September 10, 2024, at 1:00 PM

Original link

The meeting is called to order at 1:01 PM; it being noted that Councillor S. Hillier was in remote attendance.

1.   Disclosures of Pecuniary Interest

That it BE NOTED that no pecuniary interests were disclosed.

2.   Consent

Moved by S. Lewis

Seconded by C. Rahman

That Items 2.1 and 2.2 BE APPROVED.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

2.1   Planning and Development and Building Housing Update - 2024 Year-To-Date

2024-09-10 Staff Report - (2.1) Planning and Development and Building Monthly Housing Update

Moved by S. Lewis

Seconded by C. Rahman

That the staff report dated September 10, 2024 entitled “Planning and Development and Building Housing Update - 2024 Year-To-Date” BE RECEIVED for information.

Motion Passed

2.2   Adjustments to Appointment By-law for Deputy and Chief Building Officials

2024-09-10 SR - DRAFT - Appointment By-law - Report - Aug 2024_Rev

Moved by S. Lewis

Seconded by C. Rahman

That, on the recommendation of the Deputy City Manager, Planning and Economic Development, the proposed by-law appended to the staff report dated September 10, 2024 as Appendix “A”, BE INTRODUCED at Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024, to repeal and replace By-law No. B.-98-166, being “A by-law to appoint the Chief Building Official and Inspectors under the Building Code Act, 1992, S.O. 1992, c.23, for the purposes of enforcement of the said Act”, and to repeal By-law No. A.-8114-165, being “A by-law to appoint Peter Kokkoros as the Chief Building Official.”

Motion Passed

3.   Scheduled Items

3.1   2-4 Audrey Avenue and 186-188 Huron Street (Z-9755)

2024-09-10 SR - Z-9755 - 2-4 Audrey Avenue 186-188 Huron Street (MH)

Moved by S. Lewis

Seconded by S. Franke

That, on the recommendation of the Director, Planning and Development, the following actions be taken with respect to the application by KAP Holdings Inc. (c/o Zelinka Priamo Ltd.), relating to the property located at 2-4 Audrey Avenue and 186-188 Huron Street:

a)    the proposed by-law appended to the staff report dated September 10, 2024 as Appendix “A” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024, to amend Zoning By-law No. Z.-1, (in conformity with the Official Plan for the City of London, 2016), to change the zoning of the subject property FROM a Residential R1 Special Provision (R1-5(3)) Zone TO a Residential R6 Special Provision (R6-5(_)) Zone;

b)    the Site Plan Approval Authority BE REQUESTED to consider the following design issues through the site plan process:

i)    screen all parking areas from the public roadway with enhanced all season landscaping, as well as from neighbouring properties to mitigate any noise or light pollution;

ii)    relocate the proposed bicycle parking to be separate from the proposed waste collection area;

iii)    explore opportunities to incorporate additional short and long-term bicycle parking on site;

iv)    provide a fully integrated pedestrian connection through the central parking area by shifting the southern spur sidewalk and providing an accessible pedestrian crossover;

v)    provide a common outdoor amenity space on site; and,

vi)    ensure units fronting the public streets are oriented to the street by including the principal unit entrance (front door) on the street-facing elevation;

it being noted that the Planning and Environment Committee received the following communications with respect to these matters:

  •    a communication dated August 2, 2024 from S. Bentley, Interim President, Broughdale Community Association;

  •    a communication dated September 5, 2024 from S.G.A. Pitel;

  •    a communication dated September 8, 2024 from D. Bartlett, President, London Neighbhourhood Community Association, Inc.; and,

  •    a communication dated August 17, 2024 from M. Ratcliffe and R. Millard, Professors Emeriti, Western University;

it being pointed out that the following individuals made verbal presentations at the public participation meeting held in conjunction with these matters:

  •    D.Sikelero Elsenbruch, Planner, Zelinka Priamo Ltd.;

  •    B. Lansink;

  •    S. Pitel;

  •    M. Blosh, Broughdale Community Association;

  •    M. Wodchis-Johnson, Vice President, External Affairs, University Students Council, Western University;

  •    S. Skape;

  •    D. Bartlett, London Neighbourhood Association; and,

  •    D. Fortney;

it being further noted that the Municipal Council approves this application for the following reasons:

  •    the recommended amendment is consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement, 2020 (PPS), which encourages the regeneration of settlement areas and land use patterns within settlement areas that provide for a range of uses and opportunities for intensification and redevelopment. The PPS directs municipalities to permit all forms of housing required to meet the needs of all residents, present and future;

  •    the recommended amendment conforms to The London Plan, including but not limited to the Key Directions, City Building policies, the Neighbourhoods Place Type policies; and,

  •    the recommended amendment would permit an appropriate form of redevelopment at an intensity that can be accommodated on the subject lands and is considered compatible with the surrounding neighbourhood;

it being acknowledged that any and all oral and written submissions from the public, related to this application have been, on balance, taken into consideration by Council as part of its deliberations and final decision regarding these matters.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

Additional Votes:

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by C. Rahman

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

Moved by S. Lewis

Seconded by C. Rahman

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

3.2   1550 and 1602 Sunningdale Road West (Z-9764)

2024-09-10 Staff Report - (3.2) 1550 and 1602 Sunningdale Road West

Moved by C. Rahman

Seconded by S. Lewis

That, on the recommendation of the Director, Planning and Development, the following actions be taken with respect to the application by Foxwood Development (London) Inc., relating to the properties located at 1550 and 1602 Sunningdale Road West:

a) the proposed by-law appended to the staff report dated September 10, 2024 as Appendix “A” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024, to amend Zoning By-law No. Z.-1, (in conformity with the Official Plan for the City of London, 2016), to change the zoning of the subject property FROM a Holding Residential R5 and R6 (hh-53h-54h-100h-144R5-6/R6-5) Zone, a Holding Residential R5 and R6 (hh-53h-54h-100R5-6/R6-5) Zone, a Holding Residential R5 and R6 (hh-53h-54h-100h-110R5-6/R6-5) Zone, a Holding Residential R1 (hh-100R1-13) Zone, and a Holding Residential R1 Special Provision (h-110*R1-10(8)) Zone TO a Residential R5 and R6 Special Provision (R5-6()/R6-5()) Zone, a Residential R1 and R3 (R1-13/R3-1) Zone, and a Residential R1 (R1-3) Zone;

b) the Approval Authority BE ADVISED that no issues were raised at the public meeting with respect to the application for the properties located at 1550 and 1602 Sunningdale Road West; and,

c)    the Site Plan Approval Authority BE REQUESTED to consider the following design issues through the site plan process:

i) provision of short-term public bicycle parking in the development of each block through the site plan process;

ii) street oriented design and safe and accessible pedestrian connections; 

iii) landscaping to include a minimum 50% native species, with no invasive species planted;

iv) no laneway or parking areas adjacent to any Civic Boulevards;

v) provide pedestrian connections from Capris Cres to Sunningdale Road West and from Ethan Circle to Hyde Park Road;

it being pointed out that the following individual made a verbal presentation at the public participation meeting held in conjunction with these matters:

  • M. Paluch, Intermediate Planner, Monteith Brown Planning Consultants;

it being further noted that the Municipal Council approves this application for the following reasons:

  • the recommended amendments are consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement 2020;

  • the recommended amendments conform to The London Plan; and,

  • the recommended amendments will permit development that is considered appropriate and compatible with the existing and future land uses surrounding the subject lands;

it being acknowledged that any and all oral and written submissions from the public, related to this application have been, on balance, taken into consideration by Council as part of its deliberations and final decision regarding these matters.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

Additional Votes:

Moved by C. Rahman

Seconded by S. Lewis

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

Moved by C. Rahman

Seconded by S. Lewis

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

3.3   3975 Stewart Avenue (Z-9754)

2024-09-10 Staff Report (3.3) - 3975 Steward Ave

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by C. Rahman

That, on the recommendation of the Director, Planning and Development, the following actions be taken with respect to the application by Sifton Properties Limited, relating to the property located at 3975 Stewart Avenue:

a) the proposed by-law appended to the staff report dated September 10, 2024 as Appendix “A” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024, to amend Zoning By-law No. Z.-1, (in conformity with the Official Plan for the City of London, 2016), to change the zoning of the subject property FROM a Holding Residential R5 and R6 Special Provision (hh-100h-198*R5-4(23)/R6-5(51)) Zone, TO a Residential R5 and R6 Special Provision (R5-4()/R6-5() Zone; and,

b) the Site Plan Approval Authority BE REQUESTED to consider the following design issues through the site plan process:

i) provision of short-term public bicycle parking in the development of each block through the site plan process; 

ii) street oriented design and safe and accessible pedestrian connections;

iii) landscaping to include a minimum 50% native species, with no invasive species planted;

iv) investigate renewal sources of energy such as solar for the roof and sides of the building, and geothermal for interior heating and cooling;

v) investigate air source heat pump options; and,

vi) apply bird friendly policies using the CSA standard;

it being pointed out that the following individual made a verbal presentation at the public participation meeting held in conjunction with these matters:

  • D. Posthumus, Sifton Properties Limited;

it being further noted that the Municipal Council approves this application for the following reasons:

  • the recommended amendment is consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement, 2020;

  • the recommended amendment conforms to The London Plan;

  • the recommended amendment conforms to the Southwest Area Secondary Plan; and,

  • the recommended amendment will permit development that is considered appropriate and compatible with the existing and future land uses surrounding the subject lands;

it being acknowledged that any and all oral and written submissions from the public, related to this application have been, on balance, taken into consideration by Council as part of its deliberations and final decision regarding these matters.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

Additional Votes:

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by C. Rahman

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

Moved by S. Lewis

Seconded by C. Rahman

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

3.4   80 and 82 Base Line Road West (Z-9750) 

2024-09-10 SR - (3.4) 80 and 82 Base Line Road West

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by S. Lewis

That, the following actions be taken with respect to the application by 13759741 Canada Inc. (c/o Strik, Baldinelli, Moniz Ltd.), relating to the property located at 80-82 Base Line Road West:

a) the proposed revised, attached by-law as Appendix “A” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024, to amend Zoning By-law No. Z.-1, (in conformity with the Official Plan for the City of London, 2016), to change the zoning of the subject property FROM a Residential R9 (R9-7*H45) Zone TO a Residential R9 Special Provision (R9-7(_)*H30) Zone;

b)    The Site Plan Approval Authority BE REQUESTED to consider the following design issues through the site plan process:

i) the applicant shall provide a revised water servicing report through the Site Plan Approval process; 

ii) landscaping to include at minimum 50% native species, with no invasive species planted;

iii) investigate renewable sources of energy such as solar for the roof and sides of the building, and geothermal for interior heating and cooling;

iv) investigate air source heat pump options;

v) apply bird friendly policies using the CSA standard; and,

vi) consultation with the Municipal Housing Development division for the provision of affordable housing units and entering into a Tenant Placement Agreement for existing tenants;

it being noted that the applicant has expressed interest in using mass timber construction, which is encouraged by Council in support of the Climate and Emergency Action Plan;

it being noted that the Planning and Environment Committee received the following communication with respect to these matters:

  • a communication dated September 6, 2024 from S. Rasanu, Planner and Project Lead, Strik Baldinelli Moniz;

it being pointed out that the following individuals made verbal presentations at the public participation meeting held in conjunction with these matters:

  • S. Rasanu, Planner and Project Lead, Strik Baldinelli Moniz;

  • J. Chichendt; and,

  • C. Rorke;

it being further noted that the Municipal Council approves this application for the following reasons:

  • the amendment is consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement, 2020 (PPS), which encourages the regeneration of settlement areas and land use patterns within settlement areas that provide for a range of uses and opportunities for intensification and redevelopment. The PPS directs municipalities to permit all forms of housing required to meet the needs of all residents, present and future.

  • the amendment conforms to The London Plan, including but not limited to the Key Directions, City Design and Building policies, Neighbourhoods Place Type policies; and will facilitate a built form that contributes to achieving a compact City; and,

  • the recommended amendment would facilitate the redevelopment of an underutilized parcel of land with a scale and intensity that is appropriate for the site and surrounding context;

it being acknowledged that any and all oral and written submissions from the public, related to this application have been, on balance, taken into consideration by Council as part of its deliberations and final decision regarding these matters.

Motion Passed (4 to 1)

Additional Votes:

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by C. Rahman

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

Moved by C. Rahman

Seconded by S. Lewis

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

3.5   1338-1388 Sunningdale Road E (Z-9740)

2024-09-10 Staff Report - (3.5) 338-1388 Sunningdale Road East FINAL_Redacted

Moved by C. Rahman

Seconded by S. Lewis

That, the following actions be taken with respect to the application by Auburn Homes Inc. (c/o Steve Stapleton), relating to the property located at 1338-1388 Sunningdale Road East:

a) the proposed revised by-law appended to the Planning and Environment Committee Added Agenda as Appendix “A” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024 to amend Zoning By-law No. Z.-1, (in conformity with the Official Plan for the City of London, 2016), to change the zoning of the subject property FROM a Residential R1 (R1-14) Zone, Urban Reserve (UR3) Zone, and a holding Urban Reserve (h-2UR3) Zone on a portion of the lands TO a holding compound Residential R5 Special Provision/Residential R6 Special Provision/Residential R7 Special Provision (hR5-4(  )/R6-5(  )/ R7H22D100) Zone, Open Space Special Provision (OS5(  )) Zone and an Open Space (OS5) Zone;

b) the Site Plan Approval Authority BE REQUESTED to consider the following design issues through the site plan process:

i) provide a shared amenity space that is purposeful and large enough to support the number of residents anticipated at the development, a site layout that addresses the public realm; and built form that is located close to the public street; 

ii) ensure the interior side yards adequately are buffered from the adjacent properties, and the principal entrances for units fronting Sunningdale Rd E are oriented towards the street with direct walkway access from individual units; 

iii) ensure a network of pedestrian walkways are included throughout the site to provide connections between buildings, parking areas, amenity spaces and Sunningdale Road East and a site playout that maximizes the visual exposure of the open space to the rest of the development; and,

iv) ensure the pedestrian circulation on site allows for future connections to the future multi-use pathway to be accommodated within the ESA buffer;

it being noted that the Planning and Environment Committee received the following communications with respect to these matters:

  • a revised by-law; and,

  • a communication dated August 2, 2024, from J. Uribe and M. Alcocer;

it being pointed out that the following individual made a verbal presentation at the public participation meeting held in conjunction with these matters:

  • A. Vandersluis, Development Manager, Auburn Developments;

it being further noted that the Municipal Council approves this application for the following reasons:

- the recommended amendment is consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement, 2020 (PPS), which encourages the regeneration of settlement areas and land use patterns within settlement areas that provide for a range of uses and opportunities for intensification and redevelopment. The PPS directs municipalities to permit all forms of housing required to meet the needs of all residents, present and future; 

- the recommended amendment conforms to The London Plan, including, but not limited to the Key Directions, City Design and Building, Our Tools, Environmental policies, and the Neighbourhoods Place Type policies; 

  • the recommended amendment would apply zones that permit a range of residential uses with appropriate forms and intensities for the context of the site and surrounding neighbourhood; and,

  • the recommended amendment supports Council’s commitment to increase housing supply and affordability;

it being acknowledged that any and all oral and written submissions from the public, related to this application have been, on balance, taken into consideration by Council as part of its deliberations and final decision regarding these matters.

(5 to 0)

Additional Votes:

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by C. Rahman

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

Moved by C. Rahman

Seconded by S. Lewis

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

3.6   Heights Review/Transit Village/Major Shopping Area (OZ-9726, OZ-9727, O-9752 and O-9753)

2024-09-10 SR - O-9752 OZ-9726 OZ-9727 O-9693 Heights Transit Village Major Shopping Areas (SF SB)

Moved by Mayor J. Morgan

Seconded by S. Lewis

That, the following actions be taken with respect to Phase 2 of the Section 26 Official Plan Review of The London Plan:

a) the proposed revised by-law to be provided at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024 as Appendix “A” to adopt Phase 2 of the Section 26 Review of The London Plan, BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024 and BE FORWARDED to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing for approval;

it being noted that the alternative by-law includes the following changes:

i) change the Place Type for the lands along Richmond Street from Kent Street to Epworth Avenue, and Western Road from Windermere Road to Sunnyside Drive, from Rapid Transit Corridor to Urban Corridor on Map 1 – Place Types; 

ii) remove Transit Village at Richmond Street and Oxford Street East on Map 1 – Place Types; 

iii) amend Figure 5 to remove the Transit Village at Richmond Street and Oxford Street East; 

iv) amend Figure 14 to remove the Transit Village at Richmond Street and Oxford Street East;

v) reclassify the following portions of the Rapid Transit Boulevard from Rapid Transit Boulevard to Civic Boulevard and remove the Rapid Transit Stations on Map 3 – Street Classifications:  

A) Richmond Street from Central Avenue to Epworth Avenue,

B) Western Road from Lambton Drive to Richmond Street,

C) Richmond Street from Western Road to Fanshawe Park Road,  

vi) reclassify Clarence Street from Dundas Street to Central Avenue from Rapid Transit Boulevard to Neighbourhood Connector and remove the Rapid Transit Station on Map 3 – Street Classifications;

vii) amend the height of Transit Villages to 35 storeys; 

viii) delete Table 9 and amend Table 8 to include a maximum height of 25 storeys within the Rapid Transit Corridor Place Type;

ix) add a policy within the Rapid Transit and Urban Corridor Place Type chapter to permit a maximum height of 25 storeys in a Rapid Transit Corridor and 15 storeys within an Urban Corridor, and maintain the existing minimum height; 

x) amend Neighbourhoods Place Type Table 10 to permit stacked townhouses along all Neighbourhood Connectors; 

xi) amend Neighbourhoods Place Type Table 11 to permit a height of 10 storeys for development at the intersection of a Civic Boulevard or Urban Thoroughfare with another Civic Boulevard or Urban Thoroughfare;

b) the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing BE ADVISED that Municipal Council declares that Phase 2 of the Section 26 Review of The London Plan does not conflict with provincial plans, has regard to the matters of provincial interest, and is consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement;

c) the proposed revised by-law to be provided at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024 as Appendix “B” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024, and BE GIVEN two readings, to amend Zoning By-law No. Z.-1, (in conformity with the Official Plan for the City of London as amended in part a) above), to amend Figure 4.19 Areas Exempt from Minimum Parking Standards; it being noted that the third reading of the by-law would occur at such time as the Official Plan Amendment described in part a) above is approved and in-force;

d) pursuant to subsection 34(17) of the Planning Act, no further notice be given;  

 

e) the Civic Administration BE DIRECTED to monitor implementation of this amendment and report back with possible further amendments after one year of the approved by-law, including Transit Villages;  

 

it being noted that the Site Plan Control By-law and Zoning By-law will be included in a future review to implement this amendment and address the recommendations of the London Height Framework Review report (July 2024) prepared by SVN Architects and Planners;

it being noted that the Planning and Environment Committee received the following communications with respect to these matters:

  •    a communication dated August 27, 2024 from A. Haasen, Project Manager, Planning and Development, Sifton Properties Limited;

  •    the staff presentation;

  •    a revised recommendation from Mayor J. Morgan;

  •    a communication dated September 5, 2024 from M. Wallace, Executive Director, London Development Institute;

  •    a communication dated September 6, 2024 from J.M. Fleming, Principal, City Planning Solutions, on behalf of Tricar Properties;

  •    a communication dated September 6, 2024 from A. Vandersluis, Development Manager, Auburn Developments;

  •    two communications dated September 6, 2024 from L. Jamieson, Zelinka Priamo Ltd., on behalf of Wonderland Power Center Inc.;

  •    a communication dated September 3, 2024 from J. Unrau and R. Daneff;

  •    a communication dated September 6, 2024 from C. Kulchycki, Senior Associate, Zelinka Priamo Ltd., on behalf of 785 Wonderland Road Inc.;

  •    a communication dated September 6, 2024 from J.M. Fleming, Principal, City Planning Solutions, on behalf of 100 Kellogg Lane;

  •    a communication dated September 5, 2024 from Dr. R. Forrester-Jones, et. al.);

  •    a communication dated September 5, 2024 from J. Zaifman, CEO, London Home Builders’ Association;

  •    a communication dated September 5, 2024 from C. Butler; and,

  •    a communication dated September 6, 2024 from P. King;

it being pointed out that the following individuals made verbal presentations at the public participation meeting held in conjunction with these matters:

  •    A. Kaplansky, KAP Holdings;

  •    S. Elson, Member, First St. Andrew’s United Church;

  •    C. Butler;

  •    M. Wallace, Executive Director, London Development Institute;

  •    P. Mancini;

  •    S. Levin;

  •    J. Devechenzo;

  •    T. Holness;

  •    J. Farquar;

  •    G. Hickling;

  •    E. Gilckinson;

  •    J. Unrau;

  •    S. Brand;

  •    K. Hall;

  •    J.M. Fleming, City Planning Solutions;

  •    J. Zaifman, London Home Builders Association;

  •    M. Blosh, Broughdale Community Association;

  •    C. Kulchycki, Zelinka Priamo Ltd.;

  •    R. Forrester-Jones;

  •    A. Vandersluis, Auburn Developments;

  •    S. Scape;

  •    T. Jones;

  •    M. Moussa; and,

  •    R. Danuff;

it being further noted that the Municipal Council approves this application for the following reasons:

The proposed amendments are consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement 2020 as multiple policies within the PPS support intensification, including:

  •    Healthy, liveable and safe communities are sustained by accommodating an appropriate range and mix of residential types (including additional residential units) (1.1.1.b).

  •    Healthy, liveable and safe communities are sustained by ensuring that necessary infrastructure and public service facilities are or will be available to meet current and projected needs (1.1.1.g).

  •    Appropriate development standards should be promoted which facilitate intensification, redevelopment and compact form, while avoiding or mitigating risks to public health and safety (1.1.3.4).

  •    Planning authorities are also required to “establish and implement minimum targets for intensification and redevelopment within built-up areas…” (1.1.3.5).

  •    Planning authorities shall provide for an appropriate range and mix of housing options and densities to meet projected market-based and affordable housing needs of current and future residents of the regional market area by permitting and facilitating all types of residential intensification, including additional

residential units, and redevelopment in accordance with policy 1.1.3.3. (1.4.3b).

And the proposed amendments are consistent with the proposed PPS 2024 coming into effect October 2024 including:

  •    The addition of the Major Shopping Area Place Type will meet the intent of this proposed 2024 PPS policy section by ‘encouraging the repurposing, reformatting, infill and intensification of existing centres to take advantage of existing services, use land more efficiently, and reduce the need for outward expansion’ (876.4) and permitting a broad range of land uses (877.1).

  •    Complies and aligns with the PPS 2024 new component to Identify Strategic growth areas (SGA) within settlement areas, nodes, corridors, and other areas that have been identified by municipalities to be the focus for accommodating intensification and higher-density mixed uses in a more compact built form;

it being acknowledged that any and all oral and written submissions from the public, related to this application have been, on balance, taken into consideration by Council as part of its deliberations and final decision regarding these matters.

Motion Passed (6 to 0)

Additional Votes:

Moved by S. Lewis

Seconded by S. Franke

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (6 to 0)

Moved by C. Rahman

Seconded by S. Lewis

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (6 to 0)

Moved by C. Rahman

Seconded by S. Franke

G) amend Neighbourhoods Place Type Table 10 to permit stacked townhouses along primary transit routes;

Motion Failed (1 to 5)

Moved by S. Lewis

Seconded by C. Rahman

Motion to grant the Mayor an extension of five minutes.

Motion Passed (6 to 0)

3.7   Protected Major Transit Station Areas Zoning Review (OZ-9749)

2024-09-10 Staff Report (3.7) OZ-9749 PMTSA Zoning Review (KK)

Moved by Mayor J. Morgan

Seconded by S. Lewis

That, the following actions be taken with respect to the application by The Corporation of the City of London, relating to Protected Major Transit Station Areas (PMTSAs): 

a)    the proposed revised, attached, by-law attached as Appendix “A” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on September 24, 2024 to amend the Official Plan, The London Plan, by amending Policies 800_1, 802_1, 811_1, 813_1, 837_1, 839, 840_5, 840_6, and 847_ 2, adding Policies 798A, 802_4, 802_5, 809A, 813_4, 813_5, 829A, 840_3 and 840_4, and deleting Polices 803A, 803B, 803C, 803D, 803E, 803F, 814A, 814B, 814C, 815D, 815E, 815F, 860A, 860B, 860C, 860D, 860E and 860F relating to the Protected Major Transit Station Areas (PMTSAs), and Map 10 – Protected Major Transit Station Areas, relating to the boundary of the Protected Major Transit Station Areas (PMTSAs), and Map 3 – Street Classifications, relating to the locations of the Rapid Transit Stations, and the by-law BE FORWARDED to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing for approval;

it being noted that in accordance with the Planning Act, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing is the approval authority for official plan amendments with respect to PMTSAs;

it being noted that the alternative bylaw includes the following changes:  

i)    remove Protected Major Transit Station Areas along Richmond Street from Kent Street to Epworth Avenue, and Western Road from Windermere Road to Sunnyside Drive on Map 10 – Protected Major Transit Station Areas; 

ii)    remove Protected Major Transit Station Areas from Richmond Street and Oxford Street East Transit Village on Map 10 – Protected Major Transit Station Areas; 

iii)    amend Policy 813 to permit a maximum of 35 storeys within the Transit Village Place Type and Transit Village Protected Major Transit Station Area; 

iv)    amend Policy 839 to remove references to Table 9 and permit a maximum height of 25 storeys within a Rapid Transit Corridor and 15 storeys within an Urban Corridor Place Type, and maintain the existing minimum height; 

v)    delete Policy 840.6 related to greater residential intensity may be permitted within the Rapid Transit Corridor Place Type on sites that are located within 100 metres of a rapid transit station; and, 

vi)    delete Policy 840.7 related to clause iv, above;

b)    the proposed revised, attached, by-law as Appendix “B” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on on September 24, 2024, and BE GIVEN two readings, to amend Zoning By-law No. Z.-1, (in conformity with the Official Plan for the City of London, 2016, as amended in part a) above), and subject to OZ-9726, OZ-9727 and O-9752 coming into force and effect, to add Section 52 Transit Station Area Zone and to change the zoning of the subject properties in the Protected Major Transit Station Area TO add a Holding Transit Station Area (h-213TSA1, h-213TSA2, h-213TSA3, h-213TSA4, h-213TSA5, and h-213TSA6) Zone;

it being noted that the third reading of the by-law would occur at such time as the Official Plan Amendment described in part (a) above is approved and in-force;

it being noted that the alternative bylaw includes the following changes:

i)    remove TSA zoning related to the Richmond Street and Western Road corridors;  

ii)    remove TSA zoning related to the Oxford and Richmond Transit Village;  

iii)    change the TSA4 Zone to permit a maximum height of 35 storeys;  

iv)    remove the TSA1 Zone and renumber the subsequent zones and amend mapping; 

v)    apply the TSA2 Zone to areas currently within the TSA1 Zone;

  •    That the  zoning by-law amendment relating to Protected Major Transit Station Areas be changed by deleting Emergency Care Establishment from Section 52.2 – Permitted Uses in the following clauses:

i)    Clause b) of the TSA1 Zone;

ii)    Clause g) of the TSA1 Zone;

iii)    Clause a) of the TSA2 Zone;

iv)    Clause b) of the TSA2 Zone;

v)    Clause b) of the TSA3 Zone;

vi)    Clause g) of the TSA3 Zone;

vii)    Clause a) of the TSA4 Zone;

viii)    Clause b) of the TSA4 Zone;

ix)    Clause b) of the TSA5 Zone;

x)    Clause g) of the TSA5 Zone;

xi)    Clause a) of the TSA7 Zone; and,

xii)    Clause b) of the TSA7 Zone;

and be it further resolved that pursuant to subsection 34(17) of the Planning Act, no further notice be given; 

it being noted that the above noted amendment is being recommended for the following reasons:

  •    the amendments are consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement, 2020 and the Provincial Planning Statement, 2024, which both require land use patterns within settlement areas to be based on densities and a mix of land uses that are transit-supportive, where transit is planned, exists or may be developed;

  •    the amendments conform to The London Plan including but not limited to the Key Directions, City Design and Building policies and will facilitate a built form that contributes to achieving a compact city; and,

  •    the amendments will implement federal Housing Accelerator Fund initiatives through Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation (CMHC);

c)    the Civic Administration BE DIRECTED to bring forward a report to a future meeting of the Planning and Environment Committee to consider the following submissions:

  •    1164-1170 Richmond Street;

  •    420 York Street;

  •    TSA2, TSA4, TSA7, request to change to “optional” instead of “required”;

  •    amend the wording to confirm permission for office/commercial on floors other than the first floor only;

  •    allow the market to determine the mix in a mixed-use building;

  •    743 Wellington Road did not contain proper base zoning;

  •    south side of York Street in and around the Thames Street area;

  •    TRICAR IN STAFF REPORT APPENDIX;

  •    100 Kellogg Lane;

  •    335 Kellogg Lane;

  •    1063 Dundas Street;

  •    1097 Dundas Street;

  •    1127 Dundas Street;

  •    351 Eleanor Street;

  •    1151 York Street;

  •    1080 Dundas Street;

  •    1100 Dundas Street;

  •    1108 Dundas Street;

  •    1453, 1455, 1457 and 1459 Oxford Street East and 648, 65, 654 and 656 Ayreswood Avenue;

  •    standalone residential;

  •    flooding on Moore Street and adjacent streets;

d)    the Civic Administration BE DIRECTED to bring forward the required by-law changes to Council to permit residential use on the ground floor within all TSA zones and the opportunity of other range of uses above the first floor;

it being noted that the Planning and Environment Committee received the following communications with respect to these matters:

  •    the staff presentation;

  •    a revised Map 12;

  •    a revised recommendation from Mayor J. Morgan;

  •    a communication from J. Smolarek, Siv-ik Planning and Design;

  •    a communication dated September 6, 2024 from J.M. Fleming, Principal, City Planning Solutions, on behalf of Copp Realty Corp.;

  •    a communication dated September 6, 2024 from J.M. Fleming, Principal, City Planning Solutions, on behalf of Tricar Properties;

  •    a communication dated September 6, 2024 from J.M. Fleming, Principal, City Planning Solutions, on behalf of 100 Kellogg Lane;

  •    a communication dated September 5, 2024 from J. Zaifman, CEO, London Home Builders’ Association;

  •    a communication dated September 5, 2024 from M. Wallace, Executive Director, London Development Institute;

  •    a communication dated September 5, 2024 from C. Butler; and,

  •    a communication dated September 8, 2024 from A.M. Valastro;

it being pointed out that the following individuals made verbal presentations at the public participation meeting held in conjunction with these matters:

  •    A. Kaplansky, KAP Holdings;

  •    V. Campanale;

  •    M. Wallace, Executive Director, London Development Institute;

  •    H. Froussios, Zelinka Priamo Ltd;

  •    J.M. Fleming, City Planning Solutions;

  •    J. Zaifman, London Home Builders Association;

  •    J. Smolarek, Siv-ik Planning and Design;

  •    A. Vandersluis, Auburn Developments;

  •    M. Moussa; and,

  •    M. Legan;

it being further noted that the Municipal Council approves this application for the following reasons:

  • the amendments are consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement, 2020 and the Provincial Planning Statement, 2024, which both require land use patterns within settlement areas to be based on densities and a mix of land uses that are transit-supportive, where transit is planned, exists or may be developed;

  • the amendments conform to The London Plan including but not limited to the Key Directions, City Design and Building policies and will facilitate a built form that contributes to achieving a compact city; and,

  • the amendments will implement federal Housing Accelerator Fund initiatives through Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation (CMHC);

it being acknowledged that any and all oral and written submissions from the public, related to this application have been, on balance, taken into consideration by Council as part of its deliberations and final decision regarding these matters.

