Housing and affordability

Great question. There are so many community and infrastructure challenges with these rules. Everyone rightly talks about parking, but our power grid in established communities like Walnut Grove and Murrayville is already stressed as more electric vehicles, heat pumps, and air conditioners are added by existing users. We are in a provincial election, and the fastest way to change provincial policy is to push candidates for MLA on these issues. I would encourage you to attend any MLA all-candidate meetings and send them a note asking them to deal with this. After I’m elected on Oct. 17, and after the Oct. 24 provincial vote concludes, I’ll seek a meeting with our new MLAs as soon as possible to discuss this and other issues. If a government is elected that favours these policies, we will work to collect data on the outcomes, share that with other cities and the Union of B.C. Municipalities, and lobby the new housing minister together. Ultimately though, provincial governments hold the hammer on policies like these; we will talk with them, share the impacts felt by the neighbourhood, the Township and the utilities like BC Hydro, and make the case for change.

There's … And that's when timing is money in building pricing. A platform commits to timing. It's time certainty, cost certainty. Those are things that developers … make decisions on … So we need to look at development charge … so that we can continue to grow and offer housing at an affordable price for residents. I will say that it would be great if we as residents had access to the financials so that we could actually see what the true debt is. I think that's something that even our … would love in the decision-making process is to understand truly what the financials are so that they had access to make informed decisions. That's all about transparency. When we talk about respect for taxpayers, transparency is respect.

One of them is to ensure that Willoughby is developing in the right way, ensuring that supply continues inside the urban containment area. We're finishing areas as well that have been opened up for development and ensuring that they're on the supply side. The permitting processes side, a lot of the delays around permitting are occurring at the development level. A lot of them are making applications that are not consistent with bylaws, and there's a lot of back and forth around it. I think there's a lot of work that can be done to improve the feedback loop with the development industry, and it's something that's being … by staff right now. It's really challenging for the local government to focus on the issues that are causing the lack of …, which have been related to immigration, monetary policy at the federal level, and a number of other issues. But what we do at the Township of Langley is take it very seriously. The cost of living is a key issue, which is why we have to continue with the voluntary water metering program, not cancel it. Right? And so this is really, really important that we continue to focus on the cost of owning a home around water and sewer costs, which we are going to get down for … And so there are a number of things that Township can do. And one of them is to ensure that growth continues to pay for growth, to ensure housing is more affordable, property taxes are as affordable as possible, not … And one of that is to … the actual debt level. It's 575 … whatever number they're going to look at tomorrow.

Well, I hate to tell everyone, Tim Baillie, Progress from Langley, that we did speed up the process, the building, especially in residentials. We have greatly and significantly sped up that. But one of the things we did this last term was we created the Housing Trust. That is creating over 200 units for people who live and work in the community. That's firefighters, that's cops, that's nurses, people that you need to have in the community. And we are right now up on our sixth story on the first build, and we are making great progress in the Aldergrove one. So we have already taken very significant steps towards housing for people who live and work in the community.

Thank you for the question Cory, and absolutely and I think we've been hearing a lot from the business community that the Township is quite unpredictable when it comes to development applications We're constantly hearing that the goalpost is moving and it's making it more challenging for businesses and developers so we would look to implement digital permitting and something similar to a 3-1-1 model that you are seeing in other municipalities I think we can learn from other municipalities on how they're doing it and how they're speeding up the permitting and licensing process because time is money and that cost is being put back on to the buyer or the tenant and that could be both from the residential or the commercial space Additionally when it comes to DCCs we do need to obviously use them because we do need to have growth paid for in some way when it comes to development cost charges but we also do need to diversify our industrial tax base and we need to expand and we need to look to continue with expanding and protecting employment lands across the Township Thank you.

So, earlier this term we as a Council we were actually in this room where we met with consultation with TransLink we're working on the 2040 plan so there's three corridors or there's one … with three urban villages and in those hubs those are where we can we can build you know higher density places where people can work live they can get on the on the BRT get to the SkyTrain so we need to look at where density belongs which is on our 200th Street corridor and where people can actually get to work get to the Highway get to the SkyTrain I think that's you know a good place to start and yeah thank you.

So, I think one of the things I would maybe suggest is freezing the DCC's development charges and also continue making improvements and administrative processes. Um And always just to listen and collaborate with the community and people in those neighborhoods I think it's also important when you're planning neighborhoods to um look at each neighborhood and see what their um characteristic and histories are, history, um community history is, and prioritize that. Um Yeah, I think that's the only things I can think of right now. Thank you.

