District of North Vancouver council members will soon get a running tally of the number of new housing units they’ve got coming in the pipeline.
The change comes at the request of Coun. Lisa Muri who brought a motion to council Monday night, noting that, with an election coming in the fall, regular updates from staff would allow council “the opportunity to consider the appropriate phasing for development and creates the awareness required for appropriate decision making.”
A preliminary count by staff found 3,746 units somewhere in the application phase that had not yet come before council for a vote, although those numbers are subject to change as development proposals are altered or shelved before they reach council chambers.
Numbers on housing starts released by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. Tuesday show 886 units received building permits from the district in the first quarter of 2018, the largest quarterly growth in CMHC’s data dating back to 1990. The highest ever annual total by the district is 816, set in 2016. During the first quarter of 2018, the City of North Vancouver granted permits for 536 new units and the District of West Vancouver had 145 housing starts.
Council watcher Corrie Kost compiled his own list of incoming new units and came up with 8,780, although his totals include all projects back to 2011, some of which, according to staff, were abandoned.
Council’s support for Muri’s motion for more data on development applications in 2018 was unanimous but each member of council used the official debate period to sound off on their own issues related to housing – too much development, expensive home prices, construction impacts, displacement of renters and renovictions, not enough below-market rental units being built, rising rents, a lack of incentives for landlords to do upkeep on their suites, aging of rental stock, the cost of single-family homes being out of reach for middle-income earners, more traffic on the roads from commuters who cannot afford to live on the North Shore, and whether the district was overshooting its expectations for development under the official community plan.
