Saskatoon council moves to lay the groundwork for housing accelerator

City officials are laying the groundwork to put the federal government's housing accelerator dollars to work building more middle-density units in Saskatoon.

The planning, development and community services committee met Wednesday to formally establish the more than $41 million dollar fund committed to rapidly build 940 housing units over the next three years in Saskatoon.

"We ultimately know we need to provide some flexibility to get projects out there that are viable that can proceed in the timeline," Lesley Anderson, the city's director of planning and development, said to the committee.

"We are going to need a variety of projects out there."

The Housing Accelerator Fund is forcing municipalities across the country to encourage "missing middle" housing and ending exclusionary zoning.

The city is defining missing middle housing "as the gap between single family homes and mid-rise apartment buildings," which are typically up to four storeys, a city report said.

Exclusionary zoning is a regulation that prevents certain types of housing in various parts of the city.

This type of zoning can preserve certain character-defining elements of a neighbourhood, but can result in excluding potential residents because of economic and social factors, which in turn increases the cost of housing and unaffordability.

The intent is to increase the variety of choices in the overall housing stock, while providing more options along the spectrum of affordability.

"We need to focus on affordable housing, and that is the housing that can't simply be unlocked by adjusting regulation. So the half program is designed to ask municipalities to think hard about adjusting regulation and we're going and doing that work, and we're about to go and have immense conversations with our community about that," Councillor Hilary Gough said.

The housing accelerator deal requires that city councillors adopt “as-of-right” development for up to four residential units on a property in all residential areas of the city — meaning it qualifies for construction without requiring discretionary approval. Council must also green-light four storey multi-unit builds within 800 metres of the bus rapid transit corridors.

Questions are being asked about what this sort of change will do to the city's most historic neighbourhoods.

"The fear is that somehow overnight a lot of things are going to change and while that isn't true, I think folks would really like to better understand how we are still considering protection of the general feel of a neighborhood," Coun. Cynthia Block said.

Much of the discussion Wednesday centred around the implications of changing the city's infill policies to allow four homes on a single lot, doubling the current policy of two homes on a lot.

"I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater in terms of what we've been able to achieve and have in place," Mayor Charlie Clark said.

"It's going to be complicated, but I will be interested at the council discussion."

As part of the information report on character home protection, administration examined other cities in Canada going through the same process. Every city legalized up to four-unit as-of-right development to access the funds.

"Based on the experience of other cities that I've learned, it seems achievable. It may mean that it's much harder to fit it on the smallest lots," Clark said.

As the pace to access the funds and build homes quickly, council will need to overhaul zoning requirements over the coming months.

"It's a timeline that no other city has had to do,” Clark said. “They were able to take four years to do that, and we're doing it in months.”

The committee voted to establish a business line for the Housing Accelerator Fund and exempt those projects from certain policies. The character home protection report was received as information and will be discussed further at council's regular business meeting.