Is Kelowna running out of room to grow?
Vacant buildable land is getting scarce in Kelowna.
A “permanent growth boundary” imposed by city council limits urban sprawl but that also means it's going to be tough to find space for the 45,000 to 95,000 additional people who are expected to live in the city by 2040.
“If each parcel were to build out to the currently allowed zoning regulation, we have room to accommodate about 96,000 units which equates to a population of approximately 213,000 residents,” Danielle Noble-Brandt, the city’s manager of policy and planning, told iNFOnews.ca in an email. “Currently, we have approximately 72,000 units so we have the capacity to add another 25,000 units.”
The city’s population is around 150,000 (144,576 as of the May, 2021 census and an estimated 5,000 new residents since then).
That means there’s room for 73,000 new residents in those 25,000 homes, or 2.92 people per home.
The census showed 2.3 people per home but, Noble-Brandt said current trends are towards more people per household.
Going by City of Kelowna projections, 45,000 new residents are expected in the city by 2040. That leaves lots of wiggle room for housing and lots of time for the city to amend its Official Community Plan to adjust for that growth, if necessary.
But, if the 13.5% rate of growth in the 2016-21 census period continues, there could actually be another 95,000 people by 2040 so all that land would be used up.
The permanent growth boundary covers massive amounts of land in far flung areas of the city where new housing is not permitted.
For example, the Kettle Valley area of the South Mission is within the growth boundary because it was approved for single-family homes years ago. But the Thomson Flats area is outside of it.
Developers of the Thomson Flats area, bordering on Kettle Valley and the city’s southeastern boundary, proposed about 600 single-family homes. That was turned down by council because it was outside that growth area and city staff said there are already 1,500 single-family lots that can be developed elsewhere in the city.
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“We receive a similar number when we’re talking with city staff,” Dan Winer, executive director of the Canadian Homebuilders Association of the Central Okanagan told iNFOnews.ca. “They acknowledge there is about 1,500 lots. They do believe they have enough to meet the demand of the next 20 years. I think, with the growth we’ve seen over the last five years, it would be fair to have some skepticism around (a) whether the number is accurate and (b) whether it will actually keep up with growth.”
What that means is bulldozing existing buildings in order to get more housing units on each lot.
“The land is there but we have to be creative about how we use it,” Winer said. “More importantly, we have to ensure that the process of redeveloping land is painless for builders who have made a living on building single-family and may now have to transition to townhomes, duplexes, triplexes and more dense forms of construction, particularly with rising costs and unpredictability around interest rates.”
The land base in Kelowna is limited in part because 30% is in the agricultural land reserve and another 10% is zoned agricultural.
Out of the remaining land, only 50% is designated for residential development. The rest of the remaining land is reserved for things like parks (21%), industrial (6%) and commercial (2%). Not to mention all the hillsides that are too steep to build on.
Even if the city is right and there are 1,500 single-family building lots, that still leaves 23,500 homes that need to fit into land that is already mostly developed.
How much of that land is vacant is not really possible to calculate, Noble-Brandt said. That's because, for example, a two-acre parcel that has one house on it would be considered developed even though most of the land is vacant.
The city is currently rewriting its zoning bylaws to make them simpler and more in line with its plans to concentrate new growth into five “urban centres” (downtown, South Pandosy, Capri-Landmark, Midtown (around Orchard Park mall) and Rutland).
Downtown and South Pandosy have been the areas of greatest redevelopment to date. Not only are there numerous highrises in both areas but much of the land is designated RU7, which means single-family homes can easily be replaced by four-plexes.
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That’s not a simple conversion in other parts of the city, such as Rutland or Glenmore, which are still mostly designated as single-family.
“RU7 was a great first step but all it did was make some properties in certain parts of Kelowna more valuable than others,” Winer said, arguing that the RU7 zone should apply throughout the city.
Single-family homes in the RU7 areas often sold for inflated prices so four-plexes could be built.
“When everything has the same value all at once, then it makes it much harder for the market to jack up the prices," Winer said. "If we want to solve housing affordability, the only reasonable way to do it is lower the cost of accessible land and our municipality plays a huge part in that.”
The city's Official Community Plan was adopted earlier this year. It will be reviewed in five years and adjustments will be made, if necessary, to deal with changed conditions, Noble-Brandt said. A full rewrite will be done in 10 years.
The new zoning rules are scheduled to go to a public hearing on June 21 with the expectation that they will be adopted by mid to late summer.
For more information on the new zoning bylaws, go here.
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