Additional Votes:

Moved by S. Lewis

Seconded by Mayor J. Morgan

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by C. Rahman

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (6 to 0)

Moved by C. Rahman

Seconded by S. Lewis

Motion to add the following to the Zoning By-law by deleting Emergency Care Establishment from Section 52.2 - Permitted Uses:

  •    That the  zoning by-law amendment relating to Protected Major Transit Station Areas be changed by deleting Emergency Care Establishment from Section 52.2 – Permitted Uses in the following clauses:

  1.    Clause b) of the TSA1 Zone

  2.    Clause g) of the TSA1 Zone

  3.    Clause a) of the TSA2 Zone

  4.    Clause b) of the TSA2 Zone

  5.    Clause b) of the TSA3 Zone

  6.    Clause g) of the TSA3 Zone

  7.    Clause a) of the TSA4 Zone

  8.    Clause b) of the TSA4 Zone

  9.    Clause b) of the TSA5 Zone

  10.    Clause g) of the TSA5 Zone

  11.    Clause a) of the TSA7 Zone

  12.    Clause b) of the TSA7 Zone

Motion Passed (5 to 1)

Moved by S. Lewis

Seconded by Mayor J. Morgan

Motion to proceed past 6:00 PM.

Motion Passed (5 to 0)

Motion as amended

Motion Passed (6 to 0)

4.   Items for Direction

None.

5.   Deferred Matters/Additional Business

None.

6.   Adjournment

The meeting adjourned at 6:13 PM.

Full Transcript

Transcript provided by Lillian Skinner’s London Council Archive. Note: This is an automated speech-to-text transcript and may contain errors. Speaker names are not identified.

View full transcript (5 hours, 29 minutes)

Good afternoon, everyone. I’d like to welcome you all to the 14th meeting of the Planning and Environment Committee. Please check the city website for additional meeting detail information. Meetings can be viewed via live streaming on YouTube and the city website.

The city of London is situated on the traditional lands of the Anastomac, Haudenosaunee and Lenapei-Wak and Adirondarang. We honor and respect the history, languages and culture of the diverse indigenous people who call this territory home. The city of London is currently home to many First Nations, Métis and Inuit today. As representatives of the people of the city of London, we are grateful to have the opportunity to work and live in this territory.

The city of London is committed to making every effort to provide alternate formats and communication supports for meetings upon request. To make a request specific to this meeting, please contact hackpec@london.ca or 519-661-2489 extension 2425. Before we get into the agenda here, I’d like to pause briefly for some recognitions that normally would be done at council but due to personnel being here and not at council, I think it’s appropriate to have a few words set. And I’d like to go to the Vice Chair Pack and Deputy Mayor Lewis, please.

Thank you, Chair. And through you, I’d like to share some great news that was shared with us by Harry Fruszos from Zalinka Priammo earlier this week, which is that the Vision Soho Project will be receiving the OPPI Plan Ontario Vision Award of Merit later this month at their annual conference. That project has involved many, many, many individuals, including many of our city staff. But in particular, I want to take this moment to recognize the work of Michael Pease, of Life Maitland and of Meg Sondercock, without whom there would not be shovels in the ground at South Street today.

We would not see buildings rising up to provide affordable housing options for our community. They worked very tirelessly on this project. There were a number of hiccups along the way that they had to help solve as well. And well, certainly, we think all of our partners end well and Zaren and Holmes Unlimited and the others who are making this project happen.

It would not have happened without the efforts of many staff and to Meg, Life, and Mike, in particular, I want to extend our thanks for all of your tireless work. And a little extra congratulations that this project is receiving this prestigious award. Thank you, Deputy Mayor. I will look now for any disclosures of pecuniary interest.

Seeing none, I’d like to move on to the consent items. Look for a motion to put those items on the floor. Are you making a motion? Yes, I will.

I thought Mr. Mathers had a comment for us too, but I will move the consent items. Thank you. And I have a seconder, Councilor Raman.

So I just wanted to get that on the floor. Now I’d like to go to Mr. Mathers, just regarding 2.2, the adjustments to point with by-law for deputy and chief building officials. Pretty cool, thank you so much.

Through the chair, I just wanted to take a moment to just acknowledge this by-law. So this is the by-law to appoint our new chief building official. So our new chief building official is Alan Shaw. He has many years experience in similar roles across Ontario.

We’re very lucky to have him here in London. He’s right over here. He’s already started making improvements in the building area. And I look forward to his leadership in the years to come.

So just wanted to acknowledge that. And thanks for the time. Thank you, Mr. Mathers.

Now we have motion moved and seconded any comments or questions on the items. Councilor Raman. Thank you. I just wanted to quickly comment on the same item, supportive of the direction that we’re looking to go.

I just want to ensure that communication will go to members of council when those decisions are made as just a general circulation. So we’re well aware as well. Thank you. Thank you.

Other members of the committee are visiting councilors. Seeing none, I’ll just from the chair. He allows me just to echo, Mr. Mathers, welcoming Mr.

Shaw. Mr. Shaw, you are inheriting a very important department. It does the work of turning the stuff that we do at planning into forwarding shovels on the ground, which is referred to by the deputy mayor.

We can rezone all we want, but until we build stuff we’re not fulfilling, I guess the good intentions of, so we can get housing for Londoners. So welcome. We have a motion moved in second, and I will call the vote. It’s not coming up, so I’m going to have to log back in, but I will vote yes.

Opposing the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Thank you. Okay, moving on to our scheduled items, 3.1. This is regarding two to four Audrey Avenue and 186 to 188.

You’re on street, I’ll look for motion to open the PM. Councilor Frank, seconded by Councilor Raman, I’ll call that vote. Opposing the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Any questions of the technical nature from committee or visiting Councilors?

Seeing none, and I’ll move to the public. Oh, I’m sorry, Councilor, please go ahead. Yes, my question is very, very specific, and I’ll save my comments for later. How many units, given the fact that this is four parcels, how many units would the applicant be able to have as a matter of right under the new near campus neighborhood, well, under the near campus neighborhood regulations, without a zone change?

In other words, how much could this property be intensified without a zone change? I’ll go to staff. Through the chair, without the zoning by-law amendment, they currently are in the residential R1, so they’d be allowed to have one unit, plus three additional residential units as appropriate. On each of any other questions of a technical nature?

On each of the four parcels, through the chair, on each of the four parcels. Go ahead, staff, for clarification. On each of my councilor. Through the chair, that’s correct.

And the councilor, through the chair, please. Through the chair, the next technical question is, what is the current status of the effectiveness, enforce nature of the near campus neighborhood regulations? ‘Cause we recently passed an amendment, but I understand there is an appeal pending. So could you tell me what the current status through the chair of the current near campus neighborhood regulations are?

I’ll go to staff. Through the chair, so the zoning to permit three additional residential units is enforce. Subsequent to that coming into force, there was a separate review that was completed, and as part of that, we changed some of the parameters around how those units could be added. That second amendment is currently under appeal, but the first amendment to permit three additional residential units is enforce.

Councilor, thank you. I will go to the public, and I’ll look for the applicant, the applicant would like to address the committee. Please give us your name, and you have five minutes. Thank you, can you hear me well?

Sorry. Perfect. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, council members.

My name is Danieli C. Kalero-sen-Brush, and I’m a planner at Zalinga Priamu. Together with my colleague, Casey, and the property owner, Arnold Kablinski, we are pleased to be here to present the ZBA application for two four out three Avenue, and 186, 188 here on the street. Firstly, we would like to thank City staff, and especially my Kayla for their work on this file.

My Kayla prepared the staff report. They did a great job. We have carefully reviewed the staff report, and we welcome the approval for the approval recommendation. I just want to highlight some key points.

A total of 14 dwelling units, and one accessory building is proposed on the subject lens, and King’s College University is interested in leasing this lens to have a similar granting as he has, currently with the building located on Richmond Street at the corner at Epworth Avenue, and to address the need for housing in the neighborhood. As outlined this staff report, there are some concerns with vehicle and bike parking spaces. However, we are providing a total of 14 vehicle parking spaces at a rate of one parking space per unit, and we are also providing two bicycle parking spaces, which meet the zoning regulation. Also, the subject lens are located within walking distance of King’s College, Western University, bus stops on Richmond Street, and clothes to walking and cycling routes, which of course supports active mode of transportation.

It’s important to note that some special provisions are being required, such as the proposed rear yard and theater side yard, and those two are existing conditions, and it’s not anticipated any new or unanticipated impacts. The proposed reduced front yard and exterior side yard maintain this street-scape character and contribute to a strong street presence. And a special provision to permit five bedrooms per dwelling unit is aligned with the recent city initiated amendment, adding emergency needed housing supply to the neighborhood. Finally, the proposed intensification is consistent with the applicable policies of the PPS, conforms with the London Plan, and the goals of the near campus neighborhoods.

If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer them. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. I’ll go to members of the public, and just please approach the microphone on either side, if you’d like to speak.

Pretty awkward, but it worked, here I am. My name is Ben Lansing. You’re five minutes. Thank you.

During the 1920s, Bruffdale’s character began changing when the University of Western Ontario moved to a bluff, overlooking the Farmer Kingsville farm. With the university’s relocation to Bruffdale, the community was soon formed to professors, other university staff, and yes, student borders. That is from the architectural conservation conservancy of Ontario. Western is a top 1% university in the world.

There are 44,000 students plus from 128 countries and 362,000 alumni across 160 countries. Western has functioned before any of the current residents moved to Bruffdale. All residents are aware of the existence of Western University, which is still growing, and that student housing is very much in need in 2024. There are about eight buildings surrounding the gates in that area of the university, including the proposal that’s before you.

Density’s range from 29 to 445 units per hectare. This particular application contemplates 82 apartments per hectare for the subject property. That’s reasonable and more than appropriate. There are four buildings at the gates of the university that Mr.

Koplansky built, when did he build those? A few years ago in 2003, everybody objected. It had to go to that time, the Ontario Municipal Board for a decision. Fortunately, it passed.

None of the arguments had any merit. They still don’t. When Koplansky complex has been constructed, King’s University College will also lease these buildings to provide safe, affordable, efficient, healthy accommodations housing students. All the buildings close to Western, officially and safely, provide the much needed student housing.

At, I might add, no cost to King’s College. The capital cost is born by the developer, Mr. Koplansky. The public have objected in the past, and they will object again.

But I can’t think of why anybody would complain about the four units that Mr. Koplansky built at the Gates University. It provides much needed student housing. Finally, there was an article recently.

It was actually in the National Post, and it was by Disgarden’s describing the shortage of affordable student housing. And right now, we’re in a crisis. We don’t have enough student housing. We need students.

Students are our future. We need to house them. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

I’ll look for the next speaker. Please, sir, if you could give us your name and you have five minutes. I could do that, and thank you. My name is Stephen Patel.

I’ve submitted a written letter that’s been added to the materials for this, and I’m simply here to supplement some of what I say in that letter with some oral remarks. I’m opposed to this application, and I’m gonna speak on that along a couple of different themes. I’ve lived in the neighborhood for a long time. Oddly enough, I did know there was a university there when I bought the property, so I was well aware of that.

Indeed, I was an employee of it at the time that I bought the property. But I was also aware that we lived in a city governed by zoning laws and that we agreed collectively as a community that we would respect those rules and that those rules govern our decisions. They govern the reliance that we place when we make a major decision, such as the purchase of a family home, and then the commitment to maintain and develop that home and to pay the taxes on that home over time. And one of the key elements in that bargain that I made when purchasing that home was that I was buying into a neighborhood of single family dwellings.

It was a mixed neighborhood. Some of them were owned by families that lived there a long time, and some of them were owned by rental landowners who would then rent the property to students. But all of the properties were single family homes. This is not a neighborhood of apartments in the interior of this neighborhood.

There are some larger buildings, but as you well know, all of those larger buildings are on major arterial road. They are on Richmond, or they are immediately adjacent to Western’s own resident properties. There are no buildings at all like what is being proposed today. And that’s why I’m so concerned.

I’m not concerned about that. We need to find places for students, but we have bylaws that would allow for that, right? More development could happen along Richmond and other arterial roads. Western is making a commitment by putting up additional residences, but it is not an answer to say that we’re gonna fundamentally change the nature of buildings inside interior to a residential neighborhood by putting up this particular significant intensification.

We looked at precedent. I thought it was interesting that the previous speaker said, “Well, the OMB said this before and nothing has changed.” The OMB has actually spoken about this very property before. And the OMB said that the grant and application of this nature would establish a very dangerous precedent because it would allow anyone living in similar circumstances, owning contiguous properties in the neighborhood to make a similar application and expect a similar, if we live in a country of laws, expect a similar result. And so in that theory, I should be able to take my property, buy the property adjacent to it, and then come back to you and seek to intensify on similar sort of a scale.

And that cannot stand. That cannot fly in the face of a residential neighborhood. So the precedent that’s being set here is an alarming one. It’s not one that the citizens of London should welcome.

It’s not one that the city of London should move forward with. And the OMB recognized that in its decision when it dealt with this very particular property. Final point I’ll make if I may is I really think we need to pay attention to the character of neighborhoods. I saw when I bought into this neighborhood that it had the potential to be a real gem within the city because of where it is and what it is.

It’s near a major university. It’s near two major hospitals. It’s near a major park. It’s near the river.

And it has a wonderful blending of both vibrant student, single dwelling, rental accommodation, and people who are living in the neighborhood long term. It would be a huge shame for the city to take steps that tip the balance dramatically in favor of one of those groups. Short term student rentals at the expense of the other. We don’t have to look very far to other cities that have seen entire neighborhoods turned into what are unfortunately sometimes called student ghettos to see what can happen when a neighborhood gets treated in a way that makes it undesirable for long term residents to live in it because the student density has simply been built up and built up by a series of decisions.

30 seconds. That would be regrettable. And I therefore am opposing this particular application. I thank you for allowing me to speak.

Thank you, sir. A little for the next speaker. Yeah, folks. We’ve got a number of issues today that we’re dealing with.

And I will not allow clapping or booing or any form of vocal, whether for or against it. And the reason being is this. People, not everyone agrees. We’ve heard two descending viewpoints.

And when that happens, a lot of people aren’t used to speaking in this forum. When that happens, people might be not inclined to be able to speak freely because they’d be intimidated, including members of council. So I ask you just to hold your applause or to send or boos or what have you to yourself. Thank you very much.

So I’ll look for the next speaker. Please ma’am, give us your name and you have five minutes. Okay. I guess I’ll go next.

My name’s Marie Bloch. And I’m here on behalf of the Brookdale Community Association. Our president is out of town and unable to come. So she asked me to come and speak on the behalf of the association, which I said I would do.

Over the years, over 20 years that I’ve been involved with that association, we have come here many, many times. And we have always tried our very best to talk in rational tones and planning terms and not in hyperbole. And we did send in a letter, which unfortunately did not, it got stuck in an outbox or something. And so I didn’t get to the planning stuff, but it is in your added agenda.

So I would hope that you would read that letter. And one of the things that we’re asking for in that letter is to put this in a bands temporarily until a planning study can be done so that the neighborhood can be looked at and these for places that would be appropriate for additional student housing. And the response to that is, oh, well, we can’t do that because that’s just gonna take too long and we’ve got to build affordable housing. Well, my answer to that is we asked for this when this matter went, this exact same property went to the OMB, as Mr.

Patel mentioned. And we asked for a study then. We said, we’re not opposed to more development. We want it planned.

We don’t want it to be, we don’t want it to be just, well, someone bought a house and they demolished it and now they want to build student housing. And so, okay, that’s very reactive. We want it done proactively. We want it done in planned ways.

And the response to that is often, oh, well, you can’t talk about student housing. That’s people’s owning. And yet, it’s used like a club against us because this is clearly student housing. I mean, we have people standing here saying, well, King’s is interested in it.

Well, King’s is not gonna rent anyone but students. So, don’t tell me that it’s people’s owning and I’m not allowed to talk about the people that will be living here. Because we’re sitting here right where the homecoming, where the streets get shut down for homecoming and fake homecoming every year, the unsanctioned street party that everybody plans for. And that you’ve put a lot of money into the police so that they can close the streets and allow this unsanctioned party.

That’s exactly where this is. So, what we’re asking for is not to create a compound of 70 bedrooms, the circles parking lot that leaves no area for open space that doesn’t even have places to park more than two bicycles. And to just stop and say no. This requires too many variances.

It needs variances for front yard setback, for rear yard setback, for side yard setback. I don’t even know about the FAR. It needs a variance for the density and in order to fit it in there, it’s too much. It needs to be scaled back.

Send this back, say no, it’s too much. So, I think Mr. Michelle spoke very well about there are residents in the neighborhood. This does have a precedent-setting effect.

And the other thing that the OMB mentioned when they considered this type of development on this property is they said, not only is it sending a precedent, but you’re effectively rezoning it without going through the procedures that you need to go through under the Planning Act in order to rezone it. That’s what you’re doing. And finally, I just wanna say, don’t tell me this is affordable housing. I mean, with all due respect to see in the free press the comment that this is affordable housing, right next to a sentence that says these bedrooms rent for $900 each a month.

I’m not talking about a one-bedroom apartment for $900. I’m talking about one bedroom in a five-bedroom apartment. So $4,500 a month for a rental unit is not affordable. It’s not.

And the students can’t really afford it. St. Luke’s before they closed had a pantry. And there’s a food pantry on campus.

The students are putting so much money into rent that they have to use food pantries in order to eat. And don’t tell me that, oh, well, if we have more supply, the rents will go down because the rents won’t go down. 30 cents. What happens is, thank you.

What happens is Western just increases their enrollment. So the rents are gonna stay there. So all we’re asking is a neighborhood is don’t, don’t throw us under the bus. Plan for the neighborhood, talk to us, and don’t just react and say, oh, well, somebody wants to build something.

That’s wonderful. Plan for it, and do it in a way that’s sustainable for student housing and for the long-term residents both. Thank you. I’ll look for the next speaker.

I’ll ask the clerk if there’s anyone online. There’s no one online, okay? I’ll look one more time in the gallery. I see someone go down.

Please ma’am, give us your name and you have 30 seconds. Or I’m sorry, five minutes. (laughing) Go quick. Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Michelle Watches Johnson, and I’m here as the Vice President, External Affairs at the University Students Council at Western. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak and for taking comments from the public today. The University Students Council represents the 36,000 undergraduate students at Western by advocating on issues that are important too and that affect our student body. Naturally, housing is one of these issues that has quickly become one of the biggest concerns for our students.

And with that in mind, I would like to speak in favor of this development and subsequent amendments to zoning provisions. As previously mentioned, the recommended amendment is consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement, encouraging the regeneration of settlement areas in order to provide for a range of uses and opportunities for intensification and redevelopment. It also aligns with the directions that have been given to municipalities to permit forms of housing that are required to meet the residents of the area. Located in a neighborhood that is so dominated by students, obviously not entirely, but to some extent.

We’re facing rising rent costs, as was mentioned, and we’re often forced to sprawl out into the nearby streets, whereas this development would further align with London’s near campus neighborhood strategy, which is meant to help manage this influx of student renters. The project works to sustainably increase densification in the area, allowing more students to continue living closer to campus, as was mentioned, it’s near Western University and it’s near King’s College. And it’s also near so many major arteries and walking routes and biking routes that would allow students to more easily get where they need to go. This provides students with housing that’s more appropriate to their needs as opposed to the single family residences that we are so often forced to occupy and it works to alleviate the pressure on the supply end.

It’s proximity to these campuses, as well as to the rapid transit corridor along Richmond. Again, further supports the idea of this development. The USC would be pleased to see council approve the zoning amendment. And as an action that works to address the student housing crisis that currently affects our students, we look forward to collaborating with the city and Western to ensure that Western students’ basic needs are met and to prioritize both ours and all Londoners’ access to affordable housing.

And again, I urge the members of this committee to vote in favor of this amendment. Thank you. Thank you for another speaker. Please ma’am, give us your name and you have five minutes.

Hi, my name is Sophie Skafe and I just want to highlight something that has been in the news. In the Globe and Mail on September 3rd, there was an article of Canadian University Cities facing surprising rental market downturn. This is related to international students. The number of students that applied for visas is down dramatically, which means that people looking for housing from outside of Canada are coming in that go into a lot of these places won’t be coming.

So there are actually anticipating rents going down and from what I’ve heard, there are places that haven’t rented for September this year. So it’s just something to keep in mind. We’re talking about intensification of student accommodation, but I think you should also think about what is happening to the student body, where are the students coming from? And how much is the university really gonna increase in size?

So I would suggest not going down this route and keeping a residential area, a residential. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for other speakers.

Please sir, give us your name and you have five minutes. Thank you. My name is Don Bartlett, I’m the president of the London Neighborhood Community Association, Inc. We were incorporated in 1995 and are thoroughly familiar with this particular matter.

First of all, the public engagement that the city staff followed in the summer of 2024 was in July. There were five responses, which should not be misconstrued as no interest in this matter. July was the height of summer vacation, so people are not around. This is a level of intensification that is incomprehensible.

The owner occupied single detached housing stock, R1 housing stock has been supplanted by absentee landlords buying up these properties and renting them out. Fair enough, but we’ve reached a level where it’s intolerable. You got that? It adds no value to the neighborhood.

It adds value to the pocketbook of one company cap holdings. And as far as we’re concerned, proposed zoning by-law from R1 to R6, that amendment is not only unprecedented, but it’s an undesirable change in the character and further degrades the character sustainability and of the neighborhood. It flies in the face of good planning and ignores the public interest. What it does is support the interest of one company, not the public interest.

And I would ask strongly that this committee review the public interest and see where we stand on that matter. Thank you. Thank you, sir. For other speakers, please ma’am, give us your name in five minutes.

Oh, this has to go really low for me. My name is Diane Fortney, and I live in what is known as the Black Friars area. Perhaps it still is, although I doubt it. I wanna give you a personal perspective of what happens to a neighborhood when single family houses, often by people who are needing to move into different kinds of housing or are becoming elderly.

Lovely houses with perennial gardens and that foster fees and that kind of thing, are bought up by development companies and turned into student housing. Everything that’s green gets cut down. Everything that possibly can be paved gets paved. I think we’re all aware of their myriad of issues with concrete, concrete, concrete, everywhere.

I actually call it the concrete neighborhood now, including flooding, no biodiversity, the fact that the climate is dying. When students from other countries or people come, they are terribly exploited by these absentee at landlords, crammed into buildings, no kind of introduction to the community or community values and exploited by the very landlords. And I can’t imagine how anyone can say that $900 a month for a bedroom is affordable housing. I’m not even sure how someone with any integrity could actually have those words come out of their mouth.

I am a retired nurse and I have a pension and honestly $900 a month. So the whole thing on many levels is extremely exploitative for everyone, but the landlords and the developers. When you ask who are the landlords because there is garbage everywhere, you’re told even if you are the liaison officer for Western, you’re told by this very city that that’s private information. It’s a number company.

They’re managed by property management companies who will not tell you who owns the building. If I do things that are in contravention of a bylaw, people down here know it’s my property and they come to me. My neighborhood used to be lovely. Certainly not everything that I wanted.

People who drive through my neighborhood now say, Diane, you should sell your place. It’s an embarrassment. It looks like a ghetto. And I don’t mean to be classist and elitist when I use that word, I just don’t have another word.

So from what I’ve heard here and from what I’ve witnessed going and visiting my friend Marie on Mayfair, I see the houses that are closer to Richmond. I know right away there they’ve been bought by landlords. They’re more concrete and now if you’re not allowed concrete, you put down stones. So no green things, cars, parking, noise, parties.

In theory, someone may be going to pet sit someone’s cats while they’re away. And in theory, that person might be told before the homecoming or fake homecoming or whatever thing it is, leave them extra food because you won’t be able to get onto that public street that day. So from what I’ve heard from the outside looking in, you people, okay, I should not say that. It appears that the city will do anything that a developer asks that will make a reactive or more housing, more housing, more housing.

And it doesn’t really seem to me that you have engaged with this community at all. So I am a living example or I have a life experience of what happens to a neighborhood. Blackfriars, AKA the concrete neighborhood, right? When all the single family houses or all houses get sold and absentee developers who you can’t find out who they are are allowed to take over.

Thank you. Thank you. I’ll look for the next speaker. That’s clear again, if there’s anyone that’s joined us online, there’s nobody.

Okay. I don’t see anyone else coming to the microphone. So I’ll look for a motion to close the PPM. Deputy Mayor Lewis, seconded by Councillor ramen.

I’ll call the vote. Closing the vote, the motion carries, five to zero. Okay, I’ll put the item on the floor for our committee. Deputy Mayor Lewis.

Thank you, Mr. Sharon, through you all. I’m prepared to move the staff recommendation. I have a seconder for that motion.

