Walking down Chandler Avenue in Victoria’s Fairfield neighbourhood, you’ll find an unremarkable 1950s-era raised bungalow with overgrown grass setting it apart from the tidy lawns of its neighbours.
For one housing advocate, this single-family home slated for demolition has become a symbol of the City of Victoria’s failed missing-middle housing policy.
The 10,500-square-foot lot makes the property a prime location for a small apartment building, said Robert Berry of the pro-density group Homes for Living. Instead, the bungalow will be replaced with two luxury single-family homes with secondary suites.
Victoria was the first B.C. municipality to adopt a policy to allow up to six units on a single family lot with the aim of adding housing that’s more affordable than a single-family home and more spacious than a condo. But in the four months since it took effect, there have been no applications for multi-unit housing.
Developers and housing advocates say that’s because Victoria’s policy contains too many “poison pill” restrictions that effectively kill any project that doesn’t conform to the single-family-home esthetic.
“Just like the old system, we’re getting lots of McMansions but we’re not getting missing-middle [housing] because the poison pills kill it,” Berry said.
Premier David Eby has doubled down on missing-middle housing in an attempt to address skyrocketing real estate prices, even bringing former Victoria mayor Lisa Helps — a key architect of Victoria’s policy — into his office as a housing adviser.
But as the B.C. NDP government and the City of Vancouver craft their own missing-middle policies, experts say true progress toward addressing the housing crisis will require a more transformative rethink of the single-family neighbourhood.
Victoria’s misstep also raises concerns that when the province’s legislation comes into effect this fall — which will allow four units on a single-family lot or six housing units per lot in areas close to public transit — municipalities will have the ability to insert their own poison pills to stop development in its tracks.
Luke Mari, principal of development for Victoria-based Aryze Developments, said Victoria’s policy is problematic because the restrictions around the building’s height, front and side setbacks (the space between the house and the property lines), and amount of space the home can take up relative to the lot size (known as floor space ratio) result in “unbuildable conditions” for a multi-unit project.
City planners, Mari said, have so far been unwilling to approve multi-unit housing that disrupts the “character” of residential neighbourhoods.
“How long are these neighbourhoods going to be servants to how they were built 100 years ago?” he asked, his voice teeming with exasperation. “At what point is a neighbourhood allowed to forge a net new path?”
These problems are what Berry calls the poison pills that have so far killed the missing-middle policy.
“Victoria got a lot of nice headlines saying that they legalized fourplexes and townhouses,” said Berry, who is also the manager for investment accounting at QuadReal Property Group, the real estate investment arm of the B.C. pension fund.
“But the fact is what they legalized are such small buildings located right in the middle of the lot with such finite bylaw limits on the building itself that it’s … still much easier to build a big, expensive mansion — and a profitable mansion at that — than it is to build a fourplex or a sixplex.”
Victoria’s requirement for six metres between the front of the home and property line prioritizes a decorative front yard over more functional space in the backyard, Berry said. In comparison, townhomes in Montreal and Toronto are 1.5 metres from the front property line.
“We should be allowing families to say, ‘I want a bigger backyard, rather than a front yard,’” Berry said. “But municipalities say, ‘No, we want a single-family 1950s white-picket-fence front yard esthetic’ and they write that into their bylaws.”
Victoria’s mayor accepts that the missing-middle policy missed the mark.
“I don’t think it’s failed,” said Marianne Alto, who was elected mayor in October and has sat on council since 2010. “What I think has happened is we asked too much of a single policy. I think there was a probably an unreasonable expectation that this was almost magic.”
City planners will report to Victoria council this fall with recommendations for changes that could make it more attractive to build multi-unit housing.
“We haven’t reached our goal of making it as easy to build multiple homes (on a lot) as it is to build one,” Alto said.
The City of Vancouver is in the process of adopting its own missing-middle policy, which — if a staff report is endorsed — would allow three-storey buildings with four to six strata units or eight rental homes on single-family residential neighbourhood lots, depending on their size. The proposed bylaw amendments will be debated at a public hearing in the fall.
Eby and Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon announced in April a provincewide overhaul of municipal zoning rules which, once in effect later this year, will force municipalities to approve multi-unit buildings as long as they meet requirements around height and setback. The province has also selected 10 municipalities that will be required to hit yet-to-be-established targets on new home construction or risk having the province force through higher density.
But if B.C. is to learn any lesson from California, which last year passed a statewide law allowing duplexes and in some cases fourplexes on single-family lots, it’s that municipalities can be creative in their resistance.
