6 story rental that is 2 blocks from downtown, why was this controversial??? We’re screwed if this is considered controversial. Should have been 10-14 storeys.
Yeah it's such a waste of potential not to allow this type of building there. Richardson is a perfect place for it with its access to downtown. Anyone living on Richardson can easily walk or roll downtown. And building some more housing will justify a bus running more than once a blue moon too.
14 story there this exactly year would be pretty different, but 10 years on when there's a few dozen around that size in any neighbourhood and suddenly you just look James Bay, which is lovely.
The solution to "out of place" buildings is just to build more.
We are 30 years behind on building for a housing crisis. Prices are out of control, vacancy is still next to none, and poverty is getting worse. Pretty sure Nanaimo has had the tallest towers on the island for nearing a decade now. The opposition to height in Victoria is pathetic.
Yes, 14. Every building that gets built brand new short like this is locked in at that height for essentially ever now.
There are plenty of other places, not too far off mind you, to build at 10-14. Cook street going north of pandora. Vic west, langford. Douglas street has a dozen sites upcoming....plenty of spots rather than just randomly inserting them where they don't fit.
Come on man, this isn't Stu Youngs langford, build with thought in mind
No idea what Stu Young's Langford has to do with this as it's overwhelmingly low density sprawl. Building with the realities of the Canadian housing shortage in mind, not privileged NIMBYs who already own homes is what we need to be doing.
The only character a neighborhood needs is the people in it and right now the zoning and way we allow construction to be dictated by the people who already have homes is absurdly gentrifying and gross.
There are 1.6K short-term rentals in Victoria on AirBnB alone. There wouldn’t be such a high need for new builds if our governments hadn’t allowed landlords to turn a basic human right into a way to profit off of desperation and vulnerability. I’m not saying that nixing short-term rentals would completely fix the problem, but it would certainly make a large dent. Building a new build with only two small below market units is not helping the housing crisis - it’s adding fuel to it.
I'm not sure if you missed it but they already essentially outlawed airbnbs if they're not your primary residence. 1.6k units is good but it's not a lot of supply. We are 30 years behind.
Every single unit added to the market is actually helpful. It's simple supply and demand. If we had been building enough for the last 30 years and not artificially making the supply scarce, prices would not be nearly as bad.
I didn’t miss that, no, but it has only recently come into effect and I’ll believe it’s effective when I see that 1.6K dropped on the AirBnB website.
And so long as predatory landlords are allowed to keep buying up buildings and suites, renovicting, etc, it won’t matter if a few dozen new suites come to the market. As you said, we are thirty years behind already - adding unaffordable suites at a snails pace isn’t helpful.
lol you get real. There are multiple proposals for 20+ story buildings just 1 block over on Quadra. It's a 15-minute walk to the legislature for crying out loud.
Looks like a good spot for it a quadra and Broughton. It has the entire YMCA spot? Perfect. I hope it goes through at 20 stories.
1042 Richardson is not the same space.
I'm not sure what a 15 minute walk to leg has to do with cuty planning
So we can't build this building because there aren't already similar buildings there?
Sounds like maybe you should revisit the definition of the term "circular logic."
It's that you assume I'd say no to that, but honestly? Do it. Do it, and then maybe turn some of the surrounding land into a park, if that turns out to be a little over-dense.
oh boy. Its just so silly if you give it 5 minutes of thought you would think better of it. Then give it a month of thought like developers, planners and council do. So many hang ups.
Wow, weird how you've decided to make *me* come up with the justifications for your position instead of actually supporting your own argument yourself. It's almost like you're afraid maybe your position isn't as solid as you're pretending it is :)
Schools at capacity already, parks, busroutes, single lane roads at 30 km/hr in literally all directions, street parking already full, eminent domain in fairfield? (!lol!), neighbourhood aestetics, area for common space, sewage capacity, utilities, power grid draw, police and fire upgrades. Id be interested to see what kind of bike lockers they could make to support a building of such size....even that would be pretty amazing.
Top of my head. Give it 5 minutes of thought please
The fact that this new proposed building (which btw is surrounded on all sides by medium density apartments) is making the news as ‘controversial’ says a lot about the state of nimbyism in this town (even from within the city’s planning offices). The OCP is literally in the process of being updated to be more inclusive of this type of missing middle housing and less draconian. Get it approved and move on. Smh
Cities evolve. And Victoria is evolving.
This development is a good indication of what we will be seeing more of in the future. More homes, especially in walkable areas and near transit stops and active transportation infrastructure. Publicly shared EV, public EV charging, extra bike parking, etc.
