The Curious Case of (Continued) Condo Conversions

Monday's city council meeting agenda has just come out and I don't know if I've ever seen one quite so long. Looks like the the largest chunk of the meeting will be taken up by four condominium conversion applications and the delegations that are coming out to speak for and (mostly) against them.

Alongside them, council will also be considering an apartment complex that is slated to go up at 3275 E Quance Street -- that's way out on the eastern edge of the city.

Taken together, these five items are significant in that they show how, where housing is concerned, the decisions of Regina Planning Commision are completely at odds with the recommendations of the city's Department of Planning and Sustainability. Have to wonder if this doesn't make for some tense dealings between them.

In the case of the condo conversions, city staff recommended all four be denied due to the city's abyssmally low 0.7 percent vacancy rate -- just up from October's 0.5 percent. Despite this, planning commission recommends all four be approved by council.

(For more on the hows and whys of this, check out this post by Whitworth or the condo writeup from the June 4 prairie dog.)

City staff have argued repeatedly that they have to recommend denial for these applications because city policy indicates that they should not be given approval if the vacancy rate is below three per cent. An exemption is granted under the policy if 75 per cent of renters don't object to a conversion and if no one identifies hardship would result from it. The city solicitor's office, however, has advised RPC repeatedly that in their legal opinion that exemption may not be valid under the provincial condominium legislation and they cannot guarantee it would protect the city from litigation.

In an effort to rehabilitate the city's aging multi-unit housing stock, RPC and council continue to approve conversion applications. Considering this track record, it seems pretty likely that the four applications before council on Monday will also be passed -- despite the fact that six community delegations will be coming out speak against them. (Plus, the gallery is expected to be pretty close to full with people alarmed by the conversions.)

At the same time, these could be among the last conversions to come to council before Councillor Clipsham's condo conversion moratorium takes effect. (There are two more applications that are still being negotiated between city staff and the developers.)

As has been pointed out to me by a couple councillors, this moratorium on condo conversions is an unprecedented move for our city council. And, they claim, it should be seen as a decisive move to deal with the affordable housing crunch in the city.

Now, when that conversion moratorium was passed, there were over 20 applications in the queue that the moratorium did not apply to. That represented several hundred rental units. When I pointed this out (seperately) to Councillors Fougere and Flegel, and spoke somewhat preemptively of those units being "lost to the market", both councillors pointed out that each conversion application would be considered on its own merits and there were no guarantees that all or even the majority of them would be approved.

It's worth pointing out now that in the last year and a half, only one condo conversion application has been turned down. (That was the Viva Apartment application. And you can read about the fallout from that here.)

Meanwhile, there's this apartment building that's to be built out on Quance Street. City administration recommended denial on this because of its isolated location (it is faced by a big box store's loading dock on one side, a strip mall parking lot on another, and empty land/Prairie on the other two).

It could be argued that the need for 70 new rental units should override any concerns about building placement. And if this building is approved, that is likely how it will be spun by council.

But by recommending denial, city staff are following the Official Community Plan which states that housing shouldn't be placed scattershot around the city. You shouldn't have lonely apartment buildings surrounded by big box stores and parking lagoons. It doesn't make for a cohesive city.

Moreover, one could argue that this building and another similar complex at 3351 Eastgate Bay which was approved by council back in May are the worst concerns of conversion opponents coming to fruition: namely, that affordable housing in the core of the city will be lost to condo conversion, while new affordable housing -- along with the low income people who rent them -- will be shuffled off to the edge of the city.

Taken altogether -- the condo conversions while the vacancy rate is so low, the new apartments on the edge of the city (and don't get me started on a New Housing Incentives Policy which staff have prepared but Executive Committee has let languish in limbo) -- we have a worrying situation developing where policies are put together, city staff makes recommendations based on those policies but committees and council ignore those policies when it's convenient.

As Diane Delaney, co-ordinator of the Provincial Association of Transition Houses and Services of Saskatchewan, said of the last round of condo conversions:

"The city administration people are recommending not to do this. And these are people who are well educated, experienced professionals that they’ve hired to give them advice and then they consistently ignore what their own administration advises them. And it’s not even like they could replace them with a whole group of other people because any competent city planner would give them the same advice. But for some reason they seem to think they know better. Then one would have to ask, why is that? Why are they making decisions that fly in the face of what their own city planners are recommending? You can leave that open to people to speculate on why that may be."

That city policy and staff recommendations can be overridden so often does not bode well for, say, the Downtown Neighbourhood Plan. It may outline an exciting direction for the city. But it seems there's no guarantee council has to follow it.