New details have been added to the Capital Region Board’s land use plans, but St. Albert Mayor Nolan Crouse said they still have more to do.
The board approved proposed regulations last Thursday for new developments, outlining which ones will have to seek the board’s approval.
The new regulations are an extension of the board’s initial rules for developments aimed to make sure new projects wouldn’t interfere with its plan for the region.
Now that the board’s plan for the region has been approved, a new process was put in place Thursday to ensure municipalities are sticking to it.
The board’s regional plan calls for a denser, more transit-oriented development with housing growth concentrated in a handful of priority growth areas. Those areas will have density targets attached to their growth, which will require municipalities to blend in more multi-family homes and could require more infill development in established neighbourhoods.
St. Albert Mayor Nolan Crouse said that is one of the many areas he needs to understand better and that requires clearer regulations.
“There is some lack of understanding and lack of clarity there,” he said. “We are a long ways away from making that clear.”
The board also added some regulations for communities outside of the board’s priority growth areas, including Morinville and most of Sturgeon County.
Any development in those areas that would increase a community’s population by more than 10 per cent would have to be given board approval.
Morinville Mayor Lloyd Bertschi said the idea he would have to send a developer who wanted to build hundreds of homes in Morinville away is ridiculous.
“The fact that we are sitting there as politicians and telling developers where they should go makes no sense,” he said. “That is saying that we know more about this than market forces.”
Bertschi said he was initially optimistic when Morinville was left out of the priority growth areas because he thought it might allow the community to build homes on bigger lots with more space that would be difficult to build in priority growth areas. He said it now appears that might not be the case.
Sturgeon County Mayor Don Rigney said these restrictions would make it very difficult for developers to build homes people want to buy.
“Everybody wants public transit and density, but they want it for their neighbour,” he said. “This will be very detrimental to the entire region.”
Crouse said he recognizes denser development is not popular today, but there are economic pressures forcing that to change.
“The current demand is for single-family homes, larger homes and the current supply is feeding that, but there is some belief that is going to change.”
He said sprawling development only works when land is cheap, but that is changing.
“That model worked when land was deemed to be quite cheap and it is no longer deemed to be quite so cheap,” he said. “The densification is going to be needed if home affordability is going to continue.”