For example, Woodside tried to block duplexes by declaring itself a mountain lion habitat, which would require any new development to go through a complicated environmental assessment. The ploy was eventually struck down by the courts.
Asked whether he’s concerned some B.C. municipalities will find ways to thwart the province’s policy, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon was direct.
“I am concerned about that. Because there are some local governments that don’t want to participate in making sure we have housing for future generations. It is a lesson learned from California,” said Kahlon, who recently spoke to California Senator Scott Wiener about it.
B.C.’s legislation, Kahlon said, will set specific requirements for parking, setback and height “so that we can address the tools that some communities use to put barriers in the way.”
But for Stuart Smith, a board member with Abundant Housing Vancouver, seeing politicians tinker with the details of medium density policies like missing middle is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It ignores, he said, the iceberg that is the worsening affordability crisis.
Vancouver council is “refusing to confront the elephant in the room,” Smith said, “which is the law that says it’s illegal to have big, spacious apartments next to parks and schools across the city and across the region.”
Smith points to Shaughnessy Lodge, a four-storey red brick apartment constructed in 1912 on South Granville, as an example of the type of high-density apartments that should be allowed in residential neighbourhoods.
“We get affordability with abundance,” he said.
There have also been criticisms that missing middle housing is still out of reach for lower- and middle-income British Columbians, with new townhomes in such projects listed around the $1-million mark in Victoria and Vancouver.
There’s a major misconception that missing-middle housing is housing for middle-income earners, said Victoria Coun. Matt Dell. Rather, it’s “middle form” housing aimed at providing diverse types of homes for people who don’t want to raise a family in a condo building but can’t afford a single-family home.
“I don’t believe for a second missing middle will produce affordable housing — but it will create more diverse supply in the long run,” Dell said.
That’s why housing analysts say the province must spend on below-market housing, co-op housing and rent-to-own programs to increase the supply of affordable housing. Kahlon promised that work is underway through the B.C. Builds program, which will be unveiled later this year or in early 2024.
Karin Kirkpatrick, B.C. United housing critic and MLA for West Vancouver-Capilano, is frustrated the NDP government is dragging its feet during a housing crisis.
By announcing the provincewide missing middle policy in April but delaying the legislation until the fall, Kirkpatrick said she’s heard from homebuilders who are in a holding pattern, waiting to start housing projects until they have more clarity from the government.
“The challenge is when a policy announcement is made without the policy to back it up; it does cause a lot of confusion,” she said.
Marianne Amodio, an architect with MA+HG Architects, has been watching the City of Vancouver debate for years the acceptable level of density in single-family neighbourhoods.
She and her team designed Tomo House, a 12-unit co-housing project on Main Street and Ontario Place recently built across two standard lots. The building has units ranging from studios to three bedrooms including three units which were listed at 35 per cent below market value and shared common areas for eating and socializing. A two-bedroom apartment with a separate suite is currently listed for just under $1.5 million.
The project was approved by Vancouver council in 2018 through a rezoning process. If the city’s missing-middle policy takes effect later this year, similar projects would be automatically approved by city staff as long as they meet the guidelines.
“We partnered with Tomo, two young innovative developers,” said Kathy Sayers, a co-founding member of Our Urban Village which runs the building, where she now lives. “They were looking to build a sustainable building where occupants felt connected instead of isolated. We were looking for developers who had land.”
Amodio, however, fears the missing-middle policy now before the ABC-majority council is an “incremental, very conservative approach to solving a very large problem.”
“A lot of people have a lot of really legitimate concerns about how this sweeping change is going to affect their neighbourhoods in their cities. Nobody’s thoughts about that should be denied, but we’re in a crisis.”
The city’s own planning department projected between 150 and 200 projects a year, which Amodio said will not add the density needed to bring down prices or keep pace with population growth.
Even as the City of Victoria looks to fix the problems in its missing-middle policy to spur building, Mari, the Victoria developer, is skeptical it will provide the transformation needed.
“It’s unlikely we’re going to see a policy that is robust enough to actually tackle the housing crisis,” he said.
Amodio said as long as we’re wedded to the idea of the single-family home as a symbol of the middle class dream — even as it excludes a vast swath of society who have been priced out of that dream — municipalities will continue to take a conservative approach around green-lighting density.
“This vision that we have embedded, it’s imbued in our collective consciousness, to have a big front yard with a certain style of house that has been defined as being character. And this character is what makes a beautiful neighbourhood. And I so strongly oppose that,” she said. “To me, it’s people … that create character.”
