City of Burnaby pushes back on provincial housing density rules

The City of Burnaby appears to be pushing back on additional B.C. government requirements to increase housing density.

A public hearing held recently in the city received a lot of comments from residents that they don’t want to see more towers and small-scale multi-unit housing districts.

Two years ago, the B.C. government mandated municipalities to build this multi-unit housing, allowing up to six housing units on single-family home lots. It also eliminated minimum on-site parking requirements.

Burnaby has made some amendments already and now Mayor Mike Hurley is proposing a new motion to the Burnaby City Council to limit zoning to four units on lots of less than 623 square metres and require a minimum of one parking spot per unit.

“I’m not sold on the one-size-fits-all for all municipalities across the province,” Hurley told Global News.

“We have never shied away from density. We have always built the housing that’s needed in our neighbourhood. We have done it in conjunction with our communities and brought our communities along.

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“Right now, we seem to be force-feeding our communities based on what the province has mandated, and I don’t think that’s the right way to go about planning.”

2:19 City of Burnaby holding public hearings on implementing B.C. housing mandates

However, a Burnaby resident and engineer says he is in favour of more housing options, accusing the city of backtracking on density commitments to cater to a vocal minority.

“We can’t have single-family housing with two people living on it, on giant lots,” Ron Braam said.

“Twenty per cent of the population occupying 80 per cent of the housing… It’s not sustainable.”

Braam said everyone knows there’s a housing crisis.

“It’s a crisis of rental availability and affordability, and it’s housing purchase availability and affordability that was their measure to trying to deal with that crisis,” he added.

“The city’s sort of backing away from it, saying, ‘We’ll take it slow’. Slow is not going to do it.”