Thanks, Cory. Tess Rouse with Progress for Langley. So number one, our team wants to create a complete community. Steve Ferguson would say, we want Langley to be livable. And so what that means, you know, current Council has created the Langley housing trust, and right now I believe there's over 250 units coming online, being built and developed that are 30% below market rate to create affordable housing. This is something that the Township actually has control over. We get to ensure that those bedrooms are actually put here within our community. We also need to look at projects like Gloucester and the recent bus and transit routes that were just upgraded to ensure people can actually, you know, live here as well as work here. Some people don't have a car. We need to ensure that transit is part of our transportation and mobility strategy. And so all of those things collectively need to create complete livable communities where people can work, play, and live. Thank you.

I think one of the biggest things is learning from other municipalities. BC housing, for example, has been working on different, albeit … what are they pilot projects, and that will work with modular housing. And these are one ways to work with it within the Township. Working with government as well, bringing in, making sure that we have a projection into the future, making sure that our infrastructure will support the growth. I think at this time, although we keep talking about ai and not liking it or stuff like that. But in reality, these are tools that we can use to project what we are going to see. We know that by 2050, we will have about 240,000 people in Langley. So it's important to have that projection, looking at the infrastructure. … Bring data-driven solutions, not just numbers thrown out here and there and sitting down with different aspects of government. One way that we actually employed here, it was the integrated project delivery method. Which is sitting with different government levels, sitting with different community members, sitting with different organizations that actually support housing in Township of Langley. Thank you.

That's another loaded question. I think the greatest gift that we can give, Michele St. Germain, Progress for Langley, is give a listening ear. I think it's important that no matter what we do, we need to listen to what the people are asking and what is required to do what we need to do. And that's what I would do. I would listen and then take whatever I hear, take it to the table, and try and figure out how we go from right to left to right, to move forward. Thank you.

Teresa Townsley Langley Strong. One thing that the township directly controls is the cost of time and the cost of approvals. As a business owner, I understand that a permitting delay has real costs in the real world. So I would put firm service standards on permit and development decisions. I would track files transparently and remove needless duplication. Carrying costs during long delays don't disappear. They actually are eventually reflected in the price or rent of our homes. So that won't solve affordability on its own, but it is a concrete municipal lever at our disposal.

I … would agree with what I've heard in terms of the processing time for applications. It's critical. As Lauren said, time is money And, and that is a critical aspect of the whole process. I think we need to do more, as Blair mentioned, about leveraging technology to actually process permit applications and plan plans that are being submitted. There's a lot of advancement that has taken place in many other communities throughout BC that are doing this. For me, the critical thing about the whole housing aspect, which feeds into our finances, is actually what we're charging for DCCs. And I'm going to bring it back to that because right now, from my perspective, we are undercharging on DCCs. And it is it is creating a structural deficit within our community. And that means that if we're not charging enough, in the end, taxpayers hold the bill. They are the ones that are having to cover the gap between what should have been charged for infrastructure going in versus the reality of what they're being charged. So, thank you.

Leith White, Independent Candidate, time is money, and it's the one lever that the township can really move is the aspect of time, and that's processing applications. Every month, a project sits in the queue, it carries costs, and those costs get carried and passed forward on to consumers. The other thing I would suggest is ensuring that hiring and staffing for this particular area is adequate and sufficient, because there can't be those sort of delays that hold back these projects, as well as the use of digital processing, vital that we use the technology that's available. The other aspect is, thank you.

Yeah thank you The most important thing that we can do and control is time How long does it take to get permitting and to be able to get the appropriate permits to build the housing that we need Langley … has not done a great job in that. In fact, we got an F rating recently in the small independent business rating of how well we do with permitting and getting small businesses to be able to move forward. And development, building houses, is a small business. So that's the first thing. How do we manage time? That We can manage that. Second thing that we need to do is a great job of consulting with the people around to discover what kinds of housing are they looking for and where does that fit best for us to provide in the community. It's critical. That we look at ways that we can process our timing faster. One of them is a 3-1-1 tracking system, which allows people to see online how they do with their permitting process. They can see exactly where it sits in the line. They can see how it moves along and have very specific standards set for the Township of Langley staff on how quickly these permits have to be processed. That'll get housing done quickly and fast and at a at a much cheaper rate.

Thank you, Blair Whitmarsh, Langley Strong. I think there's a common theme here, and that is that we need to be quicker at our permits, quicker in making our decisions to help developers get their approvals so they can begin to build, and to not hold things up. We're talking to other developers in the community. Langley is still one of the slower communities in the region at getting those things completed, so it is about time. We also are doing development cost-charge review. Let's bring it into the public and make sure that the public can see what happens in that review. No hiding it. Get it done. Make it open. Thank you.