Councillor Frank. Sorry, motion moved and seconded. I’ll open up for questions and discussion. Deputy Mayor Lewis.

Thank you, Sharon, through you. I’m just going to take a minute because we heard some comments from the gallery and I’m moving the staff recommendation. So I want to take a minute to speak to why. First of all, we have now under provincial legislation a 90 day statutory deadline to make a decision or a file is automatically appealable to the OLT for non-decision.

There is no advance referrals, things like that anymore. The province has changed the rules. Just as they’ve changed the OMB, it’s not the OMB anymore, it’s the OLT and it actually has a somewhat different mandate than it had back when the original towers that were quoted in the paper were built. You know, we heard a lot about students and you know, I will say yes, it’s 98% likely that students are going to be the tenants there.

But we don’t make decisions from a planning perspective based on who’s going to rent it. Whether it’s a family, whether it’s students, we have to decide based on built form and on planning act considerations. So whether it’s students or not, that does not weigh into my decision making. However, when I hear that international student visas are going to be reduced and so people may not even move into these units, that’s a risk that the landlord is taking, the property owner is taking in terms of building these.

But quite honestly, with a 1.7% vacancy rate in rental units in this city, I am not concerned that these units are going to create a glut that are going to be sitting empty because there is a demand and ultimately if the landlords can’t get the price they want, then they will have to adjust their expectations on what level of rent they’re going to charge because there’s no vacant property tax credit. They pay the same property taxes to the city, whether they have a tenant or not. And so that cost to them to have this doesn’t change. It’s whether or not they have income.

And you know, I heard a little bit about the character of the neighborhood and we should intensify long Richmond. And yet when we see applications come forward to intensify on Richmond, we hear the objections from the same neighborhood that we can’t change anything on Richmond because we’ve got heritage properties there. There’s a gentle intensification that comes with townhouses that is needed. These are a cheaper form of build because they’re wood framed.

Yes, there’s a foundation pour, but they are not 35 stories of concrete and rebar and everything else that goes into things. So they’re also a faster build because it doesn’t take three years to build a townhouse complex. It takes a few months. That’s the nature of the beast.

So when we are looking at these and we’ll be talking about more permissions for more townhouses later in this meeting, I’m going to be consistent with what I did on Upper Queens. I’m going to be consistent on what I’ve done on several other townhouse applications and support these because it is staff supported. It is a reasonable request under the Planning Act for this zoning by-law change. And that’s the thing when we say, you know, we have zoning by-laws, any property owner at any time can come in with a zoning by-law change request.

And then as we’ve done with this one, we assess it, staff make a recommendation and then Committee and Council make a decision. That’s what our obligation is to do here and that’s why I’m going to be supporting this. Thank you, other committee members are visiting Councilors, Councilor Tressel. Through the Chair, under the current near campus neighborhood policies that are in effect, what are the rules regarding floor area ratio or more generally the density on a property?

My understanding is that we have limits on how much of a property can be built without keeping some open space on it. Could you explain what the current status of that is? I’ll go to staff with that question. Through the Chair, in this particular zone, the residential R6 zone, there are no floor area ratio regulations, there are regulations for a required landscape open space which they’re maintaining through this application.

Councilor, but through the Chair, this property is in the near campus neighborhood. Is the near campus neighborhood regulations which we recently went to a lot of time and trouble and effort to redo still has limitations on, I guess, density of coverage. And the fact that those regulations were appealed means that we’re, at least for purposes of this application, we’re supposed to be applying the old rules. And it just seems to me as if we have a set of rules that we worked on very, very closely with the neighborhood associations and the staff, we had this chambers filled up, this council approved the new near campus regulations 15th and nothing.

It was widely heralded as a good compromise, yet what we’re basically saying is we have rules, we have regulations, but you know, you can opt out of them if you want. And that doesn’t create a lot of confidence on the part of the public in terms of believing that the system is fair because under our current rules, and the reason why we went to the new near campus neighborhood regulations was because we were told by the province we had to allow three units as a matter of right. We then subsequently agreed to make that four. And the thing that really makes me want to vehemently oppose this application, I guess I’m not asking a question now, I guess I’m making my comments.

What makes me vehemently oppose to this application is this developer, just like every other property owner in the area has a lot of opportunity under the current rules without his own change to do very significant intensification. So don’t think for one minute that the opposition to this is we don’t want students in the neighborhood. Students are in the neighborhood, students are in the neighborhood, and they’re gonna continue to be in the neighborhood. And that’s fine.

And when you look at what the current rules are without the zone change, there can be massive intensification. What happened to the gentle density that we were talking about just a few months ago? What happened to the idea of putting in accessory units and additional units that could be affordable that we were talking about? It just seems this is all out the window when a property owner says, you know, I don’t like the rules that have been developed.

So I’m gonna try to hop down to them. And it undermines the public’s confidence in the rule of law. It undermines the public’s confidence. Is that even me?

It undermines the, sorry, could you stop for? No, I won’t take this. It undermines the public’s confidence in the rule of law. And it undermines, more importantly, it undermines the public’s confidence in the efficacy of participating in these city consultations.

‘Cause we worked really hard to compromise on the near-campus neighborhood set of regulations. We came up with a good response and they’re out the window. Now, I made this comment 30 seconds. I made— - Yeah, admit it.

Oh, okay, that’s good. I made this comment when we talked about the College Avenue development. And that is in the near-campus neighborhood. Basically, we are sending a signal that we are not going to have regard to these policies.

Why did we bother going through this process? Why did we bother going through zoning consultations? Over the years, this neighborhood has gone through many, many zoning consultations over the years in a very cooperative way. Always with the understanding that there are gonna be more and more students moving in.

The problem is not students moving in. The problem is the kind of housing they’re going through. And the problem with this development is there is no place on this property. There is no place on this property for them to go outside.

There is no open space. And that creates externalities for the other neighborhoods and for the rest of the city, really. So I really think that we can go back and look at what can this developer as other property owners in the neighborhood do. It’s up there, Councillor.

Within the current roles, without such a massive zone change. So why will be a voting against this at council? Thank you. The other comments or questions from committee?

I’ll ask the deputy mayor to take the chair, please. Sam, Mayor, Councillor, could you turn it off your mic, please? Councillor Trozzo. Thank you.

Thank you, I’ll take the chair and acknowledge Councillor Layman. Thank you. Just have a couple of questions based on the council’s comments and staff. Does this property fall within the near campus area?

Death. Through the chair, yes it does. Through you, Councillor, Acting Chair, can you explain to me, through the Acting Chair, how is this outside? Like what exceptions are remaking that it wouldn’t fall within the policy of near campus zoning?

We will go back to staff for that. Through the chair, when we’re looking at applications like this, we look at policy 968, which outlines a series of criteria when evaluating applications in the near campus neighborhood. And one of those specifically is that whether the use is permitted in tables 10 to 12, which this use is permitted in other aspects, such as whether the size and shape of the property also would permit that use to appropriately fit on the site and various other criteria that were evaluated and it was seen that this application did conform to those criteria. Councillor Layman.

Thank you and through you, I can share. I’m still confused. How does this, like obviously it’s not fitting within the policy of near campus or some exceptions being made? Am I correct in that?

I just want to know what those are, Ms. Benton. Through you, the application is a zoning bylaw amendment, which is reviewed against the policies of the London plan. Any zoning bylaw amendment must conform to those policies.

We have reviewed the application in its entirety under the policies of the London plan, including the near campus neighborhoods policies, which establish that framework for evaluation criteria for appropriateness of residential intensification within the near campus neighborhoods through our review. It has been determined that the requested amendment is in conformity with those policies. So there’s no official plan amendment being sought here to alter the policy framework. It’s just a zoning bylaw amendment application to implement it.

And Councillor, are you acting chair? So my understanding here is it’s still within the near campus guidelines that council has passed. Is that correct? Through the chair, that’s correct.

Thank you very much. Thank you, I can chair, that’s all I have. I will return the chair to you, then I have no other speakers on the list at this time. Okay, thank you.

Councillor Ramen, please go ahead. Thank you, and I’ll keep it short ‘cause I know we’re in for a long meeting. First, I want to thank the public that came out today to speak on this application. I appreciate hearing from you on these matters.

I appreciate hearing from the word Councillor as well. Well, I share the same concerns around the fact that part of this near campus neighborhood portion around bedroom limits is under consideration still, and so that’s something that’s outstanding. However, looking at the existing planning information table that’s provided to us, specifically with this being in a primary transit area in near campus and fitting in with the table 10 as mentioned, I do think that at this time it’s difficult not to move forward with this application as it comes in as supported by our staff as well. However, I do feel like it is intense and dense in the neighborhood.

So I am torn on how we’re planning with these particular applications as they come through, and I know that we will get many more and we’ve seen many come through. And so I do think it’s, and later on, we’ll be discussing strengthening our policies and why we need to do so, and strengthening our rationale around some of these applications, but also the ability to look at it from a case-by-case basis, I think is really important and key. And so at this time, I hear the neighborhood, I hear your concerns, and although I don’t feel like I can not support the application with where it is right now with the recommendations that are coming through and the fact that I think that at the OLT, it would be difficult for us to go in a different direction to what the staff recommended. Any other comments or questions from committee members or visiting counselors?

We have a motion moved in the second, I’ll call the vote. Closing the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Moving on to 3.2, this is 1550 and 1602 Seinfeld Road West. I’ll have a motion to open the public space meeting.

Councilor Raman, second by Deputy Mayor Lewis, I’ll call that vote. Closing the motion carries five to zero. Any questions of a technical nature for staff at this time? Seeing none, I’ll look for the applicant of the applicant would like to address the committee.

Please give us your name, you have five minutes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Martha Paluch. I am an intermediate planner with Monteith Brown Planning Consultants. With me today is Jane McGuffin, Vice President and Principal Planner of Monteith Brown Planning Consultants, and Corey Mar, Vice President of Land Development of Foxwood Development. We have had a chance to review staff’s report and agree with the recommendation, and we are available for any questions.

Thank you. Thank you, I’ll look for members of the public. I’d like to address the committee. That’s clear, if anyone’s online.

I don’t see anyone coming to the mic, so I’ll ask for a motion. I’m going to create a close with PPM. Councilor Raman, seconded by Deputy Mayor Lewis, I’ll call. Closing the vote, the motion carries five to zero.

I’ll put this on the floor for committee. Councilor Raman. I’ll move the staff recommendation. I got a motion moved and seconded by Deputy Mayor Lewis.

The comments or questions, Councilor Raman. Thank you, and through you Chair, I did have a chance to meet with the developer, Foxwood Development, about this application and have some conversation around what’s in front of us today. So I want to thank them for that engagement. I just wanted to confirm with staff a question that I had with the 73 new residential dwelling units.

Will there be additional parkland education required with additional dwelling units? I’ll go to staff through you, the Chair. The parkland education through the Plan of Subdivision has been collected, so there’ll be no additional parkland with this application. Councilor.

Okay, thank you. Not what I wanted to hear, but, and I think it’s something actually, an interesting topic that needs to be considered, and I know that there’s strong regulations around how we collect parkland education, but when the unit’s numbers increase in circumstances like this, I do think there needs to be a mechanism to be able to review the parkland education as the units are increasing. So just a comment from that, I did have a lengthy discussion with the developer about that, and again, thank them for that engagement. So at this time, again, I’m supportive of what’s in front of us right now, and happy to move it.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Questions from Committee of Visiting Councillors?

We have a motion moved in second, I’ll call the vote. Opposed in the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Moving on to 3.3, this is regarding 3975 Stuart Avenue. I’ll look for a motion to open the PVM.

Councillor Frank, seconded by Councillor ramen, I’ll call that vote. Opposed in the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Any questions of a technical nature for staff? I’m Committee of Visiting Councillors.

Seeing none, I’ll look for the applicant, the applicant would like to address the committee. Please, sir, give us your name and you have five minutes. Thank you, Chair and Councillors. My name is Devin Poshman, so I work for Sifning Properties Limited.

We have reviewed and read the report, and we agree with the staff recommendation, and I have no further comments on this. Thank you. Look for other members of the public that would like to address this item. I’ll ask to clerk if anyone online.

No, there isn’t. I don’t see anyone coming to the mic, so I’ll look for a motion to close PPM. Deputy Mayor Lewis, seconded by Councillor ramen, I’ll call the vote. Closing the vote, the motion carries five to zero.

Thank you, I’ll put this on the floor for Committee. Councillor Frank. I’ll move the staff’s recommendation. We have a motion moved.

Look for a seconder, Councillor ramen. And motion moved and seconded. Look for comments or questions this time. Committee members who are visiting Councillors.

Seeing none, I’ll call the vote. Closing the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Okay, moving on to 3.4. This is regarding 80 and 82 baseline road west.

I’ll look for a motion to open the public participation meeting. Councillor Frank, seconded by Councillor ramen, I’ll call that vote. Closing the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Thank you, any questions of technical nature and committee?

Seeing none, I’ll look for the applicant. If you’d like to address the committee, please go ahead. Hi. - Oh, there you are.

Up to top there, I didn’t see you. You have five minutes, so if you can give us your name, please, thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr.

Chair. Good afternoon, PEC members. My name is Simone Arrasenu. I’m a planner with a strict fault, Nellie Moniz, and the agent for this application.

So, well, my client and I are proposing a 77-unit eight-story mid-rise building with 22 vehicle parking spaces, 72 long-term bicycle parking spaces, and eight short-term bicycle parking spaces at 80 and 82 baseline road west, which is an assembly, a land assembly, of two existing parcels of land. So, this is an existing under a utilized site within an existing mid- and medium- and high-density residential context. Within walking distance to public transit stops and amenities, including a commercial plaza at the southeast corner of Baseline and Werncliff that features a grocery store, no-frozen’s grocery store, within a 10-minute walking distance of the site. I’ve reviewed the staff report, and all those planning staff say they generally support the proposal.

They do not support the requested 22 vehicle parking spaces. As a result, they recommended zoning by-law that’s attached to their report request compliance with the 39 vehicle parking spaces that’s required by the parent zoning by-law. So, if approved, if the zoning by-law envisioned by staff is approved, it would require a significant redesign of the project and would result in approximately, in the loss of approximately 14 dwelling units, as well as the loss of the proposed community amenity space on the main floor to fit within the existing surface parking model. So, of course, underground parking is the theoretical possibility, and it’s something that has been reviewed with the applicant, with the client, but it is not financially feasible at the height and density proposed.

So, generally speaking, underground parking makes financial sense the higher you go, so for high-rise buildings, and as a result, on a per unit cost, on a lesser, on a cheaper per unit cost, all things being equal. So, alternatively, if you do support this project and would like to support the 77 dwelling units that is being proposed by the applicant, I recommend that you support the alternative zoning by-law that I’ve submitted to committee clerk, and that has been added to the added agenda that should be in front of you. So, this by-law simply adds a special provision to permit the requested 22 vehicle parking spaces, and makes no other changes to the staff recommended by-law. So, in conclusion, the subject site is appropriate for justification.

Staff agree with us on that, and the proposed project would enhance the neighborhood while helping the city of London achieve its housing supply objective of 47,000 units by 2031. Hope you support the project as envisioned, as proposed, and I’m happy to answer any questions. Thank you. - Thank you.

I’ll look for members of the public to address the committee on this item. Please ma’am, give us your name and you have five minutes. My name is Jane Dacient, and I live in ward 11, and I oppose the proposal. I oppose the recommendations that have been made.

The focus has been obviously on special provisions, but the only statement that was made was it was parking spots, but the issue I’m bringing up is biking parking spots. 72, where in London do we have any facility that allows a residence for 72 parking, I should say bike parking spots? And this comes because the density, which is a special provision, has been allowed. So the intensification of this one small plot of 0.2 hectares, and I had to remind myself, one hectare is 100 meters by 100 meters.

So trying to put in an eight-story building, and then allowing 77 units and 72 bike parking spots. You never hear of this, this is a first-time thing. And I see this as a very unfortunate experiment for the people who are going to be living there for the property managers, and for me, the surrounding residents, we already have on baseline trauma happening. They’ve been there at the two murders, five stabbings, and I can’t tell you the number of firearms that have been going on.

That’s traumatizing, the sense of loss of feeling of security and safety. And that’s why I’m talking about the safety of bringing in 72 bikers, bikes, and it’s just ludicrous. I will list a few things. And the main one is driveways.

The area immediately surrounding 82 baseline, 400 meters. There’s 125 meters of driveways, and they all converge very, very closely to each other. So how can 72 bicycles go in and out, and among the street, and the street is just two-way? There are biking lanes, but in the proposal, they don’t say that there’s less than one kilometer of biking lanes, and not only that, when the bikes go to their first intersection, they lose their bike lanes, and even worse.

When they get to baseline and weren’t cliff, there’s no biking lanes allowed at all. There’s just not there. The road is too narrow to provide for that. And the applicant talked about walking.

Well, why walk if what they’re trying to promote is biking? So there’s contradictions of that that goes on. And not only that, within the building, can you imagine two elevators? And you can only put one or two bikes in the elevator, and everybody’s trying to get out.

They may have parking spots within the main part of the building, but we know that in some of the units, they’re gonna be needing two, and if not three. And then what happens in the selection process of the tenants going in? How are they going? How is the property manager going to determine?

Well, you have a bike so you can rent here. It’s kind of silly. So they’re gonna have to go through the selection process, and they’re given free reigns to determine what that may be. So not only that, then they’re gonna have to go into the lobby with all these bikes.

And I’m sure the lobby is not that big to accommodate bikes going in, bikes going out, bikes going up the elevator, bikes coming down the elevator. And then the driveways, as I have said, there’s 125 meter of driveway in a 400 meter area. 72 bikes. - 72.

72 bikes. So I oppose, and I only wish somehow the biking aspect of this proposal would have more than just a special feature that it would actually have had a special provision because that is not a safe situation that we’re presenting to baseline road west. It is fear evoking for those drive bikers who are trying to go and use the road, the driveways, the sidewalks, and they all crisscross against each other. Thank you for your time.

That’s very unsafe. I’ll vote for the next speaker. I’ll ask the clerk if there’s anyone online. I see a gentleman.

Please, sir, give us your name and you have five minutes. Oh, my name’s Clifford Roark and I live at 76 baseline. These units will, on 80 and 82, will be built right in front of me within 50 or 60 feet. I’ll look out my window into somebody else’s.

Not only that, when I moved there, I knew what the neighborhood was and who was in front of me. I got the sunshine all day long. You put an eight-story building in front of an 11-story building. We’re not gonna get any sunshine at all.

We pay extra money for those end units because of the windows we have. And what, I get to look at an eight-story building? That’s not right. That lot is half the size, 122 down the road.

It shouldn’t have more than half of what that has. If they took the building and put it on lot 82, they could look out their windows either way and not be looking into anybody else’s. And then the parking lot can be an 80. That would give our building complete sunshine from one end to the other.

And just like, I knew what the neighborhood was like when I moved in. And if you go out there, the way it is now, you watch parents taking their kids to the buses that picked them up and you see them getting out there when they drop them off. But all summer long, you walk that street, you don’t see any kids playing. Their parents don’t let them out.

And I think that’s pretty sad. If you take a look at our block that we’re in, just baseline from end to end that section we’re in. There’s all these units here. Have something to do with the government, the city or agencies or something like that.

I don’t deny them that these people need help, not just warehousing, but it’s not fair to put them in there like that. You’ve got them. So the only people they know are people like them. If you go for my block, that’s all there, both sides of the street.

You go down to Warren Cliff and you take Warren Cliff the Wellington, you won’t find one unit like that. Now, I can see they’re a little more high class down there, but you’re not taking us into consideration at all. That’s just absolutely ridiculous. But I think that’s about it.

But if the buildings put on there so that the windows face east and west, they’re not gonna be looking anybody else’s windows. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Look for the next speaker.

We’ll see anyone else coming to the mic. There’s no one online. So I’ll look for a motion to close the PPM. Councillor ramen, seconded by the call to vote.

Wasn’t the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Put this item on the floor for committee. Councillor Fray. Thank you, yes.

I did wanna make some comments and then I have a bit of an alternative motion to move forward that’s been circulated to the clerk. But would you, do you want me to put that first and then speak to it? Yes, motion to the floor and get a seconder and then I can come back to you for your comments. Great.

Motion to the floor, do you want me to read the entire thing? Did you circulate it to all committee members? Yes, but we’ve updated some of them so they’re merged with them. Yeah, why don’t you read it out just so we can make sure we’re all on the same page.

All right, got pulled up. It’s a bit of a long one, sorry, everyone. Notwithstanding the recommendation of director planning and development, the following actions be taken with respect to the application of 13759741 Canada Inc. C.O.

Strickball Denelli and Moniz. I’ll get it one day. Relating to the property located 80 to 82 baseline road west. A, the proposed bylaw attached here too as appendix A be introduced in this full council meeting September 24th, 2024 to amend zoning bylaw number Z-1 in conformity with the official plan.

The London plan to change the zoning of the subject property from residential R-9 in brackets R-9-7, H-45 zone to a residential R-9 special provision R-9-7, H-30 zone. The site plan approval authority be requested to consider the following design issues through the site plan process. The applicant shall provide a revised water servicing report through the site plan approval process landscaping to include a minimum of 50% native species with no invasive species planted. Investigate renewable sources of energy such as solar for the roof and sides of the building.

Geothermal for interior heating and cooling. Investigate air source heat pump options. Apply bird friendly policies using the CSA standard. Consultation with the municipal housing development division for the provision of affordable housing units and entering into a tenant placement agreement for existing tenants.

It being noted that the applicant has expressed interest in using mass timber construction which is encouraged by council in support of the climate emergency action plan. It being noted that the following individuals and then the further part is the original. It being noted that was included in the first one. Yeah, do I get a secondary for that Deputy Mayor Lewis?

Okay, so the motion moved in second and I’ll go back to you, Councillor Craig. Thank you, yes, we’d love to share some rationale. So essentially I have heard from local residents we heard today and then as well via emails which were included in the report, raising their concerns. Generally a worry of increased traffic from cars on baseline but as well a worry of too little parking for the number of units at this building.

Also I’ve discussed concerns regarding the tenancy of the building due to concerns specifically about 122 baseline road. I did send out an email to many residents in that area last week regarding what the city is doing in regards to 122 baseline. I have known so it’s a city building that was built two years ago and it has caused major disruption within that neighborhood. We are working through London Mill Sex Community Housing which is managing that building as well as on police services to try and mitigate and address a lot of those tenancy issues.

I will say for this building that we’re discussing today, the ADTA to baseline road west, my understanding from the developer is that it is for purpose built market rental but of course council is not able to comment on who lives in buildings as we were just discussing earlier. And my rationale for moving forward and supporting the 22 parking spaces as opposed to the 39 as staff recommended is that in my opinion if the developer is willing to build a more affordable product then we should let them. We actually need developers stepping up to offer a broad range of housing solutions. We talk about this all the time at this committee and many times when you add parking, especially underground parking, all of a sudden rental property becomes a luxury condo because it is so cost prohibitive to build underground parking.

So less parking would make this building cheaper to build and maintain and therefore rents would be cheaper as well. Again, still market rate it’s not, they’re not attempting to try and build an entire affordable building as 122 baseline is. So by offering the 22 parking spaces for cars, the applicant is also offered significant amount of bike parking which would be on the ground floor. Therefore tenants don’t need to bring their bicycles up in the elevator as well.

The area is very walkable. If you haven’t gone around there, there’s grocery stores, there’s pharmacies, there’s schools, there’s a bus route right in front of the building. There are bike lanes on the road. So again, having less parking spaces at this building would keep the car congestion minimal on that street.

Furthermore, across the street, for example, the new rental building at 101 baseline which opened in the last year or two, it’s $1,400 for a studio. These developers are aiming to try and make their studios around 1,200 and then for a one bedroom over at 101 baseline, it’s 1,800 for two bedroom, it’s 2,100. Again, at this building, they’re looking at 1450 for one bedroom and 1750 for two. So you can see that by not having to do parking, they’re actually gonna be able to save tenants potentially two to $400 in rent every month which becomes much more affordable for average income earners in the city.

And I personally, as we’ve heard from the consultant, if we force the 39 parking spaces, we will lose 14 units and this building will likely become unbuildable because they’ll have to do underground parking. They actually could do 12 stories in height at this location ‘cause it’s got the high density overlay and they’re going for eight because they want to make a more affordable product. But if we change the 39, or if we change the 22 to 39 parking spaces, I worry that it will no longer be feasible and they essentially have to come in with a new zoning by-law amendment that goes for 12 stories. Overall, I just kind of wanted to highlight that we have a willing developer who is happy to build to this standard and there are lots of people in the city who don’t own a car.

Students, seniors, people that simply don’t want to to have the expense of having a car and they would move into this building knowing that they are unable to have a car. There will be very clear expectations that there will not be a parking spot for everyone in this building. So with all that said, again, I’ve heard concerns regarding the reduced parking as well as the tenancy, but I think that this is an example of an opportunity that we have to provide affordable housing in the area, which is something that we are really focused on as a council. So I will be supporting the circulated amendment.

Thank you. I’ll look for other comments or questions from committee or visiting counselors, Deputy Mayor Lewis. Thank you. I’m gonna be brief, happy to support the word counselor on her alternate motion on this file.

I think she’s raised some excellent points, not the least of which is the level of affordability that is provided when parking is not required and there are other options in this space. Of course, I also met with the developer and understand that they are looking to fill a niche that is not filled by others, which is marketing their units to folks who are going to look for alternate modes of transportation besides a car. And so given that both the word counselor and the developer have agreed that this is something that they’re prepared from the developer side to take the risk on knowing that they will have units that they don’t have parking spaces to offer tenants for and that the word counselor is comfortable with it. I can be supportive of that as well.

Thank you. Other comments or questions from committee or visiting counselors? Councilor Roman. Thank you and through you.

I appreciate the alternative motion provided by the counselor. I just wanna get a sense from staff. Is there any way to actually clarify with the developer how they’re gonna go about marketing those units as not having adequate parking? Are they going to say that city council or city staff said initially that it was over intense?

And so it couldn’t have enough parking. And so now based on that, we’re going with a lower parking density and therefore we’re marketing the units with less parking. I’m just wondering how that would play out because I can say in my word, where a project was approved that has inadequate parking, what we’ve seen is along all the residential streets right now, there is cars overnight and all day. And it’s a parking enforcement challenge.

One which neighbors are having to face and deal with. And so I agree that this is a really great idea if we’re able to market it and we’re able to really get that understanding out there that this is going to be a unit where or building that has less parking. But I’m challenged to see how this in the end doesn’t become the city’s problem to fix on the parking side. So just wondering if there’s any tools that we have in our toolbox to help us for going this route to really aid getting the developer to really put forward the concept that this is going to be a building with less parking.

I’ll go to staff. Through the chair, I’m going to defer that question to the applicant to explain how they intend to market that to prospective tenants. Okay, I’ll go to the applicant question on how this will be marketed to prospective tenants. Good afternoon, again, through the chair.

The applicant submitted the parking justification study by consultant paradigm transportation solutions limited and their report outlines some, what are known as transportation demand measures and ways to encourage the reduction of demand for vehicle parking spaces. So a couple of the measures outlined include, of course, walking public transit. The subject side is within walking distance of multiple public transit stops cycling. We are complying with the zoning by-law.

We required number of bicycle parking spaces, alternative car use, car shares, Uber service, property management can, you know, encourage and accommodate to the kind of an active, active using active strategies can, you know, for example, provide a welcome package, outlines the available transit routes and active transportation options, post real-time transit information in common areas, facilitate the procurement of transit tickets and transit passes by tenants in coordination with London Transit, provide IT assistance in obtaining and using travel apps for transit, car share and Uber. So there are a couple of kind of practical measures that the property management team in consultation with the owners of that building can take to encourage alternative modes of transit. And those measures are aligned in the parking justification reports that the applicant, the applicant team has submitted. Thank you.

  • Councilor. Thank you, appreciate the feedback. I agree in theory, I think it sounds like a great idea. At this time, I won’t be supporting the alternative recommendation that’s in front of us and would be inclined to support the staff recommendation if it were to come forward.

And if in between that time, I’m able to have a conversation with the developer, I will do so to see exactly how they plan to market it more efficiently. Councilor Frank. Thank you, yes, and I just wanted to provide a little bit maybe of neighbor context. The road that it goes on to is baseline road.