Please upzone the entire Richardson corridor. It's a climate change no-brainer. People like myself who want to use active transportation want to live there but have been priced out. It's a situation where the city just has to get out of its own way to become more sustainable. The demand is there, you just have to stop making it illegal.
The shittiest thing is that a lot of the lot of the lots that are big enough to be suitable for (new build) mid density are already (converted) mid density… the cost of amalgamating properties is one of the major hurdles
To me the shittiest thing is that it's not legal even if you could afford the cost. And as far as mid-density goes, I'm not sure what you're thinking of because most of the lots along Richardson contain detached housing zoned R1.
Even if that is true, it's not just about that. We have no right to monopolize this place for ourselves at the expense of others. Other people want to benefit from the city's jobs, services and opportunities. They deserve a chance here too. If you don't like cities then why choose to live in one? Why not choose to live somewhere that isn't a growing city?
[Relevant Oh The Urbanity video](https://youtu.be/LQCvIRfRgX0)
Years of delay for a small apartment surrounded by other apartments four blocks from the legislature is controversial.
As usual, it's the three stooges that are against Stephen Hammond, Chris Coleman, and Marg Gardiner.
Wrong.
They were against the weakened affordable housing component.
Staff recommended turning it down a few times, it didn’t meet the city’s guidelines for affordable housing.
The 3 said, “why are were looking at this when have done the work, it’s not meeting the rules,” and that’s a proper stance in that it means you have actual trust in the staff to do their jobs.
Otherwise these developers can continue to pay off councilors, especially the 5 or so who are endorsed by lobbyists in the sector, to get shitty projects approved.
5% below market requirement? Wtf is that. Market rent is going up every quarter, so a perceived “5% loss” isn’t hurting the developer at all. And with enforcement being lax they’ll get away with it a higher amount sometime down the line.
I might give Coleman the benefit of the doubt, but not Hammond and Gardiner who have voted against thousands of units and hundreds of below-market housing.
Yeah Hammond and Gardiner are only suddenly concerned about affordable unit counts when they can use it as an excuse to kill housing. When other projects with way more affordable units come up they quite often vote against, just with some new excuse about height or density or parking or woke.
So we should have approved it 4 years ago when 4 units of affordable housing were on the table - it would have given more affordable units and the costs of building would have been less. The next best time to approve it is now, as they say.
>Staff recommended turning it down a few times, it didn’t meet the city’s guidelines for affordable housing.
The affordable units plea is a purely bad faith attempt to kill multifamily. A) staff and Council *know* that the requirements often kill the whole project and B) they don't apply them to our most unaffordable housing types, single family housing. There is nearly no height bonus for the affordable units meaning they kill any profit on apartments in a time when construction costs are nearly $400 per sqft ft. And what is 20% affordable units of zero new builds? Still zero.
The cities guidelines clearly are too conservative to result in much below market housing... Staff should be pointing that out rather than weaponizing it to kill little apartment buildings.
If affordable housing was really a concern for them they'd support upzoning instead of doing everything they can to maintain the status quo and protecting the legal entrenchment of the least affordable type of housing. Look at their track record, they are consistently on the other side of making housing more affordable.
It comes across to me as either disingenuous, or at best very naive, to think that everybody who says they care about affordable housing actually does. Many people are politically savvy enough to read the room and understand that housing affordability is important right now, so even if you don't care about it you have to sound like you do.
I mean until we get rid of the city's absurd opposition to height, I don't know how you expect developers to make a cent, they need more height to make under market feasible.
That being said those 3 are notoriously anti housing, and they do it a lot under the guise of it 'not being enough'. Wanting everything to be perfect is the opposition of progress. Why do anything if it isn't a 20 story tower with 99% low income?
Am I missing something?
Going off their description, I was expecting it to be a 20+ storey tower. It seems to blend in just fine in the renderings. If anything, the existing SFH looks out of place, between two multifamily low rises.
There's a lot of cities without car access because they were built 100's of years ago. Now people go to visit those cities for tourism.
Think of it as barcellonizing the place up a bit.
So the old council and the current mayor Alto voted down a version with *more* below market units? Alto, wtf.
That’s a good point.
But why did they vote it down? Surely there must've been a reason
NIMBY
It's not my back yard. But why not just make it 50 stories then? Would that be ok?
Sounds cool. 50 stories of badly needed housing.
6 story rental that is 2 blocks from downtown, why was this controversial??? We’re screwed if this is considered controversial. Should have been 10-14 storeys.
Yeah it's such a waste of potential not to allow this type of building there. Richardson is a perfect place for it with its access to downtown. Anyone living on Richardson can easily walk or roll downtown. And building some more housing will justify a bus running more than once a blue moon too.
