What's Missing From the Missing Middle?
Cover art from the City of Victoria Missing Middle Design Guidelines
As we saw last week, the City of Victoria council approved the new Missing Middle Housing Initiative (MMI). This is an exciting time to be in Victoria and see how this plays out. I am hopeful this new policy will mean more housing in the core of Greater Victoria for families. Overall, I am very supportive of any plan that will bring more housing to market and also increases the densities in our neighbourhoods surrounding the downtown core. As I wrote in my article last week, this will not solve our housing shortage and since the housing shortage is directly tied to housing costs, it will not do anything for for housing affordability either. That is okay. It is still a good move to be densifying the core of our city. Keep in mind, the actual City of Victoria is tiny, less than 20 square kilometres. As our city will likely continue to grow, having single family homes in what will become downtown adjacent neighbourhoods will make less and less sense.
The plan is not perfect however, and I think that there are two specific areas where the plan fails and for the second one, I think could actual have a negative impact on the livability we are trying to create through densification. The two areas I think where the plan fails, is in its universal application across the city and its failure to accommodate commercial spaces.
Blanket Approaches
While I understand the history of zoning and many of the negative implications that arose from its creation, one thing that it does, especially in conjunction with a well thought out and liberal official community plan, is allow for the city to target areas for unique change. Especially if those nuanced pieces of zoning create economic opportunities for developers. Much of our city’s housing zones were put in place when the city was a much smaller and quieter place than it is now. For this article I am going to be referring to the areas in my neighbourhoods of Oaklands and Fernwood because that is what I know the best, but there are applicable places across the city.
Having not really amended zoning in the city in decades, there are a lot of places where the zoning no longer makes sense. The most obvious of these is along major corridors. In my neighbourhood a good example is the R2 zoning along Cook Street between North Park Village and Hillside on its east side. Cook street is a busy street with marginal transit service and completely inappropriate for either single family homes or duplexes. Really it should be multifamily buildings along the entire stretch. With the change of these lots to include the missing middle addendum, I expect that we will be seeing some developed into larger buildings, but they are going to be still too small for their context. In my opinion there should have been allowance within the bylaw to allow for apartment buildings along major roads on single family lots up to four storeys with 66% site coverage (preferably with no front yard setback). It would have been a simple addition and have allowed for sensible development. I have highlighted in yellow on the map below where I think it would have made sense, but there are numerous others streets around the city where it would also have worked.
Commercial Areas
One of the hoped outcomes of this policy will be increased population density. At the same time we are trying to reduce vehicle movements by having people live near services. We are fortunate in Victoria to have several urban villages scattered across the city that allow people to access stores and services near where they live and even more people once the MMI homes go in. The thing that seems to have been forgotten is that the current urban villages were created for the population densities we have now. If we actually see the hoped uptake on this initiative, the commercial spaces we have now will not be enough. It seems like an easy issue to fix, we can just add additional commercial areas on to the current villages, I am worried that it may be already too late.
Like with arterial roads, we currently have a lot of single family houses in inappropriate locations in the context of our urban villages. Looking at the one closest to my house, Haultain Corners, it is literally surrounding by single family houses and more importantly, houses that are still zoned R1 (Single Family House Only). Given the proximity of single family houses to the urban villages, from a development perspective they make the most sense for the implementation of MMI. Certainly, if I were a developer, having my new housing project have the benefit of a coffee shop 20 metres away would be an easy decision and something very saleable to the public. But if the houses directly surrounding the urban villages are taken over by six-plexes and townhouses, then the village can no longer grow to serve the increasing population base.
This also could have been easily fixed with a further housing type imbedded into MMI that required new projects contiguous or within one or two houses of a current urban village to have a commercial storefront component. Again I have added a map of below, using Oaklands as an example of where I would have either required commercial spaces be added or have removed those houses from MMI until they could be rezoned at a higher level that incorporated commercial. This, like the previous issue, is pervasive across the city. In the map the green is where I would has ensured that commercial would be put in and the red indicates current commercial spaces. I really think this is a critical error in the current policy and one that will in the long-term have a negative effect including the continued need for cars.
We will see on March 23rd if there is a line out the door of City Hall to apply for building permits. Another issue that I found just in writing this post is that the new actual bylaw is nearly impossible to read, especially in comparison to how easy it is to read one of the basic single family housing bylaws. You can read the new one here and an old one here. Needing a lawyer to decipher whether you can actually build on your lot is not a good start.
Overall, I am hopeful that we see some new homes for families with this new policy. I would have loved to have seem some provision for 4 bed homes as they are almost completely unavailable in housing modes besides single family homes. I would love to hear what you think of the new policy and what you are most looking forward to or where it could have been done better. Let us know in the comments.