wild west of development that will destroy the very fabric of our neighbourhoods.

Let me say this right away, those fears are unfounded.

These changes will not lead to the wholesale replacement of our neighbourhoods. But likewise, they are not the silver bullet solution to our housing crisis that some may hope.

That doesn’t make the changes any less necessary.

We need to remember that there are already many things that can happen by right without community input. Your neighbour can paint their house a hideous colour, pave their entire yard, build a massive addition, and clear cut every single tree on their property, and you don’t get a say on any of it.

But as soon as they dare add an extra unit of housing, it’s a different story: material colours, shadows, parking, “greenspace,” trees — it’s all up for discussion!

And we wonder why there’s a housing crisis.

Of course, a line must be drawn somewhere to decide what should require community consultation, and what shouldn’t. Is allowing fourplexes everywhere and four-storey buildings within 800 metres of frequent transit placing that line too far?

Historically, it wouldn’t have been. In my neighbourhood of Elmwood, my 2½-storey house sits right next to my neighbour’s bungalow, as it has for nearly 100 years. And a few houses over, mid-block, is a church whose height certainly equates five or six storeys.

There are duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and five-plexes, all mixed in with single family homes. This isn’t a never-before-tried policy, this is literally how cities were built for millennia before the Second World War.

Still, changing this one aspect of zoning isn’t going to lead to a housing boom as many fear (or hope).

There are still parking requirements, setbacks, minimum lot sizes, dimensional standards, and more that can make it “illegal” to build a duplex or triplex somewhere even if it’s allowed by zoning.

My neighbourhood, with its mix of housing types and sizes on small lots, is technically illegal today. Everything is “grandfathered” obviously, but most buildings couldn’t be rebuilt as-is if they burn down. Updating zoning to allow “up to a fourplex” and “up to four storeys” won’t do much to change that.

There are so many rules other than zoning that determine whether a fourplex can be built. Incidentally, those rules are why infill development has been concentrated in a handful of neighbourhoods: the overly tight restrictions keep infill “illegal” in most other neighbourhoods.

But this issue isn’t just about housing, it’s also about municipal insolvency.

The pattern of development we’ve adopted since the Second World War doesn’t generate enough income to sustain itself.

I could go into all the gory mathematical details, but briefly, it comes down to a mismatch between the amount of private investment (development, housing) and the amount of public investment (infrastructure like roads, pipes, libraries).

There isn’t enough private investment, the stuff we tax, to support the level of public investment we’ve become accustomed to.

It’s why our libraries don’t have enough funding, why our roads are crumbling, why our recreation centres are falling apart, why we dump raw sewage into the river, why our tree canopy is shrinking.

Oh sure, you can keep the balls in the air for a few decades with debt (which we’ve done), but eventually it all comes crashing down.

So our choice is this: tax increases, service cuts and crumbling infrastructure, or allowing more private investment in our existing neighbourhoods to increase our financial means to support the public investments we’ve already made.

To do that, we need to loosen the rules at the small end of the scale (up to a fourplex), while tightening the rules at the big end of the scale, so all of our neighbourhoods are able to gradually evolve to the next increment of intensity, rather than by huge jumps, as is forced by our current regulations.

No neighbourhood should be exempt from change, but no neighbourhood should experience sudden, radical change.

While four storeys and fourplexes may seem like big change, that’s only because we’re used to our neighbourhoods not changing at all, due to regulations, not market forces.

It’s a level of change that is normal elsewhere, was normal here once, and will need to become normal again.

Unless we prefer higher taxes, fewer services and ever-worsening infrastructure.

Michel Durand-Wood lives in Elmwood and has been writing about municipal issues since 2018.