Council approved a bylaw aimed at promoting densification of housing in the Town of Olds during last week’s meeting.
The Town’s Chief Administrative Officer says it is basically trying to promote building on already existing land versus building new communities on new streets.
Brent Williams says this is important right now for a variety of reasons, but the primary one is the need for housing and affordable housing. He says “We see it locally with Olds College and their growth, especially in the international student market. We see it regionally with some communities building housing very quickly. Provincially and nationally of course it is just a story all around.”
According to Williams, the more complex nature of it to explain is ‘infill development’ versus ‘green field development’, so building in existing communities versus building in new communities. He says “For every new community that is built, that is another street, another sidewalk, another sewer pipe, another water pipe that the Town of Olds has to care for and own. It makes sense financially in the first five or ten, even fifteen years on the property tax return but as we reach twenty years, forty years the cost for that residential infrastructure to the Town of Olds becomes negative.”
Williams adds, the business case to promote growth – building up instead of out is how it is sometimes explained – is certainly not lost on administration for the Town of Olds. He says “Of course higher density housing means generally more affordable housing. Apartments, condos, town houses, duplexes are all in scale more affordable then a single detached house. So, we don’t want to discourage single detached housing like we see in the west areas of town, the northwest areas of town. Those communities are lovely and they will continue to grow, but we have to have a more robust variety of housing stock in Olds to service the needs of not just of the students and the current and future residents, but of the businesses who need to hire staff who actually afford to live in Olds.”
Williams adds, there still is a limit to how high a building can be. However, he notes they have upped that limit for certain areas. So what they call their R3 building, which is their highest density, he says that limit has increase from approximately 12 meters to 22 meters – for instance the current height of the Credit Union building. According to Williams, the height limit in other districts – whether you live in the Vistas or in east Olds – that remains the same, that hasn’t changed.
Williams says the biggest changes as part of the bylaw aimed at promoting densification of housing in the Town of Olds were to parking minimums. He says the Town did require one of the highest per unit parking minimums at 1.75 stalls per unit and that was brought down to a much more competitive number. A tiered requirement for parking minimums will bring Olds more in line with the average requirements in the province for a 1-bedroom unit it will be 1 parking stall, for a 2-bedroom unit it will be 1.25 stalls, and for a 3-bedroom unit it will be 1.5 stalls.