There’s no stopping, there’s no parking, there are bike lanes that are not separated, there’s painted lines. So every time I’ve gone down baseline, I have not seen other than a bus or school bus pull over to the side of the road parking. Other than that, it would be very difficult to park over on Center Street to the north and the walk all the way around because there’s fencing along it. So again, if the person was trying to park on one of the neighboring streets, they’d have to be willing to walk 10, 15 minutes, it would be interesting.

The other thing I would say is at 122 baseline, my understanding is we actually have overbuilt parking there and most of the time is half unoccupied. So I would be interested potentially if there is overflow from this building, finding a economic rationale for maybe renting out parking on another parking lot that is half empty, half the time a few blocks or a few buildings down. But I would just say that again, my understanding would be for this building, the developer was planning on having the parking spots be preallocated towards the two bedroom units. And so my understanding would be, again, I can’t speak for the developer, they would have to do it, but if I was doing this, I would not say that this unit has a parking space.

And so if you sign a rental agreement, you would sign one that does not have a parking space. Thank you, other comments or questions from committee or visiting? I’ll ask the deputy mayor to take the chair. I have the chair and I recognize Councillor Lehman.

Thank you. Yeah, I wanted to speak to this outside of the chair because I’ll be supporting the motion in front of us, which goes against the staff recommendation. You know, we talk a lot about affordable housing and we did have bonusing available to this council to push some affordable housing units in the new builds, but that tool has been removed by the province. So it’s primarily through, I don’t know, Kajoling or working with developers to see how we can get more affordable housing out.

This I think is a pretty unique example. I mean, the cost of a big part of building is parking. And I can see where the developer is going on this. If he can eliminate that cost to his tenants and he is able, as was outlined by Councillor Frank, a substantial reduction in rent.

And I think this is actually a gap in what’s being rezoned and built that I’m happy to see being addressed. When we changed the parking by law, I think it was, I’m probably wrong on this, but I think it was like two spots per unit. And the glass council, or this council, I can’t remember, we changed that. And I was supportive of that because I believed honestly that the city council shouldn’t be in the business of dictating how many parking spots should be in a building.

That is part of the developer’s business plan who he proceeds to be tenants or customers and what their needs are, factoring in cost. And I think in this case, this developer has done exactly that. He’s looked at who are the clients that he’s wishing to attract, what are their needs. And perhaps they can be, we can deal on price point as opposed to a number of vehicles.

So when I saw the staff refusal on this, it appeared to me it was primarily based on not meeting that parking policy of .5 spots per unit. Given the business plan and the location right on baseline, and a couple blocks from Warren Cliff and the commercial activity there, I can understand why the applicant chose to go this direction. So I’ll be in support of the councilor’s motion here ‘cause I think it fills a niche that we need in the city and if it’s not successful, it’s on the developer. It’s a miscalculation if he finds that people are requiring parking spots for this building.

You’ll have trouble renting it out based on what I’ve seen. I think he’ll be successful. So thank you, Acting Chair. Thank you, Chair Layman.

I’m going to return the chair to you as I have no one else on the speakers list and now I’ll advise Councillor Hawkins. Councillor Hawkins. Thank you for recognizing me and I’ve been very interested in not only hearing committee’s comments around these applications, but in particular around the conversation of affordability. It seems to creep up on and on.

And so with this application, just following up on Councilor Robinson’s comments around pushing out the parking, I can see that happening. I think it does exist in the ward that I represent as well. When we do these infills. But my question through you Mr.

Chair and hopefully I can ask it of the applicant, we heard that there is a business case. We know the tools for affordable housing have been taken away from us. So I would like to have a better understanding what this business case is. I know this is going to come to Council.

I’m going to be sort of thinking about how I’m going to be voting on this, but I would like to have a better understanding about the business case. And I know developers build, city doesn’t build, but there is also this on us when we do approve applications that it is on us as well, especially when it comes to the affordability. If we truly know it’s going to be affordable. So if you can give me and us a better understanding what the business plan for the affordability of this application, thank you.

I’ll go to the applicant. The applicant is here in the audience. I’m not sure if it’s too late for them to comment at this point, but as the agent, what I can tell you is that the applicant is working, is consulting with the, with bodies like the CMHC to potentially provide affordable housing units, but no decisions have been made based, to my knowledge as of now. So any kind of further questions about kind of practical business matters are probably best handled by the applicant.

Should they, if that’s still available for them to speak, if the opportunity selects this for them to speak at this point. So it’s, yeah, I’m not the best person to answer the business type of questions. I’m here primarily as the planner and kind of the overall agent coordinator, but not necessarily the business lead on this application. Thank you.

The applicant like to address Vinnie, where are you? There he is. So the question from the counselor, sir, is what’s the deal to dive a bit into your business plan and why, you know, how a parking fits into this, your pricing, clientele customers that you’re looking to attract, et cetera. So when it was Musa to do, I’m the applicant, I’m the developer on this.

The best way to explain it to you guys is most people that are building rental apartments stock in the city and throughout South Western Ontario are building luxury apartment buildings because that’s what’s financially feasible. When there’s less parking, you can actually lower the price of rent. For this particular building, we’re trying to keep it, I guess you could say 10, 15, 20%, but less than what market rent is. If everybody’s choosing to rent a one bedroom, as you have on one-on-one baseline, and others, there’s another one beside one-on-one that’s getting built as well, they’re gonna be looking to rent a one bedroom between 1800 to $2,000.

We’re trying to rent it for about 20% or less. Now, to do that, we have to market it without parking. The reason why we have to do less parking ‘cause it’s gonna cost me less to build so I can give that back to the tenants. Most people, I understand, will look at this build and think there’s too much parking, I mean, too less parking, but you gotta understand, there’s a majority of people in the city that cannot afford a luxury one bedroom at $2,000.

And other things, I’m open. Councillor. Yes, and through you, my thanks to the applicant for that explanation. You saved me a phone call and I do really appreciate you stepping up to the mic and making those comments.

Thank you. Thank you. All right, Councillor Robin. Thank you, and since we have an applicant available and through you, can you comment on the application for affordable and whether or not it fits within any criteria for affordable housing?

So, please go ahead, sir. Yes, so this building, there’s affordable housing, which would be, I guess you could say in the city less than $1,000 and then you have luxury, which is another, let’s just say, 100% more, $2,000. In this building, currently, we’re gonna not, for us, affordable would be 20% less than what market rent is going for. Now, for affordable housing, as defined, we are going to be going somewhat with CMHC somehow.

We don’t know exactly how right now. Once this is approved, we are speaking with CMHC. CMHC is right now allowing somewhat of, I guess, 10% affordable housing, right? We might look at that option.

We probably are, but until this is approved and how we look at it, and from that standpoint, we probably might do approximately 10% affordable housing units. So, when you look at the building, per se, compared to other buildings, that’s a pretty good amount. Councillor. Thank you and through you.

It sounds like the applicant is speaking more about attainable housing versus affordable housing, for the most part, and I commend you for considering that ‘cause it’s almost the missing middle and when it comes to rental. So, agreed with you on that. However, as I’ve said, I won’t be supporting the application at this time, but look forward to further conversation before Council, thank you. Any other comments or questions from committee or visiting Councillors?

We have a motion moved and seconded, I’ll call the vote. Opposed and the vote, the motion carries four to one. Moving on to 3.5, this is regarding 1338 and 1388, sunny Nell Road East. I’ll look for a motion to open the public participation meeting with my Councillor Frank, seconded by Councillor Ramen and call the vote.

Opposed and the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Any questions of a technical nature for staff? Seeing none, I’ll look for the applicant to address the committee. Please sir, give us your name and you have five minutes.

Good afternoon, my name is Alex Van Der Sluis. I work for Auburn Development, so as a development manager, given what’s ahead of us, I’m sure everybody would like a lengthy and detailed presentation on the application. Not needed, we are here in support of the staff recommendation and the amended by-law certainly appreciate the work leading up to committee meeting to get that sorted out. And obviously if there’s any questions for us as the applicant, I’m happy to answer them.

Thank you. I’ll look to members of the public who’d like to address the committee on this item. Okay, I’ll ask the clerk if there’s anyone online, there’s no one online. I don’t see anyone coming to the mic.

I’ll look for motion to close the PPM. Councillor Ramen, seconded by Deputy Mayor Lewis, so I’ll call the vote. Opposed and the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Thank you, I’ll put this item on the floor for committee.

Councillor Ramen. Thank you, I’ll move the staff recommendation that I have a question. Thank you, I’ll look for a seconder, Deputy Mayor Lewis. Motion moved in second, I’ll go back to Councillor Ramen.

Thank you and I’ll just move to my question just to save some time. But I did see communication, I think it’s 181 in the original package, not the added not sure. But it’s from Mr. Shukla regarding some concerns around some additional challenges on his property, just wondering if the applicant might be able to comment on how he plans to work with the residents that have concerns around some potential overland water flooding concerns on their property and then the fact that they’re on wells and how that might be impacted by the development.

Don’t go to the applicant. Yeah, absolutely, thank you. Through the chair, this is a rezoning application, so there will be a site plan application for a detailed plan in the future. We did do hydrogeological studies and stormwater studies associated with the rezoning, so we are comfortable with the work of our consultants that the water will be going to the right places and not the wrong places.

But certainly with that future process, we’ll continue to engage with the neighbors on either side of us and it’ll be a requirement of us to deal with any issues related to stormwater and certainly ensuring no adverse impacts to somebody’s well as part of that future application. Councillor. Thank you, that’s all my questions for now, just looking forward to hearing from the word Councillor on this one. Thank you, Councillor Fray.

Thank you, yes, I just wanted to triple check that the 30 meter buffer hasn’t been included in this one. Go to staff. Three years to chair, yes. There is the special provision for the OS5 zone that includes the 30 meter buffer.

Councillor. Thank you, no further questions and that makes me very happy. I’ll go to other Councillors and visiting Councillors. Councillor Permull.

Thank you, sir, the chair actually I have two questions to the staff as well and I just want to verify a couple of things that the flooding drainage will be dealt with through the site blend approval process. And while in groundwater, there will be a holding provision that has been recommended to ensure orderly development and adequate provisions for municipal services. Just if you can confirm these two comments if I’m accurate, please, thank you. I’m gonna staff on those two concerns.

Yeah, through you, Mr. Chair, yes, there has been a holding provision that’s been recommended to be applied for the orderly developments of the lands which includes servicing and traffic. Additionally, with regards to the drainage and the storm that will be dealt with through the site blend approval process. And it’s in the recommendation as well.

Councillor, thank you for confirming that. And to I as the board council, I’m supporting this application that’s in front of us. Thank you. Thank you.

Any other comments or questions from committee or visiting? Seeing none, we have motion moved. Seconded, so I’ll call the vote. Opposed in the vote.

The motion carries five to zero. Thank you. Okay, moving on to 3.6. This is a Heights review, transit village and major shopping area.

I welcome the mayor as he has joined us for a motion to open the public participation meeting. Deputy Mayor Lewis moves it. Seconded by Councillor Frank, I’ll call the vote. Opposed in the vote.

Motion carries six to zero. Thank you, any, I’m gonna go to Mr. Mathers to kind of give us a brief, yeah, not a summary as such ‘cause we have the information in front of us, but kind of an indication of why we are here today discussing this matter. Thank you very much and through the chair.

I’d like to provide a brief background on the next two reports. Firstly, these are both staff initiated reports. We brought forward to provide more housing in London. Zoning changes before we today represent the most significant increase and has a right high density zoning since the last zoning by-law was approved over 35 years ago.

Together, the changes proposed in these reports would result in zoning permissions allowing taller buildings, more dense forms of developments and overall expansion of the area where the higher density housing is permitted. Council has been very clear in a strategic plan and it’s a provincial housing pledge. Additional housing is a key priority for our city and this is a primary reason you have these reports before you for consideration today. These reports also align with the work that we’re doing under the Federal Housing Accelerator Program.

As part of that program, we were asked to choose from a series of initiatives and our successful application included initiatives to both promote as of right high density zoning and promote infill developments. The work we completed was scoped to both meet the requirements of the housing accelerator program while generally aligning with the current London Plan framework. It is absolutely in Committee and Council’s purview to go beyond the scope and expand upon the recommendations and these reports to address today’s housing challenges. As owed in these reports, the work is being undertaken under the province’s official plan review process and as such, this is the opportunity for Council to provide direction to our official plan as it moves forward.

This is the ideal time to have Committee and Council direction on how the London Plan needs to be updated to meet the current housing challenges. So with that, I’ll pass the floor back to the chair. Thanks. Thank you, Mr.

Mathers. This time we’ll go to the public for comments on this item. Please, sir, give us your name and you have five minutes. My name is Arnold Kapranzky and my purpose of speaking today is to express my support for the proposed zoning changes to reflect proper planning that this city needs.

It seems that the city is taking positive steps to correct the mismanagement of planning in the past. I specifically want to support the comments made by urban homes, urban development, comment number 10. Thank you. Thank you.

Please, sir, give us your name and you have five minutes. My name is Stephen Elson. I’m here as a member of First St. Andrews United Church.

We’ve been around for a while, 155 years as of this year. So we’re very aware of our historical status. Within the city of London. The reason that I’m here today is that we live, we are our church, rather, is located immediately outside of the proposed zone for the high intensity development that you’re proposing to consider today.

And the reason for this being of concern of ours is that we are, like many mainline churches, having a very difficult time maintaining our building and we’ve got a very large property. Our zoning right now is neighborhood facility, which is very, very restrictive. It basically allows us to do virtually nothing with our facility in terms of being able to develop it beyond its current status. And we really need the opportunity if we’re to survive and thrive, not only as a church community, but as a vibrant part of the downtown London area to allow increased capacity to use our physical space for other developments, such as affordable housing.

This is something that many churches are taking on right now because they recognize the need within the community. And our thinking is right now, at least the way I’d like to put to you is that right now, one side of the street on which we’re located, and we’re right at the corner of Queens Avenue and Waterloo, one side of the street is in the zone for high intensity development, and our side of the street is not. So I would like to suggest that in fact, you include both sides of the street, whether that’s Waterloo or Queens Avenue for intensive development in order to give us not the right, but at least the opportunity to ensure that we are continuing to be a very vibrant and sustainable part of the downtown London community. Thank you.

Thank you. I’ll look for the next speaker. Please, sir, give us your name and you have five minutes. Yeah, good afternoon.

My name is Chris Butler and thanks for recognizing me. When I submitted this last Tuesday or Wednesday to the clerk’s office, I’ve been out of town since. I sort of had a look this morning, it was startled by how many people might be presenting and new issues. So the first issue I think is off the table is extremely concerned is that they live on Waterloo Street in Sam’s writing with the transit village.

There’s actually so the transit village at Oxford and Oxford and Richmond. And my feeling is from what I’ve looked at, just speed reading, the proposal from Mayor Morgan and Deputy Mayor Lewis is that’s been addressed and I won’t talk to it any further. I’d just ask you to somewhat support that with the exception of the issue. If you want to debate it a little further on something called neighborhood streets or neighborhood connectors.

I have no idea what that means and my friends don’t either. We thought it was a car park. So the other issue is I’ve been following this sort of like a tsunami coming through public notices way back in July. And it could sort of see what was coming and was startled.

I went to Kentucky for a week and I came back ‘cause I was waiting public meeting, you know, something in public meetings. And I realized like two nights later, there’s like a one hour virtual meeting that had been downgraded from a public meeting. And I believe that happened on July 31st. So I sort of want to echo what one of the other participants said about some of the other sites and situations like that.

I think we’ve had a bit of a drive-by in public participation in this process. And I realize it’s very technical. It’s hard to look at and has been hard to look at and get involved London and has been hard to go back and forth because it’s very, very technical. I mean, when I talk to friends about different things like Hs and different things like that, it’s really tough for people to understand.

So I’d like before this gets dropped into London plan for us to reach out back to the community and have some real public meetings on this. And I seriously think that the planning staff’s gonna have to, I think, address this a little bit through A1, you know, through developing some pictures and some different things that allow us to visualize what’s happening at the different levels so that people can understand what you’re doing here before you drop it into the London plan. Because it really is a bit of a tsunami. I agree, I haven’t seen anything like this in 35 years.

And I’m a frequent contributor down here. And to be honest, it really somewhat concerns and scares me. So I think we would have a lot of things from the public come back that would support this and make it somewhat more worthwhile. The last thing I have to say, and I think I’m still in my time zone here a little bit, is I’d like this to be sort of before it goes to council.

So something this big can’t be just technical. I mean, this is a process and it’s, this is policy, but there’s so many other things that are impacted by this. And I’ll give an example. You know, I looked at things in Bay and we had in 223 taxpayers supported about someplace around $22 million in DC incentives and DC exceptions and that was in 23.

And when I look at what’s gonna happen here, I looked at 267 New York Street down the street here and we doubled the size of the units on that. So we’re doubling the DC exceptions. How am I gonna afford that? Think about it, you’re already charging me almost two and a half percent of my taxes and those two exemptions.

There should be financial people here that are telling this chair and you folks what impact is gonna have financially for taxpayers before it goes to council. And I think that you need to reach out and get that answer before it goes to council. The same thing for transportation. If we’re gonna connect these transit villages, I mean, London Transit should be here and somebody should be saying, you know, this is gonna cost us $500 million to connect the one out on Oxford Street with the one over here.

So that we have some sort of rough magnitude. It doesn’t have to be exact, but it sort of leaves me feeling as a taxpayer. I’m doing all these handstands for $78 million for the Fed’s chair and it could end up costing me well over $750 million. So I think we need to kind of slow down to go fast and I thank you for your time.

Thanks very much. Thank you. I’ll look for the next speaker. Please sort of give us your name and you have five minutes.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Mike Wallace and I am the executive director of LDI. I appreciate the time and I’m gonna, we do have a letter that has on the agenda and I’ve sent directly to the councilors.

I’m gonna go through that. And I’m going to, Mr. Chair, go through it assuming that the mayor’s and deputy mayor’s motion will come forward and that will be the one to be debated at least first if not at completion. So try to do it quickly.

There are recommendations on table eight and nine that LDI is in support of what’s the alternative that the mayor and deputy mayor has put forward. On table 10, we talk about stacked townhouses and the alternative motion does refer to stacked townhouses in other areas and neighborhood connectors which we appreciate. We will say though, to be on the record, we think stacked townhouses should be a permissible use on neighborhood streets. Also, if you look at other municipalities where they fit in the neighborhoods, fantastic.

I come from Burlington. There are just a plethora of stacked townhouses. The definition for the base under table 10 for neighborhoods has townhouses as part of the base. So you’re gonna have a townhouse, but you can’t have a stacked.

Doesn’t make sense, but we’re willing to accept the neighborhood connector at this point going forward. On table 11, we do appreciate the change to the 10 stories that are being proposed by the mayor and the deputy mayor. But we would recommend that you would also look at the base. We need eight stories as a base and throughout that chart.

And if you look at both that chart and the other chart, it note one of every chart and note one of every chart. It says the full range of uses shown on this table will not necessarily be permitted on all sites with the neighborhood place type. It is an out, it’s a criteria that staff can use. You can use that if somebody comes in with an application and the neighborhood place type, an eight really doesn’t work there.

You have that ability, rating your plan, rating the land of plan to say no, that’s not appropriate in this particular location. But you’re limiting the opportunity for more housing by having the limits that are there currently. And so if you look at that table, table 11, you can see what those are. And you know, you have a max of eight in a primary transit area.

It should be eight everywhere, not just in the primary transit area. So we think there’s some opportunity there that you have missed in your motion and that you could still do today. So the next number of items, one of them is part D, which you’re removing from the staff recommendation. We agree 100%.

We were under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that when the consultant came through to look at what you, basically what staff had been approving, what council then has supported in terms of the last number of years on housing, on heights of buildings. We were under the impression that the consultant was coming to confirm what is actually being built and was actually being approved and making sure that the London Plan tables match what you’ve been approving. Along came with that, a number of changes to be considered at site plan that are, I will say design items, but not about the actual building heights. We are not asking, we’re supportive what the mayor’s position on clause D is.

It’s not removing site plan control over those items. It’s removing all these additional stuff that has never been in a report that you’ve seen. And I can tell you today, and we think it’s a slippery slope, and people say, oh yeah, slippery slope. I can tell you today, there are members whose applications have come in for pre-consultation and the pre-consultation notes come back, and they’re requiring these changes as part of the pre-consultation.

30 seconds. - That should not be allowed so we’re very in support of it. The final thing we’d like to say is on the major shopping area piece. Two things.

One, it shouldn’t be in the BAB, in the built area boundary. Use the urban growth boundary that is currently exists. The BAB was, came into place in the land plan in 2016. Almost a decade of growth has happened in London since that line was drawn.

And the final thing is take away the issue of linear or nodal shopping areas, give yourself some flexibility, decide on what the application is, whether it works or not, and that wouldn’t be a better system going forward. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, look for the next speaker.

Hi, Peter Mancini. - Peter Mancini. Peter Mancini, first of all, let me say I agree with the city’s attempt to increase density. Increasing density allows us to save farmland and ultimately allows the city to operate more efficiently, in my view.

And I think every study you’ve read on urban development would justify an increase in density. I’ve read the city’s recommendations, and one thing I really don’t understand, and I think the last gentleman sort of touched on it, you mentioned increase in density within 150 meters of a transit station. Why is a transit station being treated differently than a transit stop? And I think I agree with the last gentleman that they should be essentially treated equally.

So if the Councillors can consider that when they’re reviewing the density issues, I’d appreciate that, thank you. Thank you, good luck for the next speaker. Please sir, I’ll give us your name in five minutes. Vandy Levin, 59 Longbow Road.

My focus is the height changes affecting neighborhood streets, neighborhood connectors and civic boulevards. The original proposed changes are an increase to the maximum heights and stories, from heights only originally permitted in the central London, adding the primary transit area, increasing the number of permitted stories, including apartments mid-block. As mentioned, 99% of the residents of the city have no idea of the classification of their street, nor where the primary transit area is. No notice of the proposal went out to residents on affected connectors.

The public notice itself was baffled gap. The Mayor and Deputy Mayor Amendment, without any further public notice, would expand the height changes on connectors to the entire city for stack townhouses. And yes, there is a difference between a stack townhouse and a townhouse. We have townhouses in our neighborhood, we’re supporting a stack townhouse on Sarnia Road that’s coming to you next month.

We know the difference, they’re not the same. Some wards are completely within the primary transit area, most aren’t. Some of the connectors that would be added by the new amendment include unclub drive, Hudson Road, Guildwood, Vallett at Deer Park, Redon Drive, Montebello, Evans, Metal Gate, Merlin and Royal Crescent, Sorrel, Chippewa Drive, Kalele West, the five-bury Beckworth, Blackwell, Grenfell Chambers, Philbrook Drive, Aldersbrook, Paul Peel, Bateman Trail, Riverbend, and King’s Roads, Westdale, Born north of Oxford, Cranbrook, Barkley and Notting Hill Roads. So what’s going on is a change in neighborhoods from a standard max of three stories and an upper max of four on connectors only in central London, to a max height of four now, including the primary transit area.

And the amendment includes the entire city. The major worry is mid-block development, I have to say. It also changes civic boulevards from a standard max of four with an upper max of six with eight possible only in central London with standard max of eight, including the primary transit area. Our association has always been pretty okay with four stories around civic boulevards.

We’re not comfortable with the doubling from a standard max of four to a standard max of eight where there’s no intersecting higher order streets. Even worse would be going beyond that eight. Folks on streets called civic boulevards in the transit areas such as Hamilton Road, Han Mills and parts of Trafalgar will be surprised to hear that eight stories are possible now if this goes through. As was mentioned, you’ve got note one to table 11 that not all heights will be permitted, but you’ve already had tools to go beyond the heights that you have.

So the question really through you to staff is how are you gonna come down from those heights? There are already policies that could have been applied to go up, but they haven’t been used. So we’re really worried that like a cat in a tree, it’s easy to get up, it’s gonna be really hard to go down. And two, to staff please.

What about situations where the height of land on one side of the street is significantly different than the other side, which happens a lot in this city? Tall building on one side if it’s on the high side and it’s gonna look a lot taller. And third, what are, well the new near campus policies play any role. The furl today on changes in the near campus areas might be the salt and the better outcome.

If you can’t refer this back, then prior to the third reading ‘cause you’re only doing two readings next week, direct staff to help more people understand the changes, where they’re gonna take place, meet again with the near campus reps, as they did before in July. I think that’s a minimal ask, because what’s in front of you indicates no further notice is required. And that ain’t nice ‘cause no one over about three years old likes surprises. Thank you.

Thank you. For the next speaker, please ma’am, go ahead. Give us your name and you have three minutes or five minutes. Sorry.

It’s okay. Yeah. My name is Josie Devon Chenzo. You have to excuse the tardiness I was told it was going to be after two of the meetings.

So my understanding with the last correspondence, and this is in regards to the notice of planning and application and public meeting, properties within the transit village. And it looks really good. North, South, East, West, the transit hubs. And I’m sorry if I may be repeating what you guys have already discussed.

Aside from, and that’s really pushing it a bit, aside from having a subway, North, South, East, West, which I think we should really, it’s really great, excuse me, to keep in the reputation as the forest city. My concern, I don’t know if you decided on a North transit village. I live around Masonville area. Let me tell you, they did some construction kudos to all the construction workers, it did a great job.

It is so congested there, not just Wonderland in there. And I’m wondering, you know, aside from going to some of the satellite towns, like there’s Arva, I know you’ve got, already got Hyde Park and Lucan’s not just too far, Lambeth and whatnot, I’ve been to some of those areas and they look really great and there’s lots of green space too. And you know, I know population is growing everywhere. It’s like this all over Canada, as a matter of fact, the US too, North America.

You know, fine, thank you. You know, I’m an immigrant too. I imagine I was very little, so English is really my language of best language or communication. But I think my concern is, besides where these transit hubs are, and if they’re working well, and if they’re connecting well, within the parameters of what the city land has so far, I really don’t know what the limits of London, Ontario, is and what the population, I swear to God, it must be close to 700,000 or 600,000.

Those signs, you know, oh, of course street signs, I won’t even talk about street signs. But I think my concern is, where these transit hubs are located, how they’re used to the best advantage to help the population that’s there. And I think it, from this handle, the one last one I got on the 29th of the state at 29th, 28, anyways, I think my time’s almost up. So I think that’s great, just needs a little, I think it needs a little more work as to where these transit hubs are going to be, and also what’s around there.

I know, for example, and I’m gonna make another point of the North end, there are four high rises going up at Fanshawe Enrichment, I don’t know, it’s already, you can’t get by there. I don’t know where these people are going to go. If by God, you know, they need to get to a hospital, they need EMS or police or anything, where they’re gonna go, what they’re gonna do, are their parks there, first of all. You’re gonna have families, it seems to me, and I haven’t traveled that much, but it’s starting to feel a lot like Toronto.

And my greatest fear, and I will mention it here, is the whole area, Southwestern Ontario, Southern Ontario. Can it support, and I’m not gonna go on about the Green Belt, that’s another thing. Can it support, can the natural resources support this construction and expansion? So I think, you know, in my opinion, satellite towns seem to work well.

Yeah, there is distance, and there is driving, but hey, that’s where transportation comes in. And what else, thank you. How much time do I have? You have a boat, one more minute left.

Okay, let me see, I did write some things down, transit. Yeah, my other concern is about people building buildings. Who are these developers? Are there bylaws saying, like, I’m sorry, you know, we don’t want a 20, 30, 40, 50, sorry building.

Unless of course it’s downtown, like, I think, you know, other municipalities need to talk to each other, and figure out what’s working best. Otherwise, you know, this is starting to feel like, it’s starting to feel like Tokyo, like all just one big metropolis, and I don’t think that’s what people want here. I, I’m sorry, it’s just, it’s too much. And, you know, we can’t help the climate change.

We’ve already had flooding in our area, and I don’t think it’s the first in town that’s had problems like that. So, thank you. Thank you, I’ll look for the next speaker, the gentleman up here in my left. Please give us your name, you know, five minutes.

Your worship, Mr. Deputy Mayor, members of council, members of staff, my name is Trevor Holness. I live at 250 Syndham Street, commonly known as The Beck, and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I believe that the zoning amendment for the Oxford Richland Intersection should be defeated or at the very least tabled.

