Non-binding infill plan flawed

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/12/2016 (3440 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s an unusual step for a developer such as me to argue in the press that a project has been given a raw deal at city hall. Normally, we prefer to work more quietly, meeting with neighbours and city planners and eventually city councillors. We’d rather make noise once our projects come out of the ground and need to be advertised to buyers.

This time, we felt very strongly that the process governing infill development in Winnipeg was, quite frankly, broken. We needed to speak up.

To recap: we proposed building a 12-unit higher-end condo building at the corner of McMillan Avenue and Harrow Street. We worked on the plans for more than three years. We accommodated changes proposed by the city and the neighbours, cutting our original planned building in half and adding new design and architectural features.

Buoyed by the support of the next-door neighbour, as well as other residents on the street, we were also actively encouraged to apply for rezoning by the city’s urban planning division and, interestingly enough, the area councillor. On paper, our plan looked like a slam dunk.

It followed the prescribed guidelines that city council had endorsed with the Our Winnipeg long-range planning document. It was on a corner lot, it was gently densifying and diversifying a mature neighbourhood and it was on a collector road. Because we were targeting retirees who wished to grow older in their neighbourhood, we had more than 100 expressions of interest from potential buyers.

What went wrong? There are three problems as we see it.

First, the cost to make applications has risen exponentially. This one has cost us about $20,000 in fees to the city and another $30,000 in other costs such as architects’ fees. When applications for infill are that expensive, developers need to be relatively certain their plans will move forward.

Second, the city’s planning system vests too much discretionary power with individual ward councillors and their community committees. It is widely recognized at city hall that any ward councillor effectively has the power to veto any development in his or her ward. This has the unfortunate tendency to encourage pandering for votes instead of following long-range planning.

Third, and most important, the city has no firm policy on how to deal with infill development. While Our Winnipeg spells out a vision for the city to follow, it is not binding. City council can, and often does, ignore it for political reasons.

Our example is a perfect case in point. We did everything we were supposed to do by following a rigorous and lengthy pre-application process to arrive at a compromise building plan. We also followed the policy to a T. More importantly, we followed draft infill guidelines that the city’s planning department has been begging council to adopt since 2011.

In many ways, we had the perfect proposal for infill in a mature neighbourhood such as Crescentwood, but it was still rejected at community committee.

We hope the rest of council will see the error here and overturn that earlier decision. That would be the right thing to do.

But more importantly, we hope that council adopts binding infill development policies that will remove the kind of uncertainty that is embedded in the current process.

We believe passionately in building up instead of out. We want to put up beautiful buildings in mature neighbourhoods that are loved by their residents and neighbours alike. That’s one of our core beliefs as a company. We know much of the city shares that vision. Now it’s up to councillors to commit to a policy that is applied fairly to everyone every time.

Tim Comack is vice-president of development for Ventura Developments.