Pickering reviews density caps - Downtown density
NRU
March 8, 2017
By Andrew Cohrs
To spur construction of housing in its downtown core, Pickering is considering the removal of residential density caps in the city centre. The proposal is seen as a way to even the playing field among developers with different-sized properties and, at the same time, meet the municipality’s intensification targets.
Since its adoption of a downtown vision for intensification and investment more than five years ago, Pickering has been considering ways to facilitate redevelopment while promoting a suitable built form in the city centre. For example, an official plan amendment in 2013 increased population and employment targets and a 2017 city centre zoning bylaw set minimum and maximum fsi permissions.
Chief planner Catherine Rose told NRU that restricting density by using a maximum permitted number of units per hectare has proved to be challenging and unfair to some developers. Staff are
recommending removal of the current maximum of 570 units per hectare in Pickering’s city centre. Rose said that the permitted density is, in fact, quite high compared to other urban growth centres. She adds that the city has started to see a decrease in unit sizes, resulting in more units within the same gross floor space and causing proposals to surpass the number of permitted units.
She also noted that calculating net residential density on a per-hectare basis was unfair for larger properties where their size could trigger a requirement to convey some of the site for public uses, such as a community centre. Since the portion of land taken for public use is removed from the net residential density calculation, the policy was seen as unfairly constraining the number of units allowed on a site despite them meeting fsi requirements.
“Landowners are in fact penalized because of the features they happen to have and because they were some of the larger owners, they got the location of community facilities,” said Rose. She added that staff saw the emergence of two trends: a decrease in unit sizes and what she said seemed to be an unfair
penalizing of landowners because of the density cap as well as constraints on staff’s ability to be flexible about unit size, respond to the market and still ensure the construction of community facilities. “Those
were some of the precipitating occurrences that got us thinking about [removing density caps],” said Rose.
She said that a few stakeholders have expressed concerns about the impact of removing unit maximums, but contends that doing so will not necessarily compromise city infrastructure or the built form.
“We’ve got floor space index as a control in both the official plan and the zoning
by-law...and performance criteria on size of towers and setbacks so we’ve got the basic form of the development controlled...[Developers] still, of course, need to go through site planning and at the site plan stage there will be the required technical studies on traffic [and] stormwater to look at the impacts of increased development.”
Another underlying factor for reconsidering density maximums is the targets set out in the growth plan. As an urban growth centre, downtown Pickering is required to accommodate 200 people and jobs per ha. Ward 3 councillor David Pickles told NRU that removing the density caps will allow the municipality to be more flexible with development proposals, create opportunities for innovative building proposals and facilitate the creation of more affordable units.
“By looking at density in this way, we have some greater flexibility to look at builders who come in with an innovative project...It may have a positive effect of introducing some flexibility and helping to have a better mix of [units].”
Rose agrees, saying that removing a per-unit density cap would facilitate downtown redevelopment.
She said staff’s recommendations would put in place regulations to make city centre properties “development ready” and thus avoid additional official plan or zoning by-law amendments that could length the application processing time.
