More rural complications arise for new provincial housing rules

Fraser Valley Regional District staff say they have uncovered more complications during efforts to apply new provincial housing legislation to the valley’s rural regions.

In November 2023, the provincial government told local governments they would need to follow new rules aimed at increasing the amount of housing available in the province, including allowing secondary suites and increasing density near transit hubs. The new provincial rules also required local governments, including regional districts, to complete an Interim Housing Needs Report to determine just how much more housing they were likely to need.

New rules

The need to report to the province on housing needs has been around since 2019. The newly mandated reports require governments to calculate the total number of homes to satisfy local needs over the next 20 years, among other requirements. But Bill 44 also introduces a new standardized methodology for calculating those housing needs.

The new one-size-fits-all method, though, falls short when it’s applied to rural areas in the Fraser Valley, FVRD staff wrote in a report to the regional district’s board.

(In an email, an FVRD spokesperson told the Current that they are not critiquing the methods the province requires them to use to calculate housing needs and that all methods for doing so will have different problems.)

Previous reports allowed local governments to use a variety of methods to calculate their own future housing requirements, staff write. The new standardized approach uses regional data to determine how housing needs will shift and change—even in places that are not representative of that region.

But that standardized method doesn't take into account the fact that growth rates in electoral areas have historically been different from nearby municipalities. The projections are only available for an entire region; in the Fraser Valley that includes centres like Chilliwack, Abbotsford, and Mission that dwarf rural areas. Staff say that using those regional calculations might inflate the housing needs of the region's rural electoral areas.

Several directors on the board agreed that the policy was troubling in a board meeting on Nov. 28.

Director Simon Gibson, a councillor in Abbotsford, said the new rule is an imposition.

“It’s imposed on us and it doesn’t really match our plan for electoral areas,” he said. “It’s really taking a one-size-fits-all urban model and imposing it in electoral areas.”

Director Peter Adamo of Electoral Area B, one of the rural areas where the new policy is expected to impact calculations, said that the situation was “absolutely absurd.”

While the board largely found the new method passed down frustrating, a broader method of calculating housing needs may have significant upsides, as well.

Population growth in rural areas hasn’t necessarily been adhering to historical precedents in the last few years. Actual growth in rural areas of the valley has already far surpassed the population projections that FVRD planners made for them in 2021. Several big housing developments in rural areas like Popkum and Cultus Lake contributed to the population boom.

And although local governments use previous population growth (plus other factors) to predict housing needs for the future, future growth is itself influenced by housing development, with new homes drawing new residents from elsewhere.

The potential for overestimating future population growth is not the only issue FVRD planners take with the new provincial method.

Current projections imply that most electoral areas in the region will have enough homes for the next five years of expected growth, but FVRD staff say these projections don’t properly account for the current housing supply. Homes that would be considered empty based on census data—like holiday homes in Harrison Mills, or housing for temporary foreign workers on farms—are not actually available housing. Furthermore, homes left in disrepair could also be counted into the valley’s available housing stock.

Last summer, the FVRD applied for and received more time to implement the new housing density rules so that it could assess the risks involved with adding new homes onto existing rural sewer systems and into delicate natural environments.

The board asked FVRD staff to conduct a more thorough investigation into the provincial method and projections at the board meeting on Nov. 28. FVRD staff will share their analysis in a future report.