My objection is based on the conflicts between the rezoning and the London Plan. I’m at a loss to understand how you can pass an amendment that conflicts with the majority of the street’s strategic directions of the London Plan. If the proposed zoning amendment is accepted, the northeast corner of the intersection will become a prime development target. Development of this parcel will mean the loss of our neighborhood bank and grocery store, the only grocery store in the area.

No longer will local residents, including those from a naturally occurring retirement community, be able to walk to the bank or grocery store, destroying the walkability of the neighborhood. Walkability is mentioned throughout the London Plan, notably its strategic directions four, five, six, and seven. As a result of the absence of banking facilities and grocery store during the two to three year construction phase, residents will have to drive to the Masonville to buy their groceries or bank at CIBC. This will increase the emission of greenhouse gases, the reduction of which is mentioned in strategic direction four.

Thus, the city is going to have to increase its efforts to meet the greenhouse gas targets, which are waferly behind plan as it is. A surprise city of London would introduce any action that would increase greenhouse gases, especially as the city prides itself as a sustainable city. I don’t think you understand the word sustainable. Strategic direction number eight of the London Plan requires genuine engagement as stakeholders and the general public in all planning processes.

Concentrating the data is consisted of a 30 minute PowerPoint presentation over Zoom, followed by 30 minutes of a curated question and answer session. Genuine consultation involves a two-way discussion of issues and potential impacts on the community. Concept of free, prior and informed consent on adoption and implementation of legislative or administrative measures effective community has been adopted by the United Nations and many countries including Canada. The city of London should do the same for its residents.

This only leaves the strategic directions of being a prosperous city connecting to the surrounding region and be a culturally rich, creative and diverse city, which is not much of a basis for planning cities. Your best action for this amendment, riff it up. Thank you, I’ll look for the next speaker. Please, now I see you.

Please give us your name and you have five minutes. Is Jacqueline Farqua and I live in Northern London and I would just like to ask through you, Chair, Mr. Chair, if maybe the staff could update us. Most many of the people here are concerned mightily on the subject of the transit villages, that gentleman just elaborated.

And I think that there may be, have been some changes to that, which all of us are not aware of. And I’m just wondering if the staff could explain the most recent stance on this matter of particularly, I mean, there are other matters, but particularly the transit village at Oxford and Richmond. Is that possible, staff? I’m gonna go to Deputy Mayor Lewis.

Yeah, I was gonna call a point of order, Chair, just so that we can actually, because we are in a public participation process, so normally we provide all the answers at the end, but I think you’ve raised an excellent point. And I wonder if through you, Chair, you might wanna go to the Mayor to explain, because he and I are proposing a change that would remove that. So if the Mayor perhaps wants to comment on that, so that folks know what the proposed amendment does to the transit village designation. Okay, this is kind of a little unusual, but given the, I know what the Mayor is going to bring forward, and I think many people here have similar concerns.

So maybe I’ll go to the Mayor now to just kind of highlight what his intentions are. Sure, and I’m not gonna go, I’m not gonna go through all of the rationale for the motion, but I given that there’s an expectation that there’s a number of people here on the proposed transit village at Richmond and Oxford. I wanna just comment on that briefly. So in the process, staff have drafted a report, and then when Councillors see that report, they can make and suggest changes to it.

The public participation meeting is always based on the document that was before us, but I have added to the added agenda so that the public could see it, a proposal on a series of changes that I intend to put on the floor today that committee would have to approve and Council would have to support, one of which is the removal of the transit village designation at Oxford and Richmond area. And so the way the process works is, we have the staff recommendation that is in the document, but once the public participation meeting is done, and Councillors have the opportunity to put something on the floor, it’s my intention based on the letter I circulated to introduce a series of changes through an alternate proposal than what staff put on the floor. One of those changes of which is the removal of that transit village, which I think might alleviate a number of the concerns from the public participation meeting we have today. So I appreciate the chair being able to give the opportunity for me to let people know if they haven’t read the added agenda, that that is something that will be before us today for consideration.

Obviously we will have to debate and vote that, but it is separate from the staff recommendation. So I hope that’s helpful, Mr. Chair. Thank you for that clarification.

I think it’ll help folks, some folks here that perhaps looking to address committee. I will go to the gentleman on my left. Please serve, give us your name. My name is Glen Hickling, and thank you, Mr.

Chairman and Councillors and Mayor Morgan. And in particular, thank you, Mayor Morgan for that. That’s new news to be. And that was what I was gonna speak to, was the proposed Oxford Richmond Transit Village.

Sorry, point of order. Oh, sorry, Councillor Ralman. Thank you. Sorry to interrupt you, sir.

I just wanna make it clear that although there is an alternative motion and amendment on the floor, well, it’s not even on the floor yet, but that’s being considered after and during this conversation today, I think it is important that the public realize that they should still be vocal about their concerns because it’s not a decided matter yet. Well, I’ll be vocal, thank you. And this is your opportunity. So I don’t want anyone to hold back on what they’re going to say, presupposing an outcome.

So I think it’s really important that we provide that opportunity, people have been waiting for months to be able to comment on this, and I wanna make sure they have clear opportunity to do so, thank you. No, thank you for raising that, Councillor. And it was by no means to stifle what you wanted to say today, and the Councillor is correct. This has not been a decided matter at all.

It’s just before us for the first time, and we will be discussing it and voting on things today. So yeah, it was not intended to stifle any comments, but just I think there was more addressing maybe some concerns that people were thinking about. Please, sir, continue. Right, well, thank you for that clarification, and since I haven’t seen these new amendments, I’ll speak like I haven’t, ‘cause I haven’t.

And so I think when I was looking at the material that was posted last week, and the page reference could be wrong on 245 of the material that said, quote, the existing city plan said, no new transit villages types will be added over the life of the plan. So I was a little confused how that statement is there, and then suddenly we’re not through the life of the plan, and yet there’s a proposed Oxford Richmond Transit Village. So it seemed like a sudden U-turn that I didn’t understand, and much like this gentleman mentioned earlier, I really don’t think there’s been adequate public participation and input on this. I got my first notice sometime towards the end of June, and frankly, I didn’t understand any of it.

It wasn’t written to, hey, this is what’s changing, and this is what’s impacting you. It was a bunch of gobbledygook, as someone said. So it took me a few weeks to understand what was going on, and by then you have holidays, and next thing I know, here we are. So that was disappointing.

Also in page 203, I think of the material that was circulated last week, it said a heritage impact assessment may be a requirement of development. Well, it should be a requirement as it relates to the Bishop Helmuth area. But basically, I’m not in support of the new transit village as it relates to the development on the North Oxford side. But fundamentally, there’s got to be more input here.

Thank you. Thank you. I’ll go to you. Please ma’am, give us your name, and you have five minutes.

It’s Evelyn Gilkinson. I’m in Old North. I think transit villages were being funded by the federal government, is that correct? There is funding for this, and I don’t think that a transit village, per se, is just to be put anywhere in the city.

It’s to support transit. So the airport’s not supported, and there’s no flow for the university students using airports, or people that don’t wanna use an Uber or drive, are supposed to reduce traffic. You were going to put this Oxford enrichment, which the traffic is unreasonable. Can you imagine personal safety and protecting that in that area?

The hospital is increasing its flow. There are mandate, it’s a day in, day hospital, surgeries are done, people have to be driven and escorted. That traffic will be increasing, for sure, by St. Joe’s.

You put part of a hub is supposed to be near a train to provide transportation and flow, near an airport, which we have none of, for the amount and the population increase in our city or airport is substandard. Transportation to that airport is substandard. No one with the population that we have, have the issues that we have, as far as getting to and from the train station and the airport, and especially for the university students. There’s obvious that participation in public transit has been reduced, its percentages are there.

You hear it on podcasts. Frontburner did a great podcast just a two months ago on public transportation and transit hubs. So placing a transit hub just anywhere in the city is not the definition of a transit hub. And building a transit hub near a Bishop Hellmouth or Heritage area, and then using that transit hub to ultimately change bylaws so that you increase density, just anywhere you want to, right beside Oxford and Richmond, which is having like huge flow problems, makes no sense.

I can’t believe you even wasted your time on this. I cannot believe. Do we have an urban planner? Do we have urban plans that shows like a good flow for this increased population that we’re getting?

The population density has increased in downtown and so is the, you can’t fill the spots. There’s no grocery store downtown. You’ve not even addressed that for the density that you’ve increased to the downtown core. There’s no support.

You are going to take away the only grocery store that some of the students use. Downtown core uses, and now everyone has to drive out to get their groceries, like that’s really sad. There has to be some sort of urban planning and thought put into the city now. We can’t just have hazardous do things.

Masonville is horrible. It’s embarrassing. You know, seeing some of the heritage communities is the only positive light that London has to show. And you need to protect these areas and support them.

But you really need to work on your urban planning, period. You can’t just put transit hubs anywhere you want to. You have to actually think about transit. That’s it, thanks.

Thank you. I’ll look for the next speaker, please ma’am. Give us your name, you have five minutes. Thank you.

Thank you. My name is Jodi Anra and I’m new. My husband and I have just moved to London and we’re really enjoying this beautiful city and the energy it has to offer. So it was with interest that when we saw the planning application we started to educate ourselves a little bit more about transit villages and what that might look like and what that might mean for our community.

We do live and reside in that area designated by Oxford and Richmond as a transit village. So we learned a lot. We learned that the transit village is a place type for the city of London that allows for the second most intense development in the city second only to the downtown core. So from our point of view, I mean, that just kind of led us off to other research and we looked at other cities and other definitions of transit villages and in Canada and around the world.

And the one thing that they seem to have in common is that they’re centered around a transit station or a transit hub, you know, and it’s designed to create vibrant communities that are connected to others which makes perfect sense, absolutely. But then you apply it to the site that’s proposed in the Richmond, Oxford area and it stops making sense. We’re not against development in any way, shape or form and we understand that every city needs to intensify development to create these vibrant communities that we all want to live in. But in this instance, it just seems completely confusing and I would agree with a number of the other speakers that there seems to be a disconnect between this planning application and some of the others.

Like when we learned that at this point in time, council doesn’t even support the rapid transfer going north. Then where does that transit village come into play? It doesn’t make sense. I understand it’s a place type.

But as another individual said, like once you’ve got that in place, how do you open for any kind of development? Which seems that in this case, that is all that we’re looking at. We’re trying to rezone to get the second most intense development in that area in an area that it doesn’t seem to make as much sense, perhaps in other areas. Just if you look at what a transit village in general, and I understand London may have a different definition, but when one hears transit village, what that implies.

And so from our point of view, we really do want the city to take a look at this transit village and we do appreciate hearing that there is amendment currently on the table. So thank you. Thank you. I’ll go to the next speaker.

Please ma’am, I give us your name and you have five minutes. Yes, my name is Sylvia Brand and I’m here about the transit village in the south end, which is very interesting in terms of, I run into just general public people in the area and mention not only about not the transit village itself, but the other developments that are going to be going up at the corner of Wellington and Bradley with huge numbers of people moving into that area. And they just shake their head and actually they ask, well, you know, whatever, they don’t listen and where’s the planning? I really don’t understand how in the south end, you have the structure in the road system to support another area between Jelna and Deerness on Bradley to have high density housing up to 30 stories or more.

And then along Deerness south towards the 401 on the little V shape, again, 30 stories or more. And yeah, Wellington Road is going to be two lanes each way, I believe, because of the transit in the middle. So we already have traffic problems. I couldn’t believe that today, not only is Wellington Road messed up, Southdale’s also, you know, down to one lane in places.

So like, there isn’t another way to go anymore. You can’t get out. You can’t even go down and get on Wellington in the south end. So to me, it was the south end.

But bottom line is the whole idea of the transit villages sounds like we’re going to have these four different communities in the south end. There’s going to be so many people there. They’re going to have a lot of voting pressure if they actually vote. They might actually vote themselves out of London based on what you’re doing to it.

I don’t know. Like a lot of people moved here from Toronto during COVID and they moved for a reason. They didn’t want to live in a city like Toronto. But what you’re doing is creating the same sort of thing.

And I don’t know why it’s mostly in the south end, but that’s because I’m down there. I don’t see any good reason for any of these transit villages. And when I looked at that map and tried to figure out exactly where they were located, it seemed like they were all located around an existing mall or something like that. My guess is if you do this thing in the south end, White Oak Small might decide to put up a high residential apartment building instead.

And then there will be no shopping in that area. And the other problem is our transit system isn’t that great. So you put in rapid transit, you can get to a certain point. But once you’ve gotten to that point, they still can’t get to their job in a reasonable length of time.

So I don’t know the transit system that well, but all you’re going to have is a larger population out on these transit hubs. Are they going to go downtown? Absolutely not. And in fact, actually mentioned by somebody else, they might actually go outside of the city to shop because it’s easier, because you can avoid all the traffic.

Takes me longer to go from one end of the city to the other side, like in London, it’s unbelievable. Not that some of the other cities aren’t bad too, but I don’t know where you have road structure, that who’s going to go north-south? Adelaide, I think, is probably as wide as it can be. Wellington’s being reduced.

Wonderland’s already a nightmare. And that’s the north-south. Then look at the east-west. Bradley can be widened in some places, but not all the way along.

Exeter Road can’t go through the 401. And everything north of that is already busy. Unless we’re going to fly in the sky, guys, I don’t know where we’re going to go. People will have to order the groceries to their house, because they won’t be able to go out.

One point, the affordable housing, I am stunned to think that Council believes 1,400 a month for an apartment is actually affordable to the young people who are out there working in low-income jobs. That’s pretty shocking. And I think I mentioned that part. The other thing— Your time is up, ma’am.

Thank you very much. Thank you. I’ll go to the gentleman up there. Please forgive us your name, and you have five minutes.

My name is Ken Hall, and I’m a lifetime London resident. Various times I’ve lived in Huron Heights, Glenn Caron, Oak Ridge. I now reside in Bishop Helmas Heritage District. I have a business downtown with 75 employees at Carling and Richmond.

I’m a neighbor of the counselor from Word 5. And I just want to speak about the transit village. I appreciate the mayor introducing the information about a proposed change, and that’s great. And also, the encouragement to still express a point of view.

So if I use Wikipedia, just as my source here, a transit village is a pedestrian-friendly mixed-use district or neighborhood oriented around the station of a high-quality transit system, such as a rail or BRT. Often, a civic square of public space butts the train station, functioning as the hub or centerpiece of the surrounding community and encouraging social interaction. Well, mainly residential in nature, many transit villages offer convenience, retail, and services to residents heading to and from trade stations. So the transit village, it’s a very lovely term.

It will certainly supplant the only grocery store we have in the neighborhood. It is on a space that’s insufficient to really even meet what it’s trying to accomplish. And it can’t help but affect the surrounding heritage district. So again, I would agree with comments made already.

I’m not sure how this is actually going to achieve the goals or achieve the goals without affecting the heritage district around it. When people talk about London, they think about— or any city, they think about the unique cultural or heritage features of the city. So here in London, we have the Thames Valley River system. We have a trail system.

We have— we’re known as the Forest City. We take pride in trees. And we have certain heritage districts, including places like Old South, Woodfield, and Bishop Elmouth. And as time goes on, it just seems like our cities are becoming more alike.

And they’re basically just long strips of concrete, pavement, strip malls, and very similar franchises in every city across the country. So I think it is important that the city does continue to put emphasis on preserving the unique nature of the city, in whichever wards those are, and also uses some wisdom to be able to achieve transit goals without actually taking two steps backwards, which is precisely what’s going to happen here and affect the unique identity of our city. Thank you. Thank you.

Go to the top gentleman there. Please forgive us your name when you have five minutes. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

John Fleming, City Planning Solutions. I did want to just advise you that I’m representing two clients today. So rather than sitting down and standing back up again, I’m hoping that you can give me just a little bit of extra time and I’ll cover both of them. But I’ll take your lead on that.

On behalf of both clients, I’d like to thank Planning staff for all their hard work. This has been a major undertaking to address such sweeping changes to the London Plan policy. And we want to congratulate Heather, Justin, Nancy, and their teams for the good work that they’ve done. And of course, Scott, for making all of this happen with its leadership.

We think this is a great direction to open up more potential for height, density and much-needed housing in London, and as strategic locations. We generally agree with the direction that staff are recommending, but we have some important concerns and are asking for some specific changes. We’ve engaged in the process just so that you’re aware, written letters and attended meetings and conducted conversations with staff throughout the process. I’d like to start by expressing the concerns and requests of tri-car properties, first client.

You can find our letter on your added agenda. As you know, tri-car is a leading developer of mid-rise and high-rise apartment buildings in London. Our greatest concern with the staff recommendation is the limitation on mid-rise building height on major streets in the neighborhood place type. So the staff recommendation would limit height to six stories along these major streets outside of the primary transit area, even where sites are large enough to appropriately accommodate seven or eight stories.

The London plan defines high-rise buildings as those that are more than eight stories in height. And that, to me, would suggest, and as I recall, mid-rise extends as a definition to eight stories, not six stories. So why wouldn’t council want to allow the opportunity for mid-rise buildings update stories on major streets, where such height is deemed to be appropriate? And to be clear, this is not to say that eight stories should be allowed on all sites along major streets, nor would it be appropriate on all sites to allow six stories on major streets.

Rather, as expected in the London plan, as pointed out, actually, by Mr. Wallace earlier, the zoning by-law would assign the appropriate height up to eight stories based on the size of the lots, surrounding context, sanitary capacity, and other planning factors. There are some excellent examples of seven and eight story buildings along major streets outside of the primary transit area, such as the seven-story tri-car building, I’ll point out, which is right across from Springbank Park. This kind of building will be very difficult to achieve under the staff recommended height in the neighborhood place type on major streets.

Once council sets the official plan limit at six stories along major streets outside of the primary transit area, expectations will be established and set in the community, and likely be very difficult to get beyond six stories through an official plan amendment. Why not set the limit at eight stories, consistent with the London plan’s definition of mid-rise apartment buildings, and allow the opportunity for seven and eight-story buildings, whereas clearly appropriate through the zoning amendment process. If you want to proceed as we’re requesting, I would point you to the very minor wording change that would be required. Mr.

Wallace pointed this out as well to table 11 of the staff recommendation to allow eight stories as the base maximum height on major streets. And again, you could reference my submission. Secondly, tri-car is also concerned with clause D of the staff recommendation. I think that this is addressed in what Mayor Morgan has put forward, but I will state that they are also concerned that Council resolution that sets targets without a lot of context could become de facto regulations, and there’s concern around that.

There are some important issues addressed through those targets, but to us it seems that’s a role or an opportunity for the site plan process and discussion therein, not to have specific numerical targets that could become like regulations. Now I’d like to turn to concerns and requests of 100 Kellogg Lane, the name of the corporation that has been developed. - 30 seconds. Thank you, Mr.

Chair, just for Clarity, is that for both sides? - No, you got five minutes. Okay, I can’t give it to everybody else. I’m not going to make another exception.

Okay, well, I’ll just say that to date, they’ve sunk a quarter billion dollars into the Kellogg’s district. And what they’re looking for, and you can see it again in my submission and the added agenda, is some Clarity around the special policy that already exists in the official plan that will now apply to the Kellogg’s district in the transit village policies. And it would allow for parking, for example, on the north side of Dundas Street, for overflow parking for an event that might be occurring on the south side of Dundas Street, all within their land holdings. The way the policy is written now, we think there are some addresses missing, and we also think that there needs to be better Clarity.

We have put our requested change that’s fairly technical, but we think it could avoid a problem in the future where there’s parking that’s going to be a carbonating other places within the transit village on their land holdings. Thank you. - Thank you. Look for the next speaker.

Please, sir, give us your name, you have five minutes. Thank you very much. Jared Zafin with the London Home Builders Association. First, I just want to say it’s very nice to have the guard down and getting to speak to everybody very freely, it’s really nice.

So thank you for forging ahead with that. On behalf of the Home Builders Association, first wanted to thank staff for their work on this and bringing this forward. There’s certainly a lot of positive changes that we have seen coming from this file. At the same time, certainly, I think some disagreements that we have shared with staff, and I believe from what some of the mayor has put forward today, I think speaks a bit to where some of those challenges are, and where some opportunities are for, I think, really trying to achieve a lot of the goals and objectives in the Housing Accelerator Fund.

And a lot of the entirety of the housing framework that we’re looking in the review today is as a result of funds that the city has gone to bat for to get with the Housing Accelerator Fund with the direct intention of removing barriers to encourage local initiatives to build more homes faster. And these items, this one and the next one you will be addressing, look to achieve from the Half Cleanse Summary Initiatives 1 and 3, proactive as of right zoning to promote high density development and promoting infill development. Specifically, I’m going to address two major items in this today, the first being stacked town homes. The opportunity that comes with this that’s being put forward today will provide some of the most affordable and easily built homes that could be done in the city over the next many years, making the ability to create more homes faster, do exactly that.

This will accomplish that in so many ways that will help put forward so many more of the so dearly needed homes that we need in our city that are affordable as well. Specifically, requesting that stacked town houses should be added to the neighborhood streets classification as a permitted use, and in support of that to have a base condition of four stories along a neighborhood connector. Providing four stories in neighborhood connectors would give the flexibility needed to make these stacked townhouse projects broadly viable. This immediately opens up a great deal of opportunity for dense and attainable forms of housing, which is exactly what the city has been asking for and what the community is looking for as well.

With rising costs of all inputs into building, stacked town homes are becoming a very popular type of home to build, which is often now becoming the new starter home. Our membership, which represents close to 300 different businesses in this community with many, many builders, provides so much opportunity to these builders to create the drastically needed homes that we will need now in our community and into the near future. This is also a type of home that our builders have already started doing in the community with many more on the horizon. Also, I wanted to reiterate that under the R6 and R5 zones, these permissions currently exist, so why would we look to reduce those for existing permissions and go in the opposite direction?

The next point I wanted to address was staff’s request to civic administrations regarding site plan. Unfortunately, much of what’s in this request here, I believe, is counter to the intention of what the half funds are trying to accomplish, which is to be able to build more homes faster and simplify processes and remove barriers. What is being put forward here as part of a request to for consideration in site plan will do the complete opposite of that. We’ll make projects timelines significantly longer.

We all recognize that what goes into site plan can be a very subjective process and can be a bit of a negotiation between those building and what ultimately ultimately gets built. The cost, the additional cost, the timelines that go into that will make projects less affordable and create those timelines longer so that, in the end of the day, if we want to try and get more homes built faster that are affordable, this is going to be completely counter to that, so I would absolutely encourage you to support the mayor’s amendment on this, which I think will accomplish exactly that. We want to thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback and hope this can be taken into consideration as part of your discussion today and want to reiterate, again, how critical stacked town homes are going to be as a type of home that’s going to be needed in our community over the next many years and decades. Unfortunately, homes of all types have gotten more expensive to build with all different types of inputs getting more expensive.

What we want to try and do is be able to offer a type of home that many, many people in our community and those that are looking to come to our community can afford and can be able to live in and also ones that can be built in a very fast manner. And exactly this is going to be able to accomplish that and fit very well in so many neighborhoods throughout our entire city. Thank you very much. Thank you.

We’re for the next speaker. Please ma’am, give us your name and you have five minutes. Okay, thank you. My name’s Marie Blash and once again, I’m here on behalf of the Brookdale Community Association and then at the end if I have a few minutes, I’d like to make a couple additional comments of my own.

But in terms of the Brookdale Community Association, a fresh comment is that we’re, I don’t know whether to say we’re appalled or refreshed that you’ve only, you know, according to this one, section five, page seven, city staff from various departments and developers comprise the complete list of those that were consultants and consulted and that residents who are the most impacted by these heights and transit villages are just left out. So, I mean, I know we’re at the bottom of the heat. So like I said, I don’t know if we’re appalled or just kind of refreshed that there’s some honesty going on here. But in terms of the heights, we’ve had some experience as a community with some of these taller buildings and had some very specific suggestions that if we were to be consulted, we might wanna make.

One is our experience with the locks. On Richmond Street, we had horrible traffic problems there and the city had to come in after the fact and put in a pool in lay by area so that cars could pull over and not cause traffic accidents and jams when they make deliveries or the students are moving in. The would also suggest that there be significant setbacks to allow for some trees and plantings to kind of offset this concrete jungle that’s rapidly taking over the city. Would encourage design guidelines.

We know that you’ve removed the urban design peer review board or panel, whatever it was called and would suggest that you reinstate that. If you’re gonna have all these tall buildings, there should be some guidelines that they look good at least. The height of the building certainly impacts the residents. It’s for shadows, loss of privacy, all of those concerns need to be taken into effect.

Would suggest that you consider if commercial buildings are being built, that there be a residential component required. The old idea of living above the store. So that’s something that wasn’t considered. Also, bird-friendly policy should apply to these buildings and I think that it just kind of is a separate issue.

I’d like to just talk about parking a little bit. I think that Councillor ramen raised a very good point when she was discussing the issue of, well, the developer says it’s more affordable to just go ahead and build the building without any parking spots, or with very, very few parking spots, or as I was here before, we’re gonna get 14 parking spots for a complex with 70 bedrooms. What happens to all those overflow cars? There’s only, and it’s an interesting issue because if you think about it, the city’s had to deal with developments that were built without sidewalks or without streetlights.

And so in the end, when these become issues, the developers long gone, they saved their money, they didn’t put in sidewalks, they didn’t put in streetlights, it falls on the city. And that expense falls on you. And like I said, I think Councillor ramen has raised a very good point in saying, what’s gonna happen when people start demanding parking? Now, one thing that might happen is you might start getting developers coming in here and saying, well, I’m gonna build a parking garage.

And it’s, don’t laugh because the luxe building, when you pay your $900 for your bedroom, that doesn’t come with a parking spot. If you want a parking spot, that’s an additional 175 per month. I think about that. Why don’t I just start building parking garages and running those out?

Or maybe selling them? You can actually buy those luxe parking spots. The last time I looked, they were $50,000. Okay, this is not affordable.

Okay, this is not, you know, this whole idea. Everything is gonna be affordable if we lowered this cost. That’s not what’s happening here. It’s really just a buzzword.

So, okay, so finally, transit villages. You know, people ask me about this. I just say, there are no transit villages. I mean, there’s no transit.

It’s just a place type to build these tall buildings. So, and I think you should be a little more clear about that. And certainly increase the public participation, ‘cause you can see that there’s a lot of interest here. And there’s a lot of ideas and a lot of concerns.

And so, this really has to go back to the drawing board. Thank you. Look for the next speaker, gentlemen, over here on my left. Please give us your name, you have five minutes.

Good afternoon, Chair, members of the committee. My name is Casey Kolchicki. I’m a senior associate with Slenka Priam Unlimited. I’m here today on behalf of 785 Wonderland Inc.

They are the owners and operators of West Mount Mall. I have put a letter in that is on the agenda, or the added agenda today, and I’m just gonna reiterate our request that is contained in that letter. We are in support of the re-designation of the West Mount Mall property as a major shopping area. We are also in support to the proposed height increase to 15 stories.

The concern of my client is that we recently settled an OLT dispute with staff earlier this year that settled on a 12 story maximum down from our proposed 16 stories as part of our application. We’re looking for some confirmation or some assurances that as part of this amendment to the London plan that our site specific policy framework will also be updated to change the portion of the property that is subject to that 12 story maximum to the increased 15 story maximum to avoid the need for an official plan amendment when that site redevelops. Thank you. Thank you, I look for that speaker.

Please ma’am, give us your name and you have five minutes. Thank you very much. My name is Rachel Forrester-Jones. I have submitted two letters with over 40 signatures to them, including one letter to the added addendum.

Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Councillors, staff, and fellow City of London residents. This really is a story of equity and equitable consultation or lack thereof. We all know that there has been a huge and hugely negative response from residents and business owners to the city plans for the Oxford Richmond area. We have seen many of the communications sent to the planning office and to other members of the council, as well as challenging the legitimacy of the consultation exercise.

Those who have written to the planning office and see seeing the Councillors have presented diverse yet strong and valid arguments to you for rethinking what you are proposing to do to this area. Among those who have written are significant experts in the fields of planning, engineering, financial experts and law, many of whom have worked in the city of London and contributed to its growth for many years. Many have also lived in and around the Oxford Richmond area and have invested in it. London, like many cities, is an eclectic mix.

