It's Time for Harris Green Village!
Almost exactly two years ago I wrote an article about the Harris Green Village project. It’s really unfortunate just how slowly these projects move along. I understand that we were going through the pandemic, but we are also still going through a housing crisis in Victoria and unlike the pandemic, it doesn’t seem to be letting up at all. For those that read the last post on this topic, most of what I am going to say might be a little bit of repeat, but with the public hearing for the project approaching on February 9th, I think it is important for everyone to think about what this project means for the city. I personally think it means quite a lot and it comes at a time when we need it more than ever before.
What Are the Problems?
We are dealing with a host of compounding issues in Victoria right now. Though to be clear, they are not just happening in Victoria, they are happening around the globe. While we can’t control the macro causes, we can control our response to them. As pretty much everyone knows, we are dealing with a significant housing crisis in Victoria, both the city proper and the broader metro area. In an average year, we have around 6000 people moving into the region while at the same time are only adding about 2800 units a year regionally. It is important to note that on average we have about 1.8 people live in a unit of housing. That means we are shy about 500 units of housing a year. Or you can say that 1000 more people are moving here then we have housing for every year. As with any market, if you restrict supply of a commodity that is growing in popularity, you will see prices rise. This is also why we haven’t seen much impact in house prices due to foreign ownership provisions or even the rising interest rates. Remember these stats for later, but this is only one of the problems we have. (All of the stats here are pulled from a comparison of the 2016 and 2021 Victoria CMA data from Statscan)
We are also at critical point of change for downtown Victoria. The pandemic has been a catalyst for change in the way we work. While I still prefer to work in an office everyday, it would appear that I am in the minority. Offices in downtown Victoria are dramatically below their pre-pandemic occupancies. I think it’s likely we are looking at more than a 50% drop. This means that we are seeing a significant drop in the daytime customer levels for downtown businesses. For businesses that solely relied on the downtown office worker, many have either paired down operations or gone out of business. For businesses that operate for a full day, they may be opening later or simply losing that income that used to come in. For businesses that are already operating on thin profit margins, the daytime business is key. Office workers also bring in money as they leave at the end of the day and head to pubs and restaurants with co-workers. This is also not happening at the same levels simply because there are less people. For a visual reference to how much has changed, here is one of the downtown pedestrian counters, see if you can find the start of the pandemic…
What are the Solutions?
Side note: While it may not seem like it, an office building has a much larger impact than a residential building while it is occupied because of the density of people in it. An office building like the CIBC building downtown could easily have 2000 people working in it when it was full. While a big residential building like the Yates on Yates has only 122 units which likely adds up to about 200 residents. So you would need 10 buildings of that size to replace the loss of workers from a large office building.
For the return of the office worker, I will be writing a piece in the next few weeks on it. That said, I am not sure if there is a fix that we have full control over. There is at least one obvious thing we can be doing to help both problems at once and that is build more housing, especially downtown. Not only will it create homes, but if people continue to work at home, then we are also slowly replacing the missing office worker.
The Harris Green Village project will bring in over 1500 units of housing during its three phases. While as I noted before it is taking far too long to get them. It’s projects of this size that we need to actually make a dent in the housing shortage. I know that people get a little upset when they are confronted with projects of this scale because it is in your face that the city is changing, even if we don’t want it to. For the last few years, most of the new supply of housing has been in the Westshore and yes to a smaller degree in Harris Green. The new council in Langford is making it clear that they are going to take a different tact when it comes to approving housing. We might not be seeing the expansion of suburban housing at the rates we have seen over the last many years. As most of you know, I much prefer denser urban housing so I am not totally up in arms about this, but it means that other areas have to start creating the housing that is not being built in Langford. As I have said before, there is no pulling up the bridge, people are moving here and we either build housing at rate in excess of what we have been doing regionally to date, or house prices continue to increase and more people will fail to find adequate housing. If that housing is in Victoria, a lot of it is going to look like this, or at least in my opinion, has to.
But wait you ask… What about the Missing Middle Housing Initiative (MMHI)? I thought that Victoria is going to turn all Single Family Dwellings into six-plexes or townhouses? Well first I will say that overall I support MMHI and think it is an important item for the new council to consider. While I think that there are a couple of gaps in the proposal that was brought forward in the autumn (no discussion of commercial units, no designation of areas for commercial area growth to cater to new residents, no phased approach to focus on arterials where density is needed sooner), overall I want to see our land in the city used more intensely. It will make better communities in the long run and provide much needed housing for families (though still no requirement for 4bd housing is problematic for larger families). The things that MMHI will not do though is make a big difference in our housing supply anytime soon. Again according to the 2021 Census, though the City specific portion, Victoria has about 6685 single family houses. If developers really jumped on it and we saw the city cut down the red-tape for new buildings built under MMHI (Yes even under MMHI there are approvals, just not as many), we could hope to see 1% a year of the SFD lots be redeveloped. That is 67 projects. While some projects can be up to 12 units on a corner, most would be six-plexes or less. So let’s just say all are six-plexes. If we could actually build 67 projects a year, that would be 402 units or housing for 724 people. Keep in mind we need 3300 units of housing to built a year across the region. I think with the permitting that would still be needed and the construction crews that would need to be dedicated to all of these separate projects, 67 is a highly optimistic number and would likely be half that or less. I would love to be wrong on that, and if you work in the industry and think we can do more, please let me know in the comments.
I know that there are a lot of people that support MMHI not so much because they love the housing but because they don’t like high-rises and want a lower profile city. I encourage you to look back to my last article on this project and read about why we can’t turn Victoria into a European city without a massive change of our layout. The TLDR in visual form is here and here. We didn’t build our city in a European way to start. Our roads and the spaces between buildings are too wide. To achieve a European style density, we would have to change everything. I am for it, but it would be a massive project and again not feasible in the time we have to create housing. The last thing I will say on MMHI is that it is unlikely to do much of anything for the second issue of the lack of customers for downtown.
What we need to do is both, build more intensely in our surrounding neighbourhoods while also building high density downtown with projects like Harris Green Village.
As I said before, Harris Green Village will bring in over 1500 housing units across the entire project and do it in a relatively tiny space for that many homes. The project will also provide new downtown recreation space in the second phase near where London Drugs is now.
I do have two concerns about the project, but they are fixable through direction from council.
Ensure design differences between phases - The Hudson Project did this well where each phase looks quite different from another one.
Ensure small space commercial - This project will have a lot of new commercial space. While some will be used by Market on Yates and hopefully London Drugs, I would love to see the vast majority be smaller to encourage less capitalised businesses as well as more specialized types of stores.
We are just over two weeks from the public hearing. I would encourage anyone that has an interest to submit their feelings both for and against this project to City Council. This is their first approval of this scale for them and it will both show how council actually feels about creating housing and set the stage for the next four years. I strongly support this project and I truly hope we can welcome all of these new Victorians to downtown to live, work and support our local businesses!