City planners defend development record
I hesitate to bore your readers with an overly detailed rebuttal of some illinformed opinions, but I think your readers deserve some facts about how city planning actually works (“City Hall leaves taxpayers on the hook,” Letters, Jan. 19, by Richard Drinnan).
For example, Drinnan has critical opinions about the city’s record on Official Community Plan compliance.
The statistics on the number of landuse related OCP amendments, however, paint a different picture. Of the more 750 development applications received every year, fewer than 2% propose a change to Kelowna’s OCP and 0.5% of those changes are initiated to clean up inconsistencies or errors.
OCP land use planning is done at a high level and as such, changes should be viewed and judged case-by-case and not seen on the whole to be negative or positive.
Similarly, Drinnan over-simplifies the city’s approach to zoning bylaw variances. Zoning is a blunt tool meant to stop potentially negative impacts of putting a mixture of land uses in the same area.
Variances are considered by staff to refine many different objectives that are usually supported by city policy and design objectives.
And again, his interpretation of how Development Cost Charges (DCCs) work misrepresents how the program actually works.
DCCs are collected from new development and are used to fund infrastructure that supports growth like roads, bridges, parks, sewer and water. DCC funded infrastructure benefits existing residents, for example, the recently added travel lane on Clement Avenue, or a new park or a multi-use corridor. It is reasonable that some city funds support this investment in infrastructure. The city strives to find a fair balance for each DCC project with a share of the project funded from development through DCCs and a share funded from existing users through taxation or utility funding.
City contributions tend to total about 33% of the program and DCCs 67%.
Further, his suggestion that the city “quietly gave taxpayer subsidies to developers and raised the costs of publicly funded infrastructure” on two developments is wrong in a number of ways. First, there’s nothing “quiet” about the city’s rental housing agreements — it’s a public policy available online to anyone who wants to look it up.
It is disappointing that Drinnan would attempt to undermine a program that has shown a lot of success in providing rental housing to thousands of Kelowna residents who do not have the luxury of buying their own home, or who prefer to have rental options.
Rental housing grants have been among the city’s most successful tools for incentivizing the construction of new rental housing in the city.
In the last five years, 2,000 new rental homes have received rental housing grants and have subsequently been constructed.
While Drinnan suggests it’s easy for a developer to pay back a grant, stratify and sell a rental development, in truth it is much more difficult.
Council has a policy that forbids the stratification of rental housing when the rental housing vacancy rate in Kelowna is below 3%. Even if the vacancy rate were greater than 3%, there are significant hurdles for a rental building owner wishing to stratify.
To date, no rental property owner has sought to change the terms of their agreement with the city.
On Drinnan’s final point about house values, he has it completely opposite to reality. House prices don’t increase because of development or development potential identified by a city plan — they increase because of market demand.
If we don’t develop new, sustainable forms of housing — diversifying our housing types and encouraging the “missing middle” variety of housing — home price escalation will continue unabated.
I hope your readers will understand that city planning is always done with our community’s best interests in mind. It’s an open and transparent process for anyone willing to understand how and why policies and plans are developed and applied.