We have wortly, we have the downtown, we have Old North to name just a few. Like many cities, we also have our fair share of underdeveloped areas that are also equity deserving areas. They are also areas of low density and they need development. Oxford Richmond area is not such one of these areas that needs such development.

As the city of London, of which we all are, we have an opportunity to use a federal grant, a housing accelerator fund to develop areas. And there is a moral argument here that the money from the public purse be used for underdeveloped areas. It has to be used wisely. It has to be used equitably and it has to be used appropriately.

This is about equity of resources. And we know, and the planning office know, and I’ve talked to the planning office and they know where these areas are, alternative areas, that need this money. As I said, this is also a story of equitable consultation. As we have all heard from many people today, the application details are written in a way that is confusing to many people.

It is not written in plain English. And it does not explain the terms used adequately or with clarity such that a reasonable person could understand the implications of such a rezoning. Although the notices that have gone out have specified alternative accessible formats of communication supports are available upon request, please contact lander@london.ca for more information. Someone with a disability, for example, a site impairment or an intellectual disability who has capacity to consent or an older person not using online communication will have been seriously disadvantaged in accessing such so-called accessible formats.

We therefore believe that this consultation process contravenes the Accessibility Canada Act of 2019. Section six of that act says that, and I quote, “Everyone must be able to participate fully and equally in society, and persons with disabilities must be involved in and the development of and design of laws, processes, policies, services and structures.” 30 seconds. - So we ask, therefore, that you do the right thing, that you do something that is morally defensible rather than immorally indefensible, to do the right thing and choose a more deserving area for this grant that is the public purse. And also that any consultation from now on is absolutely equitable and inclusive.

Thank you very much. Thank you. I’ll look for the next speaker. Lisa, give us your name and you have five minutes.

I remain Alex Vandersluice with Auburn developments. I do wonder whether there’s any federal funding available to upgrade the seating in these chambers. I appreciate the opportunity to provide commentary on this proposal. We at Auburn have been consistently engaged in this process with staff through various consultations and presentations and written communication.

We have submitted written communication on this item this evening, and unfortunately, you’re gonna see me again for the third time on the zoning item after this. We’re still working to understand some of the implications of the changes advanced by the mayor and the deputy mayor. To be perfectly honest, we do have concerns with the down designation of some of our lands along Richmond Street, and certainly would look forward to some discussions on that topic in the next couple of weeks in advance of council. With respect to the creation of the new place type, major shopping area, we support the city for the creation of what will become a hierarchical, nodal mixed use framework in London with major and minor shopping areas.

We do believe, however, that there’s an opportunity to apply the major shopping area designation more broadly throughout the city, rather than how it’s being proposed in the framework and eligibility criteria as they’ve been proposed, it’s mostly or almost exclusively applied to sites which are built out and operating and oftentimes quite stably and successfully. The cost of redevelopment on built sites is significant. We’re going through this in London in partnership with Drew Lowe at Wellington and Bradley. The heights that we secured through a balancing framework on that site, we’re just barely meeting the threshold for us to spend the money to demolish and redevelop rather than simply keep it operating as a commercial site.

And I think a lot of developers who are receiving this major shopping area designation are going to be doing that calculus. And in my concern, our concern is that the creation of this new place tape may not actually have much effect on boosting housing stock in London. So to that end, we think that looking at some vacant development sites, which essentially Greenfield lands, where developers are ready to move ahead with applications, should be something that’s under consideration by this committee and council. On that point, we have made Auburn two site specific requests in our written submissions to the committee for lands in London that we believe are good candidates for major shopping area designation.

They are 1924 Adelaide Street North, which is the lands immediately abutting Stony Creek Community Center to the west at the northeast corner of Adelaide and Sunningdale, as well as 1269 Hyde Park Road, which is in the commercial node at Sarnia and Hyde Park. Just at the south end of the Hyde Park Road, Main Street, commercial corridor. We’ve provided a rationale within our written submission. I won’t go through all of it.

But we’re hopeful that there is some interest and uptake to advance those as major shopping areas, along with the changes that are included in the LDI submission on the framework for major shopping areas in London. The last thing I want to say is that we are, I think in agreement with our LDI colleagues and some of the others that have spoken from the development side of things tonight or this afternoon, that there is room in this new framework to permit with caveats, eight stories for neighborhood sites with frontage on major roads, and that the city should be looking to appropriate transition, built forum transition provisions in the neighborhoods policies, as well as through zoning to ensure that we’re not leaving density on the table while maintaining a correct interface with existing low-rise areas. That’s really all I have to say, and I’ll see you on the zoning item. Thank you.

I’ll look for the next speaker. Please ma’am, give us your name and you have five minutes. Is Sophie Skate? I’d just like to comment a little more generally on things.

And going back to the London plant specifically, where it states right at the beginning that this was a vision for the next 20 years of city building in London. So this was a plan for 2020, and we’re now four years into it, starting into our fifth year. We’re talking about a lot of changes here. What I would like to see going forward is, why don’t we have a vision for 2050?

What do we want the city to look like in 2050 and start planning for that? I really don’t know how we’re going to accommodate a lot of people without providing adequate infrastructure as shopping. If we’re going to go carless, we need to be able to get groceries to people. And what I’m seeing in some neighborhoods, and I can vouch for this in my neighborhood, delivery trucks, one after another, bringing groceries, bringing Amazon trucks.

I don’t know how many of these vehicles come down the street every day. They have to stop somewhere. In a residential area, it’s pretty easy for them to stop. As we build up the city and people keep ordering things, this creates a nightmare for me.

I mean, I don’t want to drive up Richmond North, because even though you’ve got a lay-by there now, they still double park, and it’s still single lane some of the time. So we need lay-bys, we need larger areas if we’re going to have no parking spaces. I would happily take transit. I’d love to take transit everywhere.

I grew up taking transit everywhere. I can’t in this city. I can’t even get to the airport. And if we want to connect as we’re talking about this city and have hubs, we really need to look at a ring area.

And we’ve talked about this a long time. But you know, the city is growing larger and larger. You know, we talked about going westbound. We got west five.

Well, it doesn’t stop there. We’re now going into, you know, Kilworth, Kamoka, Mount Bridges. And all those people are coming in. But what’s also happening is the people in London that can’t get downtown are going out there to do their shopping.

So if London is going to remain focused and grow, which you can, we need to really start thinking, you know, 25 years to the future. What do we want the city to look like then? We’re five years into this plan. So I really would like to see us not work so much on making amendments and amendments and amendments to the London plan, but to start working on a new one that might be a better vision.

And have a lot of consultation on that. Thank you. Thank you. I’ll look for the next speaker.

So clerk, if there’s anyone online. Apologies. If I do not pronounce your name, right? Is it Annura?

It is, I don’t have any comments. So I just listening. Tello Tama, Tello Tama. I’ll go to you, sir.

Please give us your name. You have five minutes. My name’s Theron Jones. I live on Lawson Road.

I’m in the Orchard Park, Sherwood Forest area. I do want to comment historically, I’ve done a lot of work with city staff in the city of London for a neighborhood group and as an individual, as a resident, and the communication and dialogue has always been great. And I’d say this is one occasion where I’ve really seen a breakdown and how this and from what I normally would experience. And from that point, I live on a connector.

I never received any notification of the significant changes that are being proposed in the amendment and certainly in July when we were asked to meet with city for comments, the changes that were being showed as potential amendments at that time are far different from what we’re talking about today and the concept of stacked townhouses, even into residential neighborhood streets, certainly weren’t even ideas that were broached in any of the initial consultation process. So that isn’t the process that I’m familiar with in dealing with the city. The other thing I was really surprised by is the fact that there is already mechanisms within the London plan to deal with going higher with buildings, whether it’s been exercised by various developers, I can’t comment, but the necessity for these aggressive changes in the London plan or in the proposed amendments seem curious because those mechanisms existed as it stands today and why we have to make the changes I have a little understanding of. The general concept of doubling and tripling building heights is really what concerns us as a neighborhood group and certainly having worked on the great near campus neighborhoods initiatives years ago and watching that progress, it certainly looks like we’re almost abandoning many of those policies.

And I can’t understand why an area that has spent over 30 years lending its geography to the greatest intensification in the city is now being ignored and simply just has to eat whatever height changes and whatever proposed amendments, we’re changing things on the fly to accommodate the builders without having consideration for the residents. And those residents, we’ve been compromised and we will meet with city, we accept the fact growth is inevitable, but it needs guard rails. And as the amendments are proposed right now, there is no balance, it’s simply let’s just build and let’s just go up. And I think with respect, those groups need to have input and there needs to be communication so people understand what’s going on.

The difference between a connector, a boulevard, all these things are not understood by the residents, certainly not in our community. And if you knew the number of people on my connector street, I live on one. And if you told them that this was gonna turn into a stacked townhouse development, that would be very concerning to them because we’re very close to the university and the economics permit that type of construction for student rental. I would love it if it went to residential, but it doesn’t.

It will go to student rental, that’s where the economics fit. And we have supported a variety of projects in our neighborhood. For instance, we have a brand new townhouse development. The Sherwood Forest School site was redeveloped.

We were realistic. It wasn’t all gonna be single-hold or single-hold pre-hold homes. It has townhouses. And similarly along Cernier Road to 79 Cernier.

That’s gonna be a large development. We put our support behind it. We’re not saying no, we don’t want any development, but we want control. We want the city to have the ability for planners to look at what’s being proposed by builders.

And we don’t wanna take the guardrails off where everybody can just build what they want. Let’s put the trust right in the construction community alone. It needs controls. And that’s what we want today.

And so what we’re asking for is essentially that city staff take this back and review it. And if you can’t do this before the third reading, you do a community involvement where you actually engage the residents. 30 seconds. And ask them for their input because people don’t know this is happening.

And they certainly don’t understand the vast change that you’re proposing. Thank you. Thank you. Look for the next speaker.

I’ll ask if there’s anyone online. Paul, have Paul registered to speak? Please go ahead. You have five minutes, Cernieras, or stand from the clerk.

There’s no one else online. Okay. One last call for, please, sir. Go ahead.

Give us your name. You have five minutes. Okay. Members of the committee and for council.

My name is Mohamed Musa. I am 155 foreign to Nav. I discovered earlier today that there was a motion on the floor to remove section D. Well, there’s no motion on the floor as of yet.

Okay. The mayor has spoken to some intentions, but there’s nothing on the floor. I just wanted to address a couple of things with respect to section D. Mostly the maximum tower floor plate.

If you do a search of the map on the city website an 1100 square meter floor plate would not have allowed every building within a one square, one kilometer radius of here built in the last 35 years, they would not meet that criterion. 1100 square meters is far too small. I understand you may be taking that out, but I just, I needed to address it. There are other things I wanted to address, but some of the heavy hitters before me more qualified than I am, excuse me, have already addressed those.

Do see here section four IV of D. I think that’s a good idea, which is the five hour sunlight on any public parks. You know, we want to preserve our parks. And I will just point out, sorry, it’s summer solstice, not equinox.

Just in case that does get kept in there. Oxford Street West development and Oxford Street West has absolutely exploded. We’re talking about transit corridors. We’re talking about transit villages.

I think to stop a transit corridor, whether, I mean, transit’s going to come rapid transit, whatever, in whatever form it comes, is going to come out to that side of the city sometimes soon. We need to extend that transit corridor. We’re already at the UGB built up at the very West End of Oxford Street. And as an individual said earlier, a lot of people from Killworth, ComoCo Mount Bridges are using Oxford Street to get into the city.

And we have more development that’s going on out there. I know it’s not part of the agenda, but it needs to be considered to make that part of the urban core, sorry, transit corridor. We’re expanding, you’re expanding, we’re expanding. Oxford Street to four lanes between sanatorium all the way out to Gideon Drive, possibly further.

And we’ll see even more population growth out there that is going to require transit. It is a very busy road to travel. Last point I want to make, and it’s not necessarily here on this agenda. There is a roundabout being put up at Oxford and Gideon.

To my mind, it’s a useless place to put it. But in discussions last year, earlier this year, in the expansion of Oxford Street, they want to put traffic lights at West Elbourn and at Commissioner’s Keynes. Those are the areas that are going to require roundabouts. So I, glad I’m speaking to a little bit over half of council, because there won’t be a PPM on this.

This will just come to you under which committee I’m not sure, but please consider, especially for transit, roundabouts at West Elbourn Oxford and Commissioner Keynes in Oxford. Thank you so much. Thank you. Any other folks that want to address the committee?

One more, please sir. Give us your name and you have five minutes. Robin Dan, I live just north of Richmond in Oxford. Just one comment based on my presence here this afternoon.

It’s apparent to me that builders, developers have a different level of access to city staff. And I feel that the general public, those of us who live here are going to be most affected by change are disadvantaged in that regard. Thank you. Thank you.

Any other comments from the gallery or online? I’ll check one more time. Is there anybody online? Seeing no more people that wish to address committee on look for a motion to close the PPM.

Councilor Robin, seconded by Councilor Lewis, Deputy Mayor Lewis, who I’ll call the vote. Opposed in the vote, the motion carries 60-0. Thank you. I just want to go to staff with a couple of questions or comments I’m looking for.

First of all, we have an official plan, a London plan. When is that up for renewal? So the London plan was approved in 2016. And under the Planning Act it’s required to be reviewed comprehensively within 10 years of that approval.

And actually I should say it was approved by the province what came into force in 2017. So we have until 2027 to complete that review. However, we have initiated the review already and this amendment actually forms part of that review. So that overall review of the London plan is already begun and is underway now.

Thank you. And the other thing I just want to get just for the public’s information, what is a stacked townhouse? Through the chair, a stacked townhouse is essentially a townhouse with a, another row of townhouses almost on top or basically is stacked. So essentially it would be within what you would normally think of as one building, I guess you could say, it’s actually divided into two essentially.

So there’s an upper and a lower typically for stacked townhouses. Sometimes can be slightly taller, sometimes there can even be as many as three. But generally that’s how it’s defined. There’s an actual definition though, in our zoning by-law if anyone is interested in it, I just don’t have it in front of me right now.

But in simple terms, what you’re saying is a townhouse that would be rented or owned in its entirety from top to bottom in a stacked townhouse would have perhaps two, two level units within that one structure. Is that correct? Through the chair, yes that’s correct. And essentially in a normal townhouse, the dividing lines between units are vertical.

In a stacked townhouse, the dividing lines between units can be vertical or horizontal. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, I just wanted to get those, some of those things clear. Thanks everyone for your comments, appreciate it.

I’m going to go and kept up to Mayor Lewis. Chair, before we get into debates and motions, I think there were two questions from the gallery that you might throw you direct to staff. Very specific ones with regard to the 100 Kellogg special provisions and what these amendments do to that. And the other with regard to the West Mount Mall site-specific settlement that was just done with OLT.

Those are two very technical questions, specific to individual sites, but are impacted potentially by this. So perhaps through you if we could get the answers to those before we move into motions and debate. Okay, I’ll go to the staff and the concerns over 100 Kellogg and the implications of this that would happen at that particular site. Through the chair, looking at the 100 Kellogg’s policy, it currently exists as is and what Mr.

Fleming has proposed to add a few additional sites. We have not looked at this at all. We have not considered the implications of that. There was a special policy that was added to the official plan several years ago with respect to 100 Kellogg’s.

And it specifically identified specific sites for accessory parking. So it’s something that we’d have to take back and look at whether it’s even possible or not. I would normally say that something like this would usually go through some sort of an official plan amendment in order so that we could have a fulsome review basically to ensure that there was no real impact of something like this. Unfortunately, I can’t give much more of an answer.

Deputy Mayor. So I just want clarification though on the existing special area provisions, those are still allowed but any additions would need to come forward through a new process. Go to staff. Through the chair, yes, exactly.

So the existing provisions carry over. There are four properties that were identified for accessory parking. However, like I said, there’s additional parking areas that have been identified by Mr. Fleming and that has not been considered at all.

So that would require some sort of an amendment typically. And through the chair for the second question about West Mount Mall. Oh, I was thinking we might also need to discuss that with legal potentially because there was a settled, this was a settled matter at the land tribunal last year or the year before. So there may need to be some discussion with legal.

Through the chair, I’ve now had that discussion with legal. And so the policy is enforced. So it would have to be amended. And we’ve not heard from, as far as I’m aware, from the property owner or agent on that property yet.

So we can have a discussion with Emma about what that could look like. Can I have any mayor? Do you satisfy? Okay, thank you.

I’m gonna go to the mayor. The mayor, I understand, has a motion that he’d like to present to the committee. Yes, chair. So I circulated and actually put it on the agenda.

The alternate motion that I’d like to make, which has a few changes. I’m happy to look for a seconder and then provide a little bit of an overview of what’s contained within that and the rationale for it. I’ll look for a seconder, deputy mayor, seconder. Okay, so the changes I’m proposing incorporated a number of things.

And I’d like to outline that and then speak a little bit about some of the comments that the public has made today. But I wanna start first by thanking the public for their comments as well as staff for their work. I don’t wanna say, although I’m making an amendment to what staff has proposed, I certainly fully respect and understand how staff came to the recommendations they made. Their recommendations are rooted in our existing policies including the London Plan, the Prandtl Policy Framework, the PPS, and a number of other documents.

And I think that their work is exemplary and they have provided counsel with an appropriate professional opinion based on our current plans. But as we’ve heard today, some of our current plans are out of date. We’ve started the renewal of things like our official plan. The provincial policy statements are changing effective October 1st.

We know that our plans are grossly out of date for the population that has already come to the city even in the London Plan. We are far ahead of the population projections where we thought we would be at this point. And so I think, although this is a great staff proposal, I think this is an opportunity for us to really show how we’re going to address the housing crisis in our cities with one of what are many steps that we’ll need to make. And so my proposal is to be a little bit more aggressive on some of the opportunities for residential development within our city and density.

And I want to be more aggressive for two reasons. One, we know that we have a housing crisis. Like, this is a big problem. We are nowhere near across this country meeting the housing needs that we need to not continue to see an escalation and pressure in prices.

It will go up and down over time, but there is an upward trend here. The opportunity for our children to have the same homeownership that we have is not there right now without us trying to increase supply and include affordable items across the city. But supply is a big pressure point here. And so this is not just a London problem.

This is something that all of us have to be doing across different cities. When we don’t develop here, we don’t provide opportunities for infill and intensification, people still develop. And they develop on farmland outside of the city. The ex-urban growth pressure in Elderton, Kilworth, Kamoka, Arva, all these surrounding communities is tremendous.

And if we don’t provide adequate opportunities here, we’re going to continue to see that outside our city where there is an opportunity to supply transit and many other things that we know can alleviate the environmental impacts of significant population growth. So what am I proposing that’s different from the staff recommendation? First is to many of the comments today, the elimination of the proposed transit village at Richford and Oxford. We’re in the process of developing a mass mobility plan.

And I think that mass mobility plan will dictate whether or not we need new transit villages. It will be an important plan when it comes to fruition to guide transit and transit opportunities for the next 25 years, including opportunities out to the west end of the city, as was mentioned in discussion. I also think we need to pull back on the rapid transit corridor on Richmond Street, north of there and convert it back to a civic boulevard classification until we determine how transit will move from the central to the north part of the city. And that can then change out of the mass mobility plan at that point.

But the existing land use structure and buildings along that corridor are not structured adequately to support the height and density that we’re contemplating with these changes that would be layered onto the existing framework of how that road is classified. And so a civic boulevard classification is likely more appropriate at this time until we figure out exactly how transit will be developed across the city. The third piece in the motion today, and again, parts of this are in the second item that we’ll talk about, but I’ll stick to this one, is the permitting of four-story stack townhouses along up to, I should say, along neighborhood connectors? And I certainly hear that not everybody knows what a neighborhood connector is.

It’s a specific map within our planning documents, it outlines where they are. There are many roads mentioned, others, and there’s a variety of roads here too, baseline, black acres, cheap side, keeps laying, they’re all neighborhood connectors. And I’ll comment on that in just a second. The other piece that is proposed here is to delete the staff recommendation to add the additional pieces into site plan.

It doesn’t mean the other things that are in the site plan process are being removed. It’s just we’re not going to layer additional pieces into there as we’re contemplated in section D, and I’ll provide some rationale to that maybe in the debate, but on the stacked townhouses piece, and I don’t know what my time is, Mr. Chair, but I’m going to deal with this as quick as possible. In view of the importance of this, I will grade you some extra minutes.

You want to do that as a motion, or I think you should do it. Yeah, so if you want to request additional time, please. I do. Okay, I’ll say five minutes.

Okay, I’m going to go to the committee to see if Councilor Deputy Mayor Lewis make the motion seconded by Councilor Robin. So I’ll call that vote. Those in the vote, the motion carries six to zero. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you colleagues, and I appreciate that some of my changes are in a variety of areas, having a little more time to explain those is valuable to me, and hopefully to the debate. So on the stacked townhouse piece, as was discussed, these are our opportunity for affordable development that can be built quickly in the city. Not all neighborhood connectors will exhibit the same redevelopment potential. Like local characteristics of the street, including lot sizes, the value of the building types, they’re going to define how that actually comes into fruition.

And it would be, I think, perilous to us to try to do this on a site-by-site basis across the city. It would be time consuming, it would be micromanaging, it would presuppose exactly where all the properties and street segments would exhibit the best opportunities for development, and I think doing it on a broad basis, with some of the protections that exist in the London plan, is probably the most appropriate. And I want to remind colleagues, too, that through successive OLT decisions, they’ve basically demonstrated that four-story, stacked townhouse type buildings are compatible with every other residential classification type. If someone wants to take us to the OLT, they can pretty much get these things built.

So for us to create a permissive framework will allow for a very affordable type of development to be built in our city, where appropriate. Now, I’ve seen in the province many times, something can get, I think, magnified in a way that maybe isn’t reflective of how it will actually occur. I remember this with four units as of right. This council approved four units as of right, 15 to zero.

And we don’t see four units as of right popping up in every part where they’re allowed across the city, all over the place. Other communities got into this very fearful moment of saying this is going to change the entire city all over the place, to the point where a community like Oakville actually gave back their housing accelerator fund money by not actually doing four units as of right. Other mayors approached me and said I’d love to do this because I don’t think it’s going to have a huge impact on the city, but the public’s really against it so I don’t think we should, giving up opportunities for significant federal funding. These developments are going to happen where they make sense across the city.

They will not be on every one of these neighborhood connected streets and not dotted all along them. There is an economics to this that makes sense. And just like four units as of right, they’re going to occur in a way that makes sense across the city. And they’re still subject to the planning principles that were put within our official plan and the processes that have to be followed through site plan and other components.

So I think it’s easy to magnify this in a way that isn’t there, but it’s important for me to create the opportunity for this type of affordable development across the city if we’re going to continue to try to strive to meet the housing challenges that we have together, that we have to address together. Finally, I just want to go back to the big picture on this. We have an opportunity, I think, to move forward and meet our obligations under the Housing Accelerator Fund to create the density. Also, the reason why it may feel like we’re pushing forward at a pace that is uncomfortable for some is one.

We’re talking about very complex planning items deep into the official plan with types and classifications. I understand that not everybody will be educated up on those things and it takes some time to do so. We’re also up against some timelines, both federally and provincially, to make some of the density changes that we want if we want to adhere to our Housing Accelerator Fund obligations or if we want to prepare ourselves for accessing things like the permanent transit fund where the federal government has said you’ve got to layer some density along primary transit corridors along this to ensure that you’re actually meeting your obligations to apply for this funding. This is a direction that all levels of a government are going and we’re pulling the same direction and so as mayor, I think it’s our opportunity to send a clear signal to the public, to everybody who’s asking about housing affordability, to the province and to the feds, that we’re on board for solving the housing crisis and we’re going to continue to take steps in an aggressive way to do so.

So the series of amendments that I put forward, I know counselors will have different opinions on. I always respect a good and thoughtful debate. I just wanted you to know some of my rationale for bringing them forward and I look forward to a good discussion and again, I want to thank our staff for the excellent work they did in creating, I think good recommendations that I think we, as it’s thrown over to council, have the absolute right and jurisdiction to say we’re going to do a little bit more. So those are my comments, Mr.

Chair and I look forward to the discussion. Thank you, mayor. Okay, so we have a motion moved in second and so I’ll open it up to committee members and visiting counselors for the comment. Deputy Mayor Lewis.

Thank you, Chair and I’ll ask if you can give me four minute warning so that I can stop and because I may end up needing to ask for an extension as well. So colleagues, I’m going to try and cram as much in as fast as I can here to leave time for debate participation later. And I’m going to start sort of where the mayor picked left off, yes, we’re moving fast. And yes, it is technical and dense and that is because we have to move fast and we have to move technically to cross all of our teas and dot all of our eyes.

But we also have to do so one of the very first speakers in the PPM today talked about the cost of development charge waivers to the city. It is going to be far more costly to us to not have those federal and provincial dollars both for built infrastructure as well as the mayor alluded to for transit. If we hand back that money and then say, we’ll go it on our own but at a slower pace. So it will be much, much more expensive.

And we heard some comments both from the mayor but we heard it through the comments from the public as well about ex-urban growth, about people going out to Kilworth and Kamoka and Dorchester and Thamesford and all of those places. And the worst thing that we can do is hold up development in the city and push that ex-urban growth because when we talk about, it’s not just about paving over the farm fields. But again, I come back to the tax base. Those folks aren’t paying property taxes to live in Elderton and then come and use our facilities in London and work in London and drive on our roads and enjoy the snow plowing and everything else that is done here.

So infill is a better option here. I absolutely appreciate the comment about, let’s start thinking about what the next 50 years looks like. And the last official plan before the London plan was the 1989 official plan. In fact, when I first arrived here at council, I couldn’t believe we were still referring to the 1989 official plan at council.

I was elected in 2018 and we were still referring to that document. Here we are in 2024 with a plan that was passed in 2027 and it is already so out of date that in 2024, we have surpassed the population targets for 2030. So we have to update it now. There’s no time to wait.

We have to move forward. And I wanna shift now to a couple of the other points that we heard because we talked to, we don’t know how we’re going to move people around. We don’t know how this is all gonna fit where are people going to shop. Well, this isn’t the only thing that we’re doing.

We’re in the midst of a master mobility plan review that should be coming forward late this year or early next year where we will be looking at the modes of mobility. We are undertaking a vacant land needs assessment and a review of the urban growth boundary. Part of that, I know Mr. Wallace will be happy to hear.

To my mind has to include a review of the built area boundary lines as well because those components have to be considered as well. And when we hear about the delivery trucks, yes, they frustrate me too. And where are people gonna shop? Well, that’s the whole point of transit villages.

And yes, we don’t have a practical transit village yet because we don’t practically have rapid transit yet. Our downtown loop line is actually not even finished, let alone running buses on it yet. But it will be soon. And as we see that start to come forward, we will start to see those kind of commercial developments at the base of residential towers in White Oaks, in Masonville, hopefully out in Argyle and my neighborhood as well, we’ll see those develop so that people, some of those folks who are going to have jobs in them all, where they’re literally going to take the elevator downstairs and be at their job and not have to commute everywhere.

So that, all of these things come together. This is not happening in isolation. So I think that it’s really important to share with the public. Now, I really wanna focus in on the stacked townhouses for a minute because we’re hearing a lot of how significant this is.

And I actually reject that. I don’t think this is significant. The neighborhood place type already allows as a permitted use, townhouses on neighborhood streets. On neighborhood connectors, it allows it in places on neighborhood connectors where they intersect with each other or where they intersect with a civic boulevard.

So the only places where they’re not allowed is mid block. Four minutes. Thank you. So I’m gonna finish up quickly to say, we’re going from three stories to four stories.

Along the length of a road where we’re already allowing them at intersections. This is, as Mr. Safeman said, the most affordable form of development right now for those starter homes that families are looking for. So I really think that this is a key component of what we are proposing here today.

And I’m gonna end there so I can save some time and ask for an extension later if I need it during debate. Okay, thank you. I’ll look for other many members, comments. Councilor Raman.

Thank you and through you. So again, I wanna thank staff and the public for staff for their work on this and the public for their participation in this discussion so far. I do wanna propose an amendment to the mayor and deputy mayor’s motion. And my amendment actually deals with stacked townhouses.

