In passing its Transit-Oriented Development Area (TOA) legislation late last year, the provincial NDP government set up an inevitable tug-of-war with B.C. municipalities, some of which immediately decried the perceived provincial overstep into their jurisdiction.
Now that the June 30 deadline for municipalities to designate properties within the 104 TOAs across B.C. has passed, we are beginning to see the resistance emerge, sometimes with fireworks.
Burnaby, for example, has refused to participate at all, while Coquitlam has designated properties, but is discouraging applications until some undefined future date when they might enact the policies required to support the new density.
The result is a chaotic regulatory patchwork in the Metro Vancouver region. In most jurisdictions, details that can make or break an investment have yet to be solidified, and timelines to get the complete picture are murky at best. Rumours and speculation are thriving in an environment where policy guidelines are half-baked, and nobody can be certain what will happen next week, let alone next year.
Understanding how the various policy layers affect a property has never been more important.
Our survey and report card on six major Metro Vancouver municipalities confirms that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to land-use policies.
The City of Vancouver is one of the few municipalities to roll out a detailed rezoning policy for each of its 29 TOAs by deadline. Vancouver’s rezoning policy regulates tenure (both strata and rental options), sets inclusionary housing standards, minimum frontages, community amenity contributions (CACs), and it addresses built-form guidelines and conflicts between TOA policies and other community plans.
By establishing a detailed framework and setting guidelines for owners and developers, Vancouver has offered clarity and, therefore, is ahead of the pack. This is a pleasant surprise, given that Vancouver has the most TOAs and a history of taking forever to complete seemingly simple policy updates.
The same can’t be said for Burnaby, where no progress has been made regarding TOAs in the region’s third-largest city.
After amassing over $2 billion in reserve funds from high-density development in its four town centres, the City of Burnaby seems to be saying it is no longer interested in helping house the influx of new residents to the region. Council ignored the provincial deadline to designate Burnaby TOAs, instead suggesting that it will see what happens in other cities and revisit at a later date.
Confusingly, council did not apply the same restraint to provincially enabled new funding mechanisms, instead imposing a massive increase to development fees. As of July 1, every new apartment built in Burnaby is on the hook for $39,000 in municipal development cost charges (DCCs) and amenity cost charges (ACCs), up catastrophically from the $2,500 that developers previously paid in DCCs for a standard 700-square-foot apartment. There is no word on whether Burnaby will reduce density bonus charges to offset this 1,500-per-cent increase, which creates even more uncertainty.
And then there is Surrey. B.C.’s second-largest municipality by population has the province’s second-highest number of TOAs and, not surprisingly, is being looked at as a leading source of new housing supply for the region. The city has adopted its designation bylaw, mapping out which properties fall within the various TOA tiers, but without any specific guidelines or rezoning policies.
Surrey has generally incorporated TOAs into existing community plans where they exist already, so rezonings will have to comply with regulations, including design guidelines, affordability requirements and any other bylaws, plans or policies adopted by council.
Overall, we gave Vancouver a B grade, Burnaby an F and Surrey a C.
We also analyzed the efforts of New Westminster (C+), Richmond (C) and Coquitlam (C-).
While municipal progress varies, one thing is clear: Developers are now faced with an evolving, uncertain and chaotic patchwork of local regulations within a region already struggling to supply housing at the pace at which it’s needed.
Most municipalities are now beginning the next phase of implementation which will hopefully fill in the gaps with more robust guidelines, and provide clarity on how new funding mechanisms such as DCCs and ACCs will be used, but we may not see that completed until well into 2025.
While the province gave municipalities a tight timeline to designate TOA properties, there doesn’t seem to be the same push to complete the job so that new supply can actually start to work its way through the entitlement process, which should be the goal of all this.
Mark Goodman and Ian Brackett are brokers at Goodman Commercial, which specializes in the sale of rental apartment buildings and development sites in Metro Vancouver. They also publish The Goodman Report.
The full TOA report card is available here.