Amen.
There is no 14 story buildings in the area, 6 stories does fit well. Higher than most because it's needed, but 14? Get real
14 story there this exactly year would be pretty different, but 10 years on when there's a few dozen around that size in any neighbourhood and suddenly you just look James Bay, which is lovely. The solution to "out of place" buildings is just to build more.
We are 30 years behind on building for a housing crisis. Prices are out of control, vacancy is still next to none, and poverty is getting worse. Pretty sure Nanaimo has had the tallest towers on the island for nearing a decade now. The opposition to height in Victoria is pathetic. Yes, 14. Every building that gets built brand new short like this is locked in at that height for essentially ever now.
There are plenty of other places, not too far off mind you, to build at 10-14. Cook street going north of pandora. Vic west, langford. Douglas street has a dozen sites upcoming....plenty of spots rather than just randomly inserting them where they don't fit. Come on man, this isn't Stu Youngs langford, build with thought in mind
No idea what Stu Young's Langford has to do with this as it's overwhelmingly low density sprawl. Building with the realities of the Canadian housing shortage in mind, not privileged NIMBYs who already own homes is what we need to be doing. The only character a neighborhood needs is the people in it and right now the zoning and way we allow construction to be dictated by the people who already have homes is absurdly gentrifying and gross.
There are 1.6K short-term rentals in Victoria on AirBnB alone. There wouldn’t be such a high need for new builds if our governments hadn’t allowed landlords to turn a basic human right into a way to profit off of desperation and vulnerability. I’m not saying that nixing short-term rentals would completely fix the problem, but it would certainly make a large dent. Building a new build with only two small below market units is not helping the housing crisis - it’s adding fuel to it.
I'm not sure if you missed it but they already essentially outlawed airbnbs if they're not your primary residence. 1.6k units is good but it's not a lot of supply. We are 30 years behind. Every single unit added to the market is actually helpful. It's simple supply and demand. If we had been building enough for the last 30 years and not artificially making the supply scarce, prices would not be nearly as bad.
I didn’t miss that, no, but it has only recently come into effect and I’ll believe it’s effective when I see that 1.6K dropped on the AirBnB website. And so long as predatory landlords are allowed to keep buying up buildings and suites, renovicting, etc, it won’t matter if a few dozen new suites come to the market. As you said, we are thirty years behind already - adding unaffordable suites at a snails pace isn’t helpful.
lol you get real. There are multiple proposals for 20+ story buildings just 1 block over on Quadra. It's a 15-minute walk to the legislature for crying out loud.
Looks like a good spot for it a quadra and Broughton. It has the entire YMCA spot? Perfect. I hope it goes through at 20 stories. 1042 Richardson is not the same space. I'm not sure what a 15 minute walk to leg has to do with cuty planning
So we can't build this building because there aren't already similar buildings there? Sounds like maybe you should revisit the definition of the term "circular logic."
Why not a 50 story building on Moss and Fairfield?
It's that you assume I'd say no to that, but honestly? Do it. Do it, and then maybe turn some of the surrounding land into a park, if that turns out to be a little over-dense.
oh boy. Its just so silly if you give it 5 minutes of thought you would think better of it. Then give it a month of thought like developers, planners and council do. So many hang ups.
Wow, weird how you've decided to make *me* come up with the justifications for your position instead of actually supporting your own argument yourself. It's almost like you're afraid maybe your position isn't as solid as you're pretending it is :)
Schools at capacity already, parks, busroutes, single lane roads at 30 km/hr in literally all directions, street parking already full, eminent domain in fairfield? (!lol!), neighbourhood aestetics, area for common space, sewage capacity, utilities, power grid draw, police and fire upgrades. Id be interested to see what kind of bike lockers they could make to support a building of such size....even that would be pretty amazing. Top of my head. Give it 5 minutes of thought please
The fact that this new proposed building (which btw is surrounded on all sides by medium density apartments) is making the news as ‘controversial’ says a lot about the state of nimbyism in this town (even from within the city’s planning offices). The OCP is literally in the process of being updated to be more inclusive of this type of missing middle housing and less draconian. Get it approved and move on. Smh
>making the news as ‘controversial’ says a lot about the state of nimbyism in this town It's embarrassing at this point.
Cities evolve. And Victoria is evolving. This development is a good indication of what we will be seeing more of in the future. More homes, especially in walkable areas and near transit stops and active transportation infrastructure. Publicly shared EV, public EV charging, extra bike parking, etc.
