October 14, 2025

As mentioned in previous updates, on October 6, Council gave First Reading to Land Use Bylaw Amendments for Provincial Legislation Alignment. The land use bylaw amendments proposed in the report intend to meet the City’s 20-year housing need, while retaining the City’s structure and priorities as established in the Official Community Plan (OCP).  

Additional information can be found in the full report by City staff. 

June 17, 2025

At their meeting on June 16th, Council directed staff to initiate an amendment to the Official Community Plan (OCP) to enable changes to the Zoning Bylaw that would allow for the 20-year housing need, schedule an “OCP Facilitated Town Hall” to gather feedback on the proposed amendments to the OCP, and bring back proposed changes to the OCP and Zoning Bylaw later this year for Council’s consideration.  

The City retained Urban Systems to understand how much residential development could theoretically be accommodated under the current land use bylaws and whether there is sufficient capacity to address 20-year housing needs. The analysis concluded that, while the OCP has more than enough capacity, the Zoning Bylaw is short by 6,556 housing units. To meet the provincial legislation, the Zoning Bylaw must be amended by December 31, 2025, to increase capacity from the currently estimated 43,766 housing units to 50,322 housing units. 

Proposed Direction  

To meet the 20-year housing need, an approach that adds density on City Lands and across the City’s lower-density areas is proposed. The proposed direction reflects the guiding principles by recommending higher density growth within and adjacent to the Regional City Centre and Frequent Transit Development Areas, and gentle infill throughout the rest of the City. The proposed direction also offers a variety of housing types, ranging from multiplexes to 6-storey apartments and high-rise buildings.  

Servicing Analysis  

In 2024, the City conducted an analysis of existing water, sewer, and drainage utility capacity and what the impact of new development would be on the utility infrastructure. The servicing capacity analysis consisted of three steps: 

1) updating the City’s utility models to align with current state asset management data; 

2) modelling the capacity of the existing systems in a first scenario where the current developability within the OCP was completely built out; and  

3) modelling the capacity of our existing systems in a second scenario where the current developability within the OCP was completely built out and the R1 (single-family), R2 (duplex/triplex) and R3 (townhouse/multiplex) OCP land use designation areas were built out at either 6 units or 8 units, depending on the lot area. 

In both scenarios results of the modelling identified areas of the systems that would require increased capacity to support the growth. Scenario two resulted in more water upgrades required due to fire flow requirements for buildings that are 5 units or more. As the proposed direction identified in this report has a growth scenario between the two scenarios modelled staff feel confident that the analysis undertaken provides a good indicator of our systems future function. It is anticipated that build-out of the R1, R2, and R3 areas would be gradual over time and, therefore, the City expects that upgrades will be required only when sufficient growth is developed. With this assumption, construction-related impacts, beyond our current pace for end of life renewal and growth based upgrades, are expected to be minimal. In addition continued focus on reducing the effective impervious area of new developments and advancing water use reduction and conservation strategies, will also help to extend the capacity of our systems to support growth in the community.  

Under current bylaws, upgrades are required for applications with two or more units that propose enough increased demand that the City’s existing infrastructure is deemed insufficient to support the proposed growth. Typically, applicants are responsible for the full cost of required upgrades. Moving forward, staff are working on an updated Development Cost Charges approach so that each development pays a proportional share of the required upgrades resulting in more predictable utility upgrade costs that are closely aligned with a particular application’s proposed growth. 

Additional information can be found in the  full report by City staff. 

April 15, 2025

At their regular meeting on March 31st, Council directed staff to remove the growth scenarios work for both the five year planning horizon (2025-2030) and twenty-year planning horizon (2025- 2045) and the associated growth scenario public engagement from the Provincial Legislation Alignment process, and directed staff to bring back a report with options of areas that could be rezoned to satisfy the zoning capacity requirements.  

The new Provincial Housing Legislation requires local governments to review and update their Official Community Plan (OCP) and Zoning Bylaw by December 31, 2025 to accommodate the identified 20-year housing need. Per the 2024 Interim Housing Needs Report, the City’s 20-year housing need is 21,301 housing units. This is in addition to the existing 29,021 residential units within the City as recorded by the 2021 Census. Therefore, a total of 50,322 units of capacity are needed to meet the City’s 20 year housing need. The City retained Urban Systems to understand the amount of residential development that could theoretically be accommodated under the current Official Community Plan and Zoning Bylaw. Urban Systems determined that the current OCP has a gross residential capacity of 71,408 units. This results in a capacity surplus of 21,086 units beyond the total 20-year housing need of 50,322 units. This capacity analysis does not include changes to the OCP that would be required to meet Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing and Transit Oriented Area legislative requirements. The change to the OCP to meet minimum small-scale multi-unit housing requirements is anticipated to be approximately the same as the increase in zoned capacity: 951 units. 

Urban Systems determined that the current Zoning Bylaw has a gross residential capacity of 43,766 units. It is estimated that the Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing amendments to be considered by Council in May 2025 will contribute a further 951 units. This results in a capacity gap of 5,605 units to meet the total 20-year housing need of 50,322 units. The Transit Oriented Area bylaw adopted by Council in 2024 meets provincial compliance requirements. 

Proposed Zoning Bylaw and Official Community Plan amendments to accommodate the capacity gap will be brought forward in June for Council direction and in October for introduction of readings. 

Additional information can be found in the  full report by City staff.