And it’s to go back to what staff are originally recommending, which is in the primary transit area. So I’m just wondering if we can, I don’t know if we have to delete it or what has to happen or if it’s just an adjustment to the language I’ve provided some wording. If the mover and seconder are okay with it, it hasn’t been voted on, we couldn’t make that adjustment. I’ll ask the mover and seconder what they thought, I think.

So through you, Chair, that would be contrary to what we’re trying to accomplish. Okay, Councilor, so we’ll treat it as amendment. And I’ll need a seconder for that motion. Okay, I’m not sure if I have a seconder, but I’ll speak, can I speak to my rationale?

Maybe I’ll. Councilor Frank wants to weigh in here. Quick question, could you repeat what you said? Is it in the PTA or all along primary transit area?

So I just, if you could reframe what it was, I just wasn’t sure what you said. Please. It was staff’s original recommendation. So I believe it says a long, but I’m just wondering if they can clarify.

I’ll go to staff. Can you clarify the original? Through the chair, the recommendation was to permit stacked townhouses along neighborhood connectors within the primary transit area. Okay, Councilor Frank.

And then one follow-up question, sorry. And then could you just explain the difference between that and then what is being proposed? So I’ll make sure I have clarity before I make a decision on seconding. Councilor.

That gets into my rationale. So is that okay? Yeah, sure, yeah, just explain the difference. I just want to go in the reasons why you want this.

Sure, well, part of this is the rationale. I mean, we consulted the public and said that part of what we were looking at was within the primary transit corridor. And now we’re talking about all neighborhood connectors. And so it’s a different conversation that we’re having than perhaps the conversation that many people might have contemplated.

So for instance, I didn’t talk to my residents that live outside of primary transit areas but on neighborhood connectors about this. So I’m just, that’s my rationale. Okay. And that’s why I want to have the discussion.

And I also think again, from the gentle density perspective, in the primary transit area made sense to me in every neighborhood connector or on neighborhood connectors, but in every neighborhood connector where we don’t have transit in some cases or we don’t have significant transit as well, I do think we need to be having other discussions before we do this. And that is also why in the initial staff, in the rest of this recommendation, it also says it will review in one year. So I do think we have opportunity for more discussion with the public about it. So I just think, yes, we need to move fast but we also need to move with the public on side.

Okay, given that, do we have a seconder for Councilor Frank? Thank you. And then movie through the chair, could I get then staff’s rationale for what their original proposal as well? I just wanna be fully, ‘cause I’m like on the fence on this one and I might second it but that would influence my decision.

I’ll go to staff on the rationale behind going where the direction you went. Through the chair. So the rationale for directing the additional density to areas within the primary transit area is to essentially include the highest densities or additional levels of intensification within that area. So we have a target of 75% of our intensification being within the primary transit area.

It’s also the area best serviced by transit. So most appropriate location for intensification, especially at a neighborhood scale. So that’s why we included in the table that it would only be within the primary transit area. Councilor?

I’m sold, I’ll second that motion. Pardon me? I’ll second that motion moved and seconded. I’ll ask the clerk to get the wording up on the screen for us.

And I’ll go back to you, Councilor, but if you’d like to, if you said your piece or if you’d like to expand on that. Thank you, through you and I appreciate the second and the conversation here at committee which is where we should be doing this kind of work and having these kinds of discussions. I think we heard clearly from members of the public some that stated they live on neighborhood connectors that were not aware that this was being proposed. This is coming as an amendment and while I really appreciate the opportunity to have dialogue on this and for the community to be engaged, I do think we’re preempting a process in a way by not allowing enough consultation for those that live on neighborhood connectors.

I’ve been meeting tomorrow with residents on Ambleside, for instance, about ongoing traffic concerns, separate, I know. But I did not have a fulsome conversation with them around this stack townhouses on neighborhood connectors. And I’m not sure how many Councillors did. Looking through and getting familiar with the London Plan map from 2023 that’s included in the Get Involved site, you would have to know very clearly the classification of your road to know whether or not a stack townhouses permitted there.

And I know we’re hearing, well, there’s going to be the assembling of land. You’re going to need to be able to have lots of a certain size, et cetera. Well, just briefly looking at lot sizes on places like Ambleside and Guildwood and a lot in Ward 5. I do think that there are quite a few neighborhood connectors that would actually potentially be sites in the future that perhaps residents don’t know right now but that’s a possibility.

So I do think that yes, we have a desire to create more opportunities for housing. Absolutely agree, I want to see more housing. And, but I do think that we are, in some cases, not adequately consulting with the community on where these are going to go. And I appreciate the opportunity to be able to engage residents more fully.

We have time for that. If we do it in the primary transit areas and continue the conversation as it does say in the rest of the motion for one year from now for us to revisit any other additional areas and we do have time for more conversations. And I do think that the primary transit areas where we initially had it out in the public. And so I do think that it’s important to stick with that.

As far as I understand and I’m, if you’ll allow me through you to ask staff questions, I’m just wondering where which neighborhood connectors would have been contacted about this potential change from a public consultation perspective of the 13,200 that were mailed or contacted. I’m just wondering, was it every neighborhood connector in our community or was it only those in primary transit areas or was that not even taken into consideration in the transit areas? I’ll go to staff. Through the chair, the 13,000 number that Councillor ramen was referencing is actually refers to the protected major transit station zoning by-law amendment, which is separate than what we’re talking about right now, which was the Heights Review, Heights Review Transit Village major shopping areas.

That was a citywide official plan amendment. And so because of that, we did not send specific notice otherwise that would also be a 20,000 plus notice that would have needed to go out. And because it’s also a policy that typically we do citywide, it’s essentially done differently. We do not target or typically send notices to every individual in certain place types.

So, Councillor. Thank you and I appreciate that feedback. So if you wanted to know your street classification, what’s the best way to find that out? Staff.

Through the chair, through staff. That’s what we have every day, planners on staff that can answer those types of questions that are on duty as well as any of the planners that were involved in these applications, including Heights Review or even PMTSA for that matter. So, yeah, do you want to start? Thank you.

Okay, so from what I heard from some of the public conversation from some of the discussion today, but elsewhere, is that it’s difficult for the public to access this information. And so, I do feel like if this small portion of this discussion does not impact our half funding, so if we continue, let’s say, to keep it in the primary transit area, is there any impact to our half funding because it was initially proposed, so I don’t suspect it would, but can we just confirm that? Councillor Lewis, or Deputy Mayor Lewis, did you want to recall any point of order? Okay, go to staff for that question.

Yep, through the chair. So, what’s being asked, my understanding, as far as this addition, is beyond what we included, we scoped everything to what was included in our half application, so this would be about beyond what is required for the housing accelerator work. Councillor. Thank you, so it doesn’t put any funding and jeopardy at this point, so I agree that this is ambitious, and I do appreciate that the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor, we’re looking to be ambitious.

I do think that there’s value in taking a more moderate approach and also engaging the community as we go along. Thank you. Thank you. I want to talk to you, Mayor Lewis.

Thank you, Chair. So, first through you, I think it’s really important to point out, it’s one year from Minister approval, as per the staff report, not per council approval. So, at best, we are talking about January of 2026, likely, you know, ball parking it, ‘cause obviously, the Minister will do what the Minister will do. But we are talking about potentially not even reviewing this until we’re into the next municipal election cycle, realistically, I would really encourage colleagues to reject this amendment, and I want to come back to, and I invite you, anyone who wants to take a look at the tables in the report, only in primary transit area, is a condition of the range of permitted uses, just for the neighborhood connector classification.

If you look further in the table, the additional permitted uses, based on intersection classification of intersecting streets, also allows them at neighborhood connector, where neighborhood connector meets, neighborhood connector, where civic boulevard or urban thoroughfare meet, or in fronting onto a park. What we are really doing here is saying, anybody who has property mid-block, we’re not gonna let you build stacked townhouses, but we’re gonna let anybody else build stacked townhouses. I don’t think that is the direction we should be going, and again, I come back to wood framed, concrete basement, and then you are building stacked towns very quickly. You are addressing housing needs in a way that nothing else in build form we have is going to impact, and I come back again to table 10.

Townhouses are already permitted, even on neighborhood streets, so even down a level, you can build a three-story townhouse. We are arguing about one story on a neighborhood connector. There have been get involved pages up all summer on this, to say that there was not an opportunity for people to weigh in, and again, I’ll come back to what I said at the start. Yes, this is technical, yes, this is dense.

Most of us, including the members of this council, including most of the people in the gallery today, are not engineers or architects, or wastewater management, or storm sewer management experts, or traffic division experts either. So we rely on our staff to do these things, but what we are talking about is a change of mid-block outside the PM TSA. And when we talk about communities like West Five, outside the PM TSA, but don’t we want to allow stacked towns in West Five, don’t we want to allow stacked towns around Bostwick and other areas that right now are outside of the PM TSA? I would argue we absolutely do.

And when we’re talking about infill in existing neighborhoods, yes, it is going to require assembling multiple properties, potentially front and rear properties, to attain enough land space to build a stacked townhouse development. I’ve been told, roughly, you have to assemble three or four properties in a row, and you have to be able to do that at less than cost of $2 million, just on the property acquisition. And when you think about what houses are selling for, along Ambleside or in Masonville in Ward Five, I don’t know how you’re assembling four properties for less than $2 million, to then demolish them and build stacked towns. So I, like the mayor said, I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of uptake on this, but there are areas including the street I live on, Wayville, where perhaps the property values will allow that.

And personally, I would welcome stacked townhouse developments on my neighborhood connector where I live, where people can walk to school, can walk to the grocery store, can walk to the community center across the street. So I really encourage colleagues to reject this amendment and stick with the motion that the mayor has put on the floor. Thank you, Councillor Frank. Thank you, yes, and I’m going to ask a couple questions because I feel like I’m just trying to get understanding what the best choice is for good infill.

And I think perhaps the issue is that there are two competing opinions on that, and that’s where I’m maybe getting pulled on both sides. So for example, my word, the entire thing is in a primary transit area. So this doesn’t materially impact me because either way all my neighborhood connectors have this ability, but I’m just trying to get understanding. What is, I guess, the negative side of having this outside of the primary transit area, and perhaps I’m asking for staff’s planning opinion through the chair?

Why was that not an initial recommendation? I’ll go to staff through the chair. So we did take our cues from the London Planet in the existing policy framework. So there is a policy structure around the primary transit area and how it’s intended to function.

So a point to policy 90, which says that the primary transit area will be the focus of residential intensification and transit investment within London. So that statement applies at different levels. So there’s the highest level, which is the downtown and transit villages, but it also applies at a neighborhood scale. So our opinion was that it makes sense to apply an additional level of density within the primary transit area above and beyond what’s permitted outside of it.

Councilor. Thank you. And then with all the other changes that are being proposed to be made, I’m wondering, I just do worry that if we allow for density everywhere, then we won’t achieve our intensification targets within the primary transit area, which therefore would decrease the success rate of having really good transit because you need density in a specific area. So I’m just trying to get a better understanding is with all the other stuff that we’re proposing today, would staff say that they feel that the intensification target within the primary transit area would be achievable?

Or is it this kind of stuff, like this smaller stack town stuff that really might push us over the edge? Again, kind of just hoping for a bit of a planning opinion. I’ll go with stuff through the chair. I would say that there’s many factors that contribute to achieving a target and part of monitoring or monitoring exercises is to look at whether or not we’ve achieved targets and if not, where have we fallen short?

So if we’re finding many stack townhouses are being built outside the primary transit area, yes, we would probably point to that and bring that forward as a possible policy change that could be required, that we could present to Council as an option to sort of correct back towards achieving that target. But there’s many factors that contribute the level of high density intensification, which tends to focus within the primary transit area is probably the bigger driver of achieving that target, but every little bit has an impact. Councilor. Thank you and perhaps this is my last question for this one.

We get the annual development reports, which have really beautiful graphics and I really appreciate because at least from what I’ve seen, we haven’t just achieving just smidgenly, getting our 45% intensification target, which is within the built area brand, read not necessarily as in the primary transit area and I’m actually not sure where we are with our 75% of the primary transit area. So that may, that’s the first part of my question is, where are we, sorry, I don’t know, I’m go doing a gotcha to staff, but do we know where we are with that 75% intensification target within the primary transit area? Good stuff. I don’t believe we have that number handy.

It’s something that we could dig up and get back to you after the meeting, Councilor. Thank you, yes. I think that would help because from what I can remember from the development report, so we’ve been getting, there’s like bubbles that kind of go out and show where the development is occurring and based on my recollection, most of the bubbles are occurring outside of the primary transit area, still within the built area boundary, but that’s pretty marginal between built area boundary and the urban growth boundary, which I know that some people in the gallery probably like to hear me say that, but what I guess I’m trying to say is, to me, it doesn’t feel like we are intensifying within the primary transit area to meet that 75% target, but again, having that number would be helpful. So maybe I’ll leave my comments there because I suppose I’m mostly just on the fence about this because I worry the more that we intensify outside of the primary transit area, the less we are gonna achieve that 75% target within inside the primary transit area.

Councilor Hopkins. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair for recognizing me and I would like to speak to the committee and encourage them to support council Romans amendment to the amendments that have been presented and going back to supporting staff’s recommendation. And I wanna first of all start off with, I appreciate the mayor and the deputy mayor’s advocacy around the need for housing and building.

I’ve been on council for a number of years. I think the planning committee and council is doing a wonderful job trying to meet those targets and trying to get there. And as you could hear from the development community, there is still a need to do more. My concern, and I support West Five, for instance, and the need for opening opportunities on the edge of our areas to build the staff town housing, that can be done through a zoning application.

We’re not saying no to that. I don’t think the community is saying no to that. What I have concerns about, and this is significant to me as a word counselor, having an information session, October 1st, having planning there to have further conversations and information to give to the community on what changes we are making. I feel very uncomfortable that we would go ahead and do something like this without even giving that notification to the community that we are going to be making these.

And I think there’s significant changes. A one story, neighborhood connector can create significant concerns in that neighborhood. It is important to the community. I’m not saying we should not do this.

This is going through a review with the London plan. All that can be determined going down and out into the future. Doing something right now at this moment makes me a little uneasy when it comes to making, to me, a significant change that will affect residents of my community. And I think we have to sort of just step back sometimes and understand what those consequences can be.

And it may not just be about building. It could be about the trust that the community has in us. So I would encourage the committee to support the amendment to the amendment. Councilor Trossall.

Thank you very much through the chair. And thank you for giving me the chance to speak. I’d really like to thank Mayor and Deputy Mayor for putting forward the amendments, particularly the first one, which is the one that I’m most familiar with, which is the one that I’ve been working on the most. Beyond that though, I’m still a little confused.

And I think members of the public are still a little confused. I would definitely support the amendment that’s coming forward. But I wanna say generally, what I heard today, the city has a disconnect. We’re disconnected from our residents in terms of the basic understanding of what we’re doing.

We’re working under this, any kind of development is good. We throw around the terms affordable quite a bit, even if it’s not affordable. We need to reconnect planning proposals, the planning process, planning notices with people’s understanding. And I know that there’s a certain shorthand, and with all due respect, I’m gonna call it planaries.

I’m not sure what to call it. But there is a certain shorthand that when these notices come out, people don’t understand them. And the first question that people in my ward had was, Councilor, could you explain this notice? And let me get back to you on that.

And I think I did that. We need a reset. We need a reset to fix this disconnect. We need to talk to people in plain English.

We need to use common sense terms. When we talk about transit villages, the way we’ve been talking about transit villages, it causes so much confusion. We need to reset our terminology. Now, simplifying the process, building more homes, reducing red tape, whole sound good.

But these values do not have to mean gutting reasonable regulations that make it easier for members of the public to understand what we’re doing. So I think that we have a disconnect. The old song communications breakdown comes to mind. But I think what we need to do is recognize this disconnect is growing.

It’s growing, and we need to stem it. And I think that what really would be helpful would be for us to just back up a little bit, step back from this a little bit, not try to pass everything today, which I think would be a huge mistake. There’s a lot of material that needs to be digested here. People have been, I think, rightly focused on the transit village issue.

Now that that’s not the big issue anymore, we can start to focus on some of these other ones. Looks like the stacked townhouse is gonna be a big item. But in closing, I just wanna say, we need to start this process with the goal of fixing this communications breakdown, closing the disconnect and getting back to a situation where members of the public can understand what we’re trying to do. And I think that’s something that we’re quite capable of doing.

So while I support this amendment and would support it at council, I really wanna urge this committee to sort of slow down on some of these other things. We need a lot more public information about this. And thank you for giving me the time. Councilor Perbal.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, this is a little too late, but I just want to ask, because when the Council of Frank asked a question and they threw the chair to the staff, Mr. Mathers, you had your hand up and you were gonna add something to it. And I was curious if it’s still valid or not.

If it is, please, if you can give us more information. I’ll go to Mr. Mathers. Through the chair, I’m just gonna add some a little bit of context.

So in our recommendation in related to the stock towns, we were looking from a scope perspective at those transit areas. We are not trying to say that stock towns may not be appropriate somewhere else. That was just not part of what we were bringing to you today. So what the mayor’s brought forward and is looking at that and advancing that ahead of over and above what we’ve brought forward to you today.

So I just wanted to add that context piece to it, that we’re not saying that providing those permissions in other areas of the city isn’t appropriate. We just haven’t brought that towards you today. Councillor. Thank you very much for this additional information.

Other comments? Deputy Mayor Lewis. Thank you, Chair. So I want to pick up on something that Councillor Trust now said, which is I think there absolutely is an opportunity for clearer communication, infographics, all of that stuff.

Even for somebody who’s been on this committee for a few years now, these reports can be challenging to digest. That’s the nature of having to meet the technical requirements to submit to the province with the Planning Act and everything else. But I hear what you’re saying about a Coles notes version with simple language and some clear identifiers. I think that that’s valid.

The challenge is, and I referenced this with respect to the ministerial approval. And I know that staff have said, well, this is over and above, so it’s not within our half scope. But the window for the half funding requires us to get this done for 2026. So, well, we can say that there is a communications leg or breakdown or what have you.

We have to make some decisions today on this and move these things forward. I wanna come back to the stacked townhouse piece though, because I appreciate Mr. Mather’s clarifying. We just didn’t bring it forward, but we’re not saying it’s a bad form of development in other parts of the city.

And that’s another thing that I think colleagues need to think about with this amendment. There are plans of subdivision working their way through our staff right now. And if we support this amendment, we are telling builders in greenfield developments even, stacked towns midblock are not okay. That is what we’re telling them.

So, we are automatically creating a barrier, not just on infill, but on greenfield, to say if you want something different, you’re gonna have to come forward with a site specific special provisions at VA. That is the result of what we would be doing if we support this amendment, even in greenfield developments. So again, strongly suggest that you reject this. I think that we are hearing a lot of, as the mayor said, with the four units as of right, in other communities, there was a lot of fear mongering about it by different organizations, and it didn’t come to pass.

Either they return the housing dollars, or they looked at London or other cities where the uptake has not been there, and they took the housing dollars, and the sky hasn’t fallen, because four units as of right is not viable economically everywhere, and neither are stacked towns going to be economically viable everywhere as infill. There’s just not places where you’re going to acquire three or four blocks at a time and start building 50 units here, 75 units there, 96 units, someplace else, without a fairly significant amount of work in a market where real estate is the most expensive part of a development. So where they can make it work, let them make it work and have the housing units, they’re not going to be able to make it work everywhere. So I really think that we need to allow this throughout, including in new developments, where nobody lives yet, where the fields are literally vacant, and if the builder wants to adjust their plan of subdivision and include those stacked towns, let’s allow them to do that.

And then when people do move in, it’s going to be the norm in their neighborhood from day one. Other comments or questions? That’s the deputy mayor to take the chair, please. I will take the chair.

I’ll ask you to hold just one moment so I can open up my timer again ‘cause I closed it. Okay, I recognize Councillor Layman. Thank you. I just have a couple of questions for staff.

Deputy Mayor raised one timeline for ministerial approval in January of something. Is the province looking at mandating or forcing through stacked townhouses? Or am I misreading that? Well, staff are working on this.

I just meant the OPA amendment to clarify my own comment. This piece that we’re sending. Okay, we’ll go to staff. To the presiding officer, the, excuse me, the ministry has 120 days to review an amendment after council approves it.

So that gives us the timeline of around January to expect a decision from them. Okay, thank you, I understand that, Councillor. Thank you, thank you, I can chair. And I just want to be clear that if we were to approve this amendment, it wouldn’t affect funding from the federal government or provincial through your chair.

I’ll look to Mr. May, there is to start and he can pass that off to any other staff that he needs to. Through the chair, yes, this is over and above our commitments as part of the housing accelerator. Okay, thank you, Councillor.

So my comments for this is a tough one. I think for sure we’ve, this committee and council has been aggressive in getting housing built and approved, made impacts the community, there’s no question. We’re doing it because as the mayor indicated, we have a housing crisis in that I think is demonstrated by the fact that more than just city of London province and even the federal government are recognizing this more than just words, but by significant funding in that direction. I’m weighing that against the impact that this would have on more neighborhoods that, quite frankly, in my ward, I wonder what streets, I don’t, I don’t even clear what streets that this would impact on the first blush.

If it was just restricted, I appreciate that Deputy Mayor’s comments about new bills, I have no problem with that and being included in new bills and I wonder if that, if this amendment went through, that would preclude the stacked town houses being built in greenfield developments. So it’s a tough one, there’s no question about it. So I just wanted to put that out there. I’m still thinking, if anyone else wants to weigh in, I would appreciate it, thank you.

And thank you for acting chair. So councilor, you started to ask a question, but then you kept talking, did you want Ms. McNeely to respond to your greenfield question? Oh, sorry.

She looked like she was ready too, and then you kept talking, so. Yeah, I kind of, I’ll ask for clarification. Thank you, acting chair, yeah. Thank you through the presiding officer.

Could you repeat the question just so that we get— Sure, and through the acting chair, if this amendment was approved by the committee and council, would it preclude stacked town houses from being included in greenfield, new subdivision planning? Ms. McNeely. Thank you through the acting chair.

It would be, as of right, it would not be permitted. However, through any applications that are either underway, or any new applications in greenfield area, those would be site-specific requests. And we would bring those through the planning committee for review and approval. Okay, all right, thank you, acting chair.

Anything further? That’s it. Okay, then I will return the chair to you. Okay, any other discussion on this amendment?

Councilor Frank? Thank you, yes, I really enjoyed this debate because I was kind of sitting on the fence. I think I’m slightly leaning at this point towards not supporting the amendment, mostly because intensification, densification, I think is really important for us achieving many of our different targets from the housing targets to emissions targets. So I think at this point, I will go with the mayor and deputy mayor’s suggestions.

But if I get more information between now and council, I might change my mind again, because this one is really tough for me to decide from. Okay, so dealing just with the amendment, we have motion moved and seconded. I’ll call the vote. Closing the vote, the motion fails, one to five.

Okay, we now have the original motion on the floor, and I’ll look for a discussion on that. Councilor Robin. Thank you and through you, just had a question regarding VC. Where it refers to Richmond Street from Western Road to Fanshawe Park Road had a lot of calls from neighbors around the reclassification from the rapid transit boulevard to what is now being proposed as a civic boulevard and removing that rapid transit station, map three street classification.

I’m just wondering if you can speak to how this impacts being in the Masonville secondary plan. I’ll go to staff through the chair. So because the Masonville secondary plan is already enforced and it’s not on the table here, there wouldn’t be any change at this point. Down the road, subject to direction, we could look at it again, but that’s not currently on our work plan.

Councillor. Thank you. So within the Masonville secondary plan on the corner of Shavian and Richmond, it contemplates, well, it’s talks about low rise up to four stories. Would that change based on what’s proposed here in front of us?

Staff. Thank you through the chair. One thing with secondary plans, it trumps the London plan, the official plan. So those policies prevail.

So there’d be no change to those policies. Thank you. That was just to get it on the record as requested by residents. So I appreciate that.

Yeah. I think that that’s again where we’re running into some confusion from folks is they don’t understand what does this overlay and what does that mean when you’re amending the overarching London plan. So I do think that that helps to clarify and I appreciate the opportunity to do so. I wanna just quickly go back to, oh, I don’t know if I can.

I just had a question about the site plan portion that was removed and put in not part of this amendment. I don’t know if that’s something I can ask about. Yeah, I’ll allow that question for sure. Okay.

So I agreed on the issue of the floor plate concerns and things like that. But the minimum of five hours of sunlight component on any public park seem like a sound thing to put into an agreed upon site plan. The tower separations I know have come up and have been discussed quite readily here. And the transparent glazing piece as well has come up quite often.

I’m just wondering if you can comment on not having that language in the amendment or sorry, what’s in front of us today. If there’s any implications in terms of those pre-consultation conversations you’re having because my understanding was the report was stating or the consultant stated that those should be in there and that they should be, I think the word was maybe stronger than recommended. And then staff’s language was requested. So it wasn’t strong, but I thought that it being in there as amended helped to strengthen from the council perspective helped in those discussions and pre-consultation to strengthen the messaging around why that was somewhat necessary.

I’ll go to staff. So through the chair to your question about would these issues still be applicable in the site plan process? They would be. So the intent was to provide some specific targets for staff to work towards as they review site plan applications.

However, there was always intended to be some flexibility built into that. However, given the motion to remove that, it would remove those specific targets. However, those issues would still be considered through the site plan review process. Councilor.

So in pre-consultation, would you be still having the same conversation about five hours of sunlight on a park or would that need to be more, would it need to be in here to be able to help with those conversations and pre-consultation? Good stuff. And through the chair, so we would still be having conversations around the potential impacts on a park if that’s the situation. Without this, it wouldn’t necessarily be with that specific target of five hours, but it would be more likely just a broader conversation around how we mitigate impacts on the park space.

Councilor. Okay, thank you. I appreciate the feedback, and I’ll keep thinking about this as we move into the discussion and council as well, because these seem like very important things to have in those pre-consultation discussions and to give it more parameters. But if, and again, the language from the consultant was stronger, and so I do feel that this was an opportunity to kind of put out a guideline or to help with some of those conversations, but I appreciate that, and I had some great conversations with the industry that did create some challenges and limitations, so yeah, willing to have more conversation before council on that.

Thank you, I’ll go to the mayor. Yes, and through the chair, of course. I just wanna add a piece on the site plan, a consultation piece, as was said by our staff. There’s still conversations that we had, that can be had, but the specific targets would be removed.

And that only really applies to the as-of-right zoning applications that go directly to staff. Any application that comes for a zoning change, council can then still provide its, as it always does, direction to the site plan authority to say, consider these things in this very specific way. Like, we would still have that. It would just require a de-come-before council for zoning, so if there was a very high-profile site that required rezoning that we wanted to attach something specific to for consideration by the site plan authority, we could do that.

The place that we wouldn’t do that is for the ones that are as-of-right discussions with staff. And so the conversations having now wouldn’t even apply in every circumstance, but I certainly recognize what staff are saying about the targets. I’m still very comfortable with the approach here, and I’m very comfortable with on big changes to zoning where there’s gonna be discussion and public feedback and other pieces that we could where there’s significance and concerns, layer or recommendation for site plan to consider through that process as well. I look for other comments or questions.

Fifthly, I’ll hand the chair over to Deputy Mayor Lewis. Thank you, I will take the chair, and I will recognize Councillor Layman. Thank you, I fully support the Mayor’s amendment here and Deputy Mayor, both whom I know worked very hard on this complex issue. Listening to many parties, residents, concerned groups and developers, staff, everyone didn’t get what they wanted here, which I think is a pretty good indication of a good direction, to be honest with you.

Like I said earlier in my comments, London is growing tremendously. I remember not too long ago at this discussion recently when I saw the number on the sign was like 280,000. Now every time I come back into London, it’s almost like there’s a staff there with a can of paint changing the number on the population sign. We’re gonna be at half a million fairly short order.

And listen, housing is going to continue to be an issue and we have choices. We can either not do these kinds of things and build, not have more intense development, or we can drive a development into outside the urban growth boundary, which that’ll be a discussion that’s coming. And I’ve already heard of that in the past, and we have to mitigate that and based on I think what people might hear from folks, or it’s going to go to outside areas as the Deputy Mayor alluded to there for sure. Like it or not, London, it’s not a small town anymore.