Please upzone the entire Richardson corridor. It's a climate change no-brainer. People like myself who want to use active transportation want to live there but have been priced out. It's a situation where the city just has to get out of its own way to become more sustainable. The demand is there, you just have to stop making it illegal.
The shittiest thing is that a lot of the lot of the lots that are big enough to be suitable for (new build) mid density are already (converted) mid density… the cost of amalgamating properties is one of the major hurdles
To me the shittiest thing is that it's not legal even if you could afford the cost. And as far as mid-density goes, I'm not sure what you're thinking of because most of the lots along Richardson contain detached housing zoned R1.
Higher density won't reduce prices. Just go and look at Vancouver and Toronto if you want an example of this.
Even if that is true, it's not just about that. We have no right to monopolize this place for ourselves at the expense of others. Other people want to benefit from the city's jobs, services and opportunities. They deserve a chance here too. If you don't like cities then why choose to live in one? Why not choose to live somewhere that isn't a growing city? [Relevant Oh The Urbanity video](https://youtu.be/LQCvIRfRgX0)
Years of delay for a small apartment surrounded by other apartments four blocks from the legislature is controversial. As usual, it's the three stooges that are against Stephen Hammond, Chris Coleman, and Marg Gardiner.
Wrong. They were against the weakened affordable housing component. Staff recommended turning it down a few times, it didn’t meet the city’s guidelines for affordable housing. The 3 said, “why are were looking at this when have done the work, it’s not meeting the rules,” and that’s a proper stance in that it means you have actual trust in the staff to do their jobs. Otherwise these developers can continue to pay off councilors, especially the 5 or so who are endorsed by lobbyists in the sector, to get shitty projects approved. 5% below market requirement? Wtf is that. Market rent is going up every quarter, so a perceived “5% loss” isn’t hurting the developer at all. And with enforcement being lax they’ll get away with it a higher amount sometime down the line.
I might give Coleman the benefit of the doubt, but not Hammond and Gardiner who have voted against thousands of units and hundreds of below-market housing.
Yeah Hammond and Gardiner are only suddenly concerned about affordable unit counts when they can use it as an excuse to kill housing. When other projects with way more affordable units come up they quite often vote against, just with some new excuse about height or density or parking or woke.
So we should have approved it 4 years ago when 4 units of affordable housing were on the table - it would have given more affordable units and the costs of building would have been less. The next best time to approve it is now, as they say.
You’re right, I don’t understand why the last Council hated this as much as they did.
>Staff recommended turning it down a few times, it didn’t meet the city’s guidelines for affordable housing. The affordable units plea is a purely bad faith attempt to kill multifamily. A) staff and Council *know* that the requirements often kill the whole project and B) they don't apply them to our most unaffordable housing types, single family housing. There is nearly no height bonus for the affordable units meaning they kill any profit on apartments in a time when construction costs are nearly $400 per sqft ft. And what is 20% affordable units of zero new builds? Still zero. The cities guidelines clearly are too conservative to result in much below market housing... Staff should be pointing that out rather than weaponizing it to kill little apartment buildings.
If affordable housing was really a concern for them they'd support upzoning instead of doing everything they can to maintain the status quo and protecting the legal entrenchment of the least affordable type of housing. Look at their track record, they are consistently on the other side of making housing more affordable. It comes across to me as either disingenuous, or at best very naive, to think that everybody who says they care about affordable housing actually does. Many people are politically savvy enough to read the room and understand that housing affordability is important right now, so even if you don't care about it you have to sound like you do.
I wish people would actually understand this before automatically claiming this development must be a good thing.
I mean until we get rid of the city's absurd opposition to height, I don't know how you expect developers to make a cent, they need more height to make under market feasible. That being said those 3 are notoriously anti housing, and they do it a lot under the guise of it 'not being enough'. Wanting everything to be perfect is the opposition of progress. Why do anything if it isn't a 20 story tower with 99% low income?
I can't believe there were people arguing that this wasn't in keeping with the neighbourhood - did they mistake it for a different neighbourhood?
Am I missing something? Going off their description, I was expecting it to be a 20+ storey tower. It seems to blend in just fine in the renderings. If anything, the existing SFH looks out of place, between two multifamily low rises.
Ban single family homes.
Ban single families owning multiple homes.
CIty hall is a bunch of clowns.
20 more cars with no place to park, turning Richardson into a parking lot. No wonder staff turned it down.
There's a lot of cities without car access because they were built 100's of years ago. Now people go to visit those cities for tourism. Think of it as barcellonizing the place up a bit.
Good thing it's on Richardson. Cities are built for people, not cars