It’s a big town, it’s a big city. And this is a type of housing that is required for that. And quite frankly, I think as was mentioned in the public participation meeting, affordable housing has changed. Starter homes have changed.

It used to be the bungalow. Now it’s not even that ‘cause that’s gone on the price range. So if we’re truly honest with ourselves about how we’re going to get, especially the next generations or young people in their first homes into the housing market, we have to look at alternative forms of housing that maybe was not common in London of 10 or 15 years ago. So for sure, this is a new direction, but it’s consistent with I think where this council has gone.

Based on the concerns we heard two years ago, we were campaigning and that was lack of affordable housing where our kids going to be able to find their house or where can I find a house that I can afford. So I think as again, I commend the mayor and the deputy mayor for getting this together and getting to where I’m comfortable frankly with. So I will be supporting us. Thank you, Councillor Lehman.

We’ll look for any other speakers and I’ll return the chair to you. Thank you. We have a motion moved and seconded. I’ll look for any further speakers.

Councillor Hawkins. Yeah, since I’ve been here for a number of hours as a guest to the committee, I do appreciate it. I’ll hold my comments until council. Okay, thank you.

So you know other comments and I will call the vote. Opposing the vote, the motion carries six to zero. So we’ve got this for four and a half hours. I just, we have one item left.

I’m not too sure how in depth we’re gonna go on that given the previous discussion. So I’ll look to committee to see if we’d like to break or if you want to just power through it. I’d like to be home to watch the presidential debate tonight. So I vote for powering through.

Okay, I see the power through its side from members. Thank you. We’re moving on to 3.7. So the Councillor has presented me with concern for the staff of which I just, it totally ignored.

So I’ll look for faces of the, are you okay with us proceeding here? Would you like, I’m getting thumbs up? Okay, okay, so we’re good. Okay, so we’re all on board.

3.7, this is regarding a protected major transit station here is zoning review. It is a public participation meeting. So I’ll look for a motion from committee to open that. Deputy Mayor Lewis, seconded by the mayor.

Opposing the vote, the motion carries five to zero. I’ll look for members of the public that would like to address this committee. And I will, if people have spoken already, I’m gonna ask you your name again, just for the clerk’s records, I’m just having a write. So you please give me your name and— I’m still an on-capped landscape.

And you have five minutes. And I’m the owner of 1164 to 1170 Richmond Street Cup Holdings, the mayor amendment removed my property from the discussion. And for this, I wanna retain the option to appeal all this by-law. I don’t understand how the amendment can by the mayor, whether it was a political pressure from the council members, because the planners recommended a certain thing for that site.

And we should stick to planning principle and not vote to political pressure. So I will request the right to appeal what is going on here. Well, I can’t give you a right to appeal anything. You’re welcome to do what you need to do.

Thank you, I’ll look for the next speaker. Please, sir, go ahead, give us your name and your five minutes. Hi, my name is Vito Campanelli. I own 420 York Street through an investment company.

And the reason I’m here today is I’m looking at your planning proposal and I’m requesting that 420 York be included in the TSA six zone. Currently, the high-rise zoning stops pretty much at Colburn and does not include the property of 420 York, which is completely surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings. The high-rise buildings that there are eight of them surrounding 420 York Street, 340, 363, and 323 Colburn, 375 Dundas, 430, 433 King Street. So 420 York Street has a building, a high-rise 24 unit building, a budding it on Colburn.

It has on Burwell, it has another 24 unit story building across the street from it on King Street. There are two buildings that are 24 story buildings. So it’s a specific request that we include 420 York in that zoning. I think it complies with what we’re trying to accomplish here in the city was create more housing.

It’s the best and highest use for that property in the sense that surrounding it, we have all those apartment buildings. The feasibility or the viability of a retail building in the area is not the best from the fact that we have the mission, which is across the street. We have the injection site, which is also across from the mission, and consequently security is an issue. We have 10,000 square feet, presently houses, Century 21 First Canadian, the tenant there.

And there are all kinds of issues with the homeless and people in that area. So having a high-rise building there would provide additional security inherently. And I’m requesting that the council expand or amend their zoning to include that property at 420 York Street. The property basically goes from York Street, it’s on the north side of York Street, and it then extends all the way to King Street.

There’s a rapid transit and built there or a transit station built there that recently. So I think it would work well. I’m just wondering if the council would consider extending that zoning TSA six to 420 York Street. Thank you.

Thank you. Look for another speaker. Please sir, give us your name and you have five minutes. Thank you, Mr.

Chair. It’s Mike Wallace from London Development Institute. We have two real points on today’s thing. Again, we are going to work on the assumption that the Mayor’s amendment will be or he’ll move it as a motion, it won’t be as a bit stiffer than what’s been presented by staff.

You do have my correspondence on your agenda on your added agenda. It’s really quite simple. The first part is that in TSA two, four, and seven, you’re not allowing a residence use as a standalone building. I’m asking from the industry’s perspective, make the word optional as it is in all the other zones instead of required, which is what is in those zones currently.

And that is if the Mayor amalgamates one and two, I’m not sure which word they’re going to use. So let’s say there’s, for argument’s sake, there’s going to be six zones. The fact of the matter is you should let the marketplace decide what how the building should be structured in terms of its occupancy. I’ve been in communities where you’ve got two or three buildings, so let’s say where’s the land assembly and people build two or three buildings.

There have been in these Soviet-type grocery stores, but they’re small. They’re designed to be the first floor of a apartment building. They’re condominiums, but they’re apartments. And it works and there’s residential, 100% residential buildings around them.

And maybe, so let the marketplace decide, make it optional in every zone. I don’t know why because it’s got required. So that means what I’m afraid will happen is that nothing will get built because if the market isn’t there for it, and if you don’t build the market for it by having a standalone residential beside other buildings that have mixed use in it, but don’t force mixed use. That’s my first suggestion.

My second suggestion, which I don’t have the wording for you, I have to have staff what you to do on this one, I think. But the wording the way it is structured, it sounds like you can only have commercial office on the first floor, and I can be wrong, so you may wanna check with staff on this. But what if I wanna build a building and I want to have retail commercial on the first floor and a couple of floors or one floor of office above it? The way it reads, I don’t think you can do it.

What if you want to build a signature building for London and you wanna have a specially restaurant at the top with a view of the city, blah, blah, blah, which happens in other communities, based on the reading, you couldn’t do that because it has to be on the first floor. Now it could be wrong, but let’s clarify the language now to allow that flexibility and what’s being built in these TSA’s. So those are from our industry’s two requests. And I’m hoping that when TSA wanted TSA to amalgamity ‘cause one has the optional word and one has the required word that the optional one is used and then consider it for A4 and A7.

Thank you. Thank you. I’ll look for the next speaker. Please sir, give us your name and you have five minutes.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, members of the committee. My name is Harry Frucio, so there’s a link at pre-ammo. Before I get started, I just wanted to just take a moment to thank Deputy Mayor Lewis.

I understand there were some very nice comments made at the onset of the meeting about award that’s being presented to us for the Vision SoHo project, so I thank you for that. That obviously was a project that meant a lot to many of us. There’s staff members here today that worked very hard on that and I think it was a collective effort from many people to provide a project that is going to have a long lasting effect on this community. So I thank Deputy Mayor Lewis for that.

Now, the reason that I’m here this afternoon is very technical. I noticed on the added agenda that there was a added map 12 to the agenda and I wasn’t sure if there was going to be any discussion about it, so I thought I’d just add some context to that. We had raised the matter with staff last week that the lands at 743 Wellington Road didn’t contain the proper zoning, the base zoning, and that if you recall members, that was recently approved back in June to place an R01 site specific 15 category and that. And all we did was point it out to staff that the correct zoning should be shown on the base mapping before the TSA zoning goes through.

So we’re just asking you to make that correction as part of the amendment. Thank you. Hey, thank you. I’ll look for the next speaker.

Please sir, give us your name in five minutes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. John Fleming, City Planning Solutions.

I’m here to represent three different clients. One is tri-car properties. That there’s a hundred Kellogg Lane and the third is COP Realty Corporation. I’ll be fast here to get through this.

You have my letters that are on the added agenda for each of these businesses. With respect to the COP Realty Corps landowner, they own lands that are on the south side of York Street in and around the Thames Street area. And currently the London Plan designates those lands as downtown. The current zoning is a downtown area DA2 zone.

And that’s for the entirety of their land holdings, which is about one and a half hectares in size. However, what’s been applied in terms of the TSA zone, the TSA6 zone to these lands only applies to TSA6 to half of that land holding. The other half is carved out. Now we’ve spoken to staff just by correspondence and today we’re not entirely clear of what portion has been carved out.

We believe it is relating to the UTRCA regulatory permit area. And this has a significant impact on the development opportunity for the site. We’re not talking about the regulatory flood line. We’re talking about the regulatory permit area.

And our submission would be that that’s carving too much out of the zone that the TSA6 zone should be extended further west and could likely include the entire block. And any flood issues would be addressed through that permitting process at the time of a site plan application. As I say, that would be consistent with and even pulling back from the current zoning that exists on the site. I’d also quickly like to speak to 100 Kellogg Lane.

As you know, the Kellogg factory buildings on the south side of Dundas and has been assigned a TSA4 zone. Across the street has not been assigned a zone despite the fact that it’s in the rapid transit corridor place type. Now it is in a secondary planning area and that is the justification for why it hasn’t been included. We would like to point out that it currently is zoned for industrial uses, which is not consistent with the official plan designation of rapid transit corridor.

This is the right time we believe to apply TSA2 zone, which would be similar to the zone that’s been applied to the corridor to the east of these lands outside of the McCormick secondary plan. Point out the secondary plan was prepared well in advance of the official plan designation that’s been applied to the site. Finally, I would just say that the concerns of Tricar very much line with what Mr. Wallace has indicated.

Just some concerns around the way the permitted uses are the language used to define the permitted uses and what appears to be a requirement in some of the zones to have commercial uses at the base at grade in all cases without relief and also not to allow for commercial uses above that first floor. As Mr. Wallace pointed out, perhaps that’s an incorrect interpretation, but that’s the way that we’re looking at and that raises concern. Thank you.

Thank you. I’ll look for the next speaker. Please sir, give us your name in five minutes. Jared Zeifman with the London Home Builders Association.

Thanks for the opportunity to address members of committee on this item. Without trying to sound too much like a broken record, just going to reiterate the importance of the TSA zones where currently permitted uses should allow or currently not allowing for standalone residential in all the TSA’s where it’s excluded currently in TSA two, four and seven. Again, this process and the heights review, all of this is coming as a result of housing accelerator fund dollars to try and accelerate housing. And I think that’s really critical to highlight here.

I think if there’s an interest and an opportunity to build more units, more residential units, that is exactly what we are trying to accomplish here. And so why should we force commercial into something where the intention is to have more residential units? That’s the main piece here. And frankly, on the more statistical side of things, we fairly well know at this point, I mean, commercial vacancies, especially in the core, not just in London, but in cities across the country, are significant.

And it does not seem likely from a trans perspective that that’s going to be coming down anytime soon. And so if we’re going to force builders to put in commercial spaces that are going to likely sit vacant, could have space for residential units in those places instead, and have the affordability challenges to those builders to look at, why would I build something when I know that I’m not even going to have a tenant that can retain that space? It creates challenges and creates barriers which shouldn’t be put in those areas. And so I would certainly encourage, and I repeat, points that have already been made to allow for standalone residential in all of the TSA zones.

Thank you. Thank you, I’ll look for the next speaker. Please, sir, give us your name, we’ll apply minutes. Good evening, my name is Jersey Smaller.

I’m a plant partner at Civic Planning and Design. I’m here this evening to represent Red Maple Properties, who is a developer who has a collection of eight properties at the southeast corner of Oxford Street, East, and Arieswood. They’ve been working over the last six years to look at options for redevelopment of the site. And most recently, in the last six months, we’ve been on board working with them through the planning process to come up with a new concept for the site.

Through that time, we’ve been working with staff in the pre-consultation stages. And since then, we’ve been working on an application where we’ve been made aware that there’d be an interpretation made here for these lands to be within 150 meters of a rapid transit station. So I just wanna be kind of, it’s gonna be a little bit technical here, I guess, in my explanation of this. Right now, that portion of the transit corridor doesn’t actually have the exact locations of the stations, or at least it wasn’t at the time when we had our pre-consultation.

And so there was interpretation made by staff that we wouldn’t require an official plan amendment to avail of ourselves of the upper limit heights. So what we are looking for is to see if these particular four out of the eight properties that are within the PM TSA lands to be actually included in the TSA two zone. Now, I do also understand there’s an alternate motion coming forward, likely, and we are in full support of that alternate motion, which would in the fact enable these lands to be zoned in that kind of upper tier, which would effectively remove any TSA one zones and allow for everything to be TSA two. So we thank the mayor and the deputy mayor who are bringing forward that motion.

And again, we are full support of that because it does implement what we are looking for, as well as what staff had our discussions with staff. Thank you. Could I get just due to repeat, it was Oxford and What Street? It’s Oxford and Arieswood, the southeast corner of Oxford and Arieswood, I could read off the— Arieswood?

Arieswood, across the street. Can you spell that for me? It’s A-Y-R-E-S-W-O-O-D. Okay.

It’s across my venture college. Yeah, that’s fine. Great, thank you. The next speaker.

So for the third time, you can give us your name. We are. You know, five minutes. (laughs) Thank you.

Alex Bander-Sluice with our developments. I will very briefly repeat my support for the comments that have been given with respect to standalone residential. I believe that this process should be looking to do less regulation by putting in place an effective, as of right, framework. And, you know, unfortunately there are some regulations in there still, which will have the opposite effect rather than facilitating and promoting housing.

I think it’ll dampen interests in that regard. Believe we are now at the point where a decision has been endorsed, which will remove the transit village of Oxford and Richmond, down-designate current rapid transit corridor properties to neighborhood or urban corridor. I can’t remember exactly what it was. Curious to understand, you know, through, I guess, staff as they look at what the implementation of the amended motion will be, what the proposed zoning will be for these areas that are a couple days ago.

They were proposed to be 30 stories after they would have been 25 stories as rapid transit corridor, and now potentially down to 15. And what, you know, if any site-specific considerations there may be for some of these properties, which have been on a bit of a roller coaster in the last few days and which may be quite suitable for redevelopment in the course. So we’d look forward to some discussions on that point. Thank you.

  • Thank you. Look for the next speaker. Please serve, give us your name, you in five minutes. Well, I’m gonna mussa, 155 Fartanav.

Didn’t read this whole report, but I’m gonna echo what was just said by the previous people before me. Mr. Fleming, Mr. Zafeman, Mr.

Wallace. Stand-alone residential, whether it’s in a TSA zone or the old DA1, DA2’s downtown, should encourage main floor development, but not require it. It’s always confused me as to why there are a lot of landlords downtown, big and small, that are having a brutal time trying to get residents, sorry, commercial tenants to require that a developer or a private property owner that wants to put up a tower, maybe not defined as a developer, requires that there be commercial. And as I said, in the old official plan, the DA1, DA2, which I’m more familiar with than what’s here today, it required it.

And as I said, just wanna echo the concerns and be fully in support of stand-alone residential. We need it more than we need commercial. Thank you. Thank you.

I’m gonna need a motion to go past six o’clock. So if I can get the move by Deputy Mayor Lewis, I can invite the Mayor, I’ll call that vote. Those in the vote, the motion carries five to zero. Thank you, I’ll look for the next speaker.

I’ll ask Clerk if there’s anyone online. Can I ask for the motion to the amendment? There’s been no amendment on the floor, sorry. You’ve had your chance to speak.

About the amendment. Thank you. If I knew about the amendment before, I would have spoken about it, but I didn’t have the option to speak about it. We haven’t moved, there’s no amendment on the floor.

Okay, thank you. Thank you. I’ll ask for the clerk if there’s anyone online. Michelle?

Yeah. You have five minutes, please. You have five minutes, please go ahead. Okay, hi, my name’s Michelle.

I’ve submitted a letter that is included within the agenda today, and I would just like to take this time to bring forward my concerns from that letter. I would like to address council today in regards to long-standing flooding issues that have occurred on Moore Street and the surrounding streets, which I believe has approved, will significantly be worsened by the Official Plan and Zoning By-law Amendments, as the amendments would allow mixed-use buildings and high-rise residential apartments to be constructed along Wellington Road, and elsewhere along the Rapid Transit Corridor. So there have been three major floods to my home since it’s purchased in May 2021, causing significant and costly damage. The most recent flood, which occurred in July this year, was catastrophic, filling our basin with seven feet of water.

We’ve had to vacate our home due to the extensive damage. The city of London is aware of the historic flooding that occurs in this area, with flooding issues dating back to at least the 1960s. As noted to us from the director of water, wastewater and storm water, the drainage infrastructure in this area predates the storm water management and the overland drainage requirements of today. The capacity of the existing drainage infrastructure for storm water in place is inadequate and not up to today’s standards.

As such, the proposal for amendments to the zoning along the Rapid Transit Corridor in this area only adds to our existing concerns as it indicates higher density living be permitted. Increased development means loss of green spaces and other surfaces that absorb and retain water. The expansion of hard surfaces in the form of roads, parking lots and buildings, prevents storm water from being absorbed into the ground, increasing overland runoff, therefore increasing the risk of urban flooding. As well, the frequent flooding has a harmful impact on property values and the health and safety of those living in them.

The current storm water drainage infrastructure needs to be reviewed and drastically improved before additional development can incur in this area in order to properly accommodate the zoning amendments. We are aware that the development is taking place along this stretch of Wellington Road related to rapid transit will address and hopefully improve drainage. However, there is no guarantee that they will fully solve the already existing issue and the increase in hard surfaces and additional developments being tied into these systems will create a larger strain on the already fragile inadequately functioning and aging storm water system that is in place since the 1950s or earlier. I ask you to contemplate how the city of London can be aware of such a longstanding issue and then engage in planning and zoning amendments, which would significantly exacerbate the problem.

How can more streets and adjacent streets property continue to be subjected to devastating flooding year after year with no efforts made to fix the infrastructure that has been failing for decades? I urge that the council take into consideration how distressing this flooding has been physically, mentally and financially and we plead that you vote who not put forward these amendments. Thank you. Thank you.

I’ll look for the next speaker. It’s clear if there’s anyone else online. No one else. Okay.

Seeing no one else would like to address the committee on the firm motion to close public participation. Councillor Frank, seconded by Councillor Raman, I’ll call the vote. closing the vote, the motion carries six to zero. Thank you.

So there were five properties that were expressed desire to be explicitly addressed. If any members want to do that, they may. I’ll leave it at that. There was one question that was raised regarding wording regarding the commercial occupancy requirement for the first floor.

Does that apply? Does that limit commercial residency of floors other than the first floor? Excuse me, in response to that. So the intent of the amendment was to require the non-residential uses on the first floor, but not necessarily to limit them to that.

So that was, we did consult on that with our zoning team and my understanding was that was their interpretation, but I think we’re open to other language that may clarify it further if there’s some confusion. Sorry, I just wanted to make that clear. Now the mayor has an amendment, so I’m going to go to you, Mayor. Yes, and I just want to preface this with to so my colleagues know that further to the alternate recommendation that I made, I’m going to add two pieces that I don’t quite have the language on, one is to ask our staff simply to review the properties that were mentioned today and come back with any future recommendations.

I’m not asking for a direct them to do something specific, but I’d like to add a piece where they just take a look at those specific things that were mentioned, which are on the fringes of all of these zones. And two is a direction to staff to ask them to bring forward clarifying language in time for the by-law council to clearly show that it is optional and is intended to be optional for residential on that first floor in the way that was just articulated. I think clearing up the language would ease some of the concerns and address some of the pieces. So I want to move my alternate recommendation with just those two additional directions to staff to do that, that way I think we could take— Do you want to include those two additional things in your— - Yeah, perfect.

Things that would end up being a C and a D. Perfect, thank you. And I apologize at all the language on that. I appreciate that maybe that could be worked up when we can look at it.

But I would like to put the ultimate recommendation on the floor if there’s a seconder with those two pieces. Please go ahead. Look for a seconder card. Deputy Mayor Lewis, so please go ahead.

Yes, so there’s a number of things in the alternate recommendation, but the most substantive that I would just want to talk about is what was mentioned and that is the extension for more intense residential development of up to 25 stories along the entire committed rapid transit corridors. We had a discussion before about intensification and how far am I going to neighborhoods in a light way. But I don’t think we have any doubt that there is significant intended intensification along the rapid transit corridors where we are building out a rapid transit network and that further intensification, not just at the primary transit stations, but between them. I think a permissive framework there is advantageous.

I would say this particular amendment would bring the London Plan into conformity with the recently released provincial planning policy statement, which will come into effect of October this year. And so I think we may as well get ahead of it now and provide this additional intensification. And it would allow for additional residential height and development of 25 stories in the well-defined catchment areas of the BRT, which actually maximizes our public investment in the transit service. We know the BRT is not a cheap thing to achieve.

We want to maximize the impact of that investment than allowing for intensification all along the corridors that do have committed rapid transit routes. It is something that I think we can be permissive on at this time as I think that not only fully supports that corridor, but also the transit system that we’re building out. So I mean, I’m not going to be as long as I was before, ask for extensions that they have taken lots of the committee’s time. That’s the most substantive change that I’m suggesting, but I do support the comments about clarifying the language.

And I’d be happy to have staff look into some of these properties again. I don’t know what the right thing is with those, but I think just a further look in that any recommendations they bring forward at future meetings in a relevant way would be beneficial as well. Thank you. I look for other comments, Deputy Mayor.

Thank you, Chair, through you. And there’s a lot going through our heads this afternoon. So if I didn’t understand the staff response earlier, or if I missed this, I apologize. But I fully support the direction to clarify the language to make standalone residential optional so that commercial is only a consideration, it’s not required.

But with respect to the comments that we heard, and I think Mr. Fleming illustrated an example, accidentally, the Hard Rock Cafe, obviously a hotel will be a commercial use, but if there’s another tower there where somebody wanted to have a commercial establishment on a top floor where they’ve got a city-wide sort of view, this doesn’t envision that right now, but that would still be an option for a site-specific ZBA, would it not? ‘Cause I don’t see this as being something that would be happening frequently, but in the event that we did have an interested operator, they could still bring forward something that would be evaluated by staff and potentially permissible, regardless of the residential intensification we’re looking for. I’ll go to staff.

Through the chair, yes, that’s correct. You can certainly do a site-specific zoning amendment. There may even be the opportunity to look at doing minor variances for something that potentially could be minor in nature, or would fit him within the context of the area, that sort of thing. So there may be options, basically, to allow for those additional commercial uses, as they mentioned on the top floor, or above the first floor, for that matter.

Deputy Mayor. Great, I like that idea even better, because if it’s a minor variance, then we don’t have to add it to our pec agenda, so I appreciate that. And I will just say, certainly, I agree with the number of comments that we heard from the gallery, particularly with respect to the TSA one going away and going with the more permissive heights of the TSA two, along the rapid transit corridor. Certainly, I know for the AERS would proposal that would resolve the potential conflict there.

And it comes back to the conversation that we heard on the last item. That doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to build to 25 stories in some of these areas. It means that the option to go that high is there for those who can put together something that works. So I think that we will still have some variations.

We’ll obviously have some design variations. People want to build something that’s attractive and unique to attract residents to choose their building over other options. So very supportive of the direction we’re going here. And again, I want to come back to removing the TSA zoning related to the Oxford River Richmond Transit Village, because I really do want to say that I appreciate the work that staff put into this.

I know that some counselors have expressed some interest in considering other areas in the city for some transit village designations that would need to be evaluated more fully too. But I do think that pulling back on this for now and waiting for the MMP makes sense and particularly with respect to the Richmond corridor. You know, I’m going to be blunt. I think that it’s time that we recognize the north leg of the BRT as it was envisioned two councils ago is not coming to fruition.

The physical problems with that corridor have not gone away with respect to the CP tracks, with respect to the original vision of having it running through Western campus, with respect to some of the heritage constraints that are along Richmond itself, which was mentioned with respect to the sorts of intensity that would be able to be functionally developed or long Richmond and whatever future iterations of a rapid transit line look like. And in my head, there’s always that idea of having one that runs all the way from the airport in the east right out to Hyde Park and West Five in the West. Obviously, that’s probably a bit of a blue sky dream at the moment. But I don’t think the sort of octopus legs version that we had originally envisioned is going to be where we end up.

But that’s part of why we’re undertaking, as I said earlier, the MMP as well as some of the other things we’re doing with the urban growth boundary and the BAB because things have changed so radically. And I think that this pullback on Richmond and Oxford makes a lot of sense in the short term. There will still be an opportunity with the heights that we’ve just approved in the last item and where we are here along a civic boulevard for up to 15 stories in some cases. Now, again, there’ll be site specific constraints to things.

Doesn’t mean everybody’s going to be able to go that high. Might have to be pieces of land assembled. But to me, that’s part of where we’re balancing. This makes sense, this might be a little premature.

And so I think where we’re landing today makes really good sense for how we’re going to lay out. All these transit corridors really get developed and intensified. And that comes back to that whole discussion about we don’t have a transit village. No, because we have to also develop the transit areas along with it.

And until those residential densities exist that actually will support the transit, it’s going to be a bit of a chicken and egg. This is one of those eggs that can start incubating and be ready to hatch as the transit system gets improved as well. Thank you, other speakers. Councillor Robin.

Thank you. I will be short, but I have an amendment. And the amendment I provided to members of committee beforehand in it relates to a zoning bylaw amendment related to the protected major transit station areas be changed by deleting the emergency care establishment from section 52.2, permitted uses in the following clauses, and then it outlines clauses B of TSA one zone, clause G of the TSA one zone, clause A of the TSA two zone, clause B of the TSA two zone, clause B of the TSA zone, clause G of the TSA three zone, clause A of the TSA four zone, clause B of the TSA four zone, and clause B of the TSA five zone, clause G of the TSA five zone, and clause A of the TSA seven zone, and clause B of the TSA seven zone. I’ll look for a seconder for that motion.

Deputy Mayor Lewis seconds, I’ll go back to your Councillor. Thank you. My rationale for deleting this from the recommendation that’s in front of us is simply that I think that we’re presupposing the zoning in the area. And I think that the public was not potentially engaged on this discussion as to the emergency care establishment zone being in all of these areas.

And so this is an opportunity again for us to engage with the public on a site specific and within these zones as applications come forward. Okay, I’ll look for comments on the amendment. Deputy Mayor, thank you, Chair. And thank you to Councillor ramen for bringing this forward.

In reading through the hundreds of pages of material here, I will admit that this one slipped through my own cracks on this, probably ‘cause I was spending so much time looking at heights that I was stopped looking at permitted uses on some of these. But I share her concern with the emergency care establishment given the debates that we have had around locations of hubs and potential provincial funding for a heart hub as well. I think if we are investigating zoning for a use like that, which is the zone that we’ve been told would have to be applied for a hub type operation that we really, really, really, really need to be as transparent and upfront as possible with folks. I am really uncomfortable with broad-based application of this particular use because it does circumvent to some degree a discussion, a very difficult discussion.

And we’ve had a couple of them here and I suspect we’ll have a couple more, but I think that in particular for the impacted neighborhood where a hub might be located in the future, we really need to have the opportunity for that very specific discussion. And so that’s why I’m gonna be supportive of this amendment. Thank you, I’ll go to the mayor. Yes, so I’ll support this amendment too.

I think there’s good rationale for this and not creating a broad-based expansion of a zone that people have a great interest in. Like this particular one, I think is appropriate and it doesn’t preclude the zone being added, but it would be on a site-specific basis. And if there’s a need for expediency for some sort of reason, there’s certainly opportunity for us to consider special meetings and an expedited process. So I’m pretty comfortable with this amendment all supported.

Okay, we have comments. We have a motion moved and seconded. I’ll call the vote. Closing the vote, the motion carries five to one.

Okay, I’ll go to the original motion as amended. As we moved and seconded, looking for other speakers. Seeing none, I’ll call the vote. Closing the vote, the motion carries six to zero.

Okay, take a scare of our scheduled items. There are no items for direction. No deferred matters, additional business. I’ll look for a motion to adjourn.

Deputy Mayor Lewis, seconded by Councilor Raman, the hand vote sufficient. Thank you everyone, thank you staff. And thank you for those that stayed in the gallery. We are adjourned.