THE City of North Vancouver has earned "an array of interesting and attractive" community benefits by swapping extra development density for community perks, but it may be impossible to know if they were worth the trade off - at least financially.
Those are two of the early findings of a study into the city's density bonusing policy being carried out by consultants hired by the city.
The practice of trading extra developable floorspace and height above what is written in the official community plan has worked to get the city its new library and refurbished city hall, as well as childcare space and affordable housing at no cost to taxpayers, but the process has bred much consternation among critics, on council and off.
Critics of the process complain that the city's method of negotiating with developers for community perks lacks transparency and creates confusion; that density bonusing has run amok and the city now allows projects that are too big simply to pull in more amenity investment from the developer; and that there is no benchmark to measure each bonusing agreement for value.
That last point stuck out at an informal council workshop on Monday when consultants Brent Toderian of Toderian UrbanWORKS and Jay Wollenberg of Coriolus Consulting presented the first phase of their report. The two reviewed the last 12 projects the city approved that involved density bonusing, but found not every community perk came with a price tag.
"Often the math wasn't there, at least in the report and not in the background information," Toderian said. "It made it hard for us to go back later and determine whether or not you got appropriate value for density. What we certainly found is you got significant public benefit back. You created many things, which are good for the city but it's hard to know whether you got the right amount of the benefit based on the density that was granted by council."
Some on council were not impressed by the news. "So you're telling us right now there's a lack of discipline in our process of documenting that has rendered us somewhat incapable of going back to the public and saying we got a fair exchange," Coun. Guy Heywood responded.
But Wollenberg added, there is more to consider than the absolute dollar value when considering whether a trade-off has been worthwhile, as that often comes down to a political values-based judgement.
Under the OCP, council can allow extra height and floor space in a building if the developer offers heritage preservation, community amenity space, affordable or non-profit housing, market rental housing, adaptable designs geared towards seniors and people with disabilities, commercial space or higher environmental building standards.
Every municipality has some form of density bonusing, though some have a maximum floor space ratio they are willing to allow, or have a set formula for determining how much a developer must contribute in cash to build to the maximum density.
The city negotiates its density bonuses on a case-by-case basis.
"The positive of that is the flexibility. The negative is it doesn't provide any up-front, city-led direction on what priority benefits are or what is specifically needed in a particular geographic area. That's something we've observed as both a strength and weakness depending on your perspective," Toderian said.
Monday's "shirtsleeves" session of council drew both developers and members of City Voices, one of the community groups most critical of the city's recent approval of dense developments, to listen in on how the city might tweak one of its most important pieces of development policy.
Council voted in February to hire outside help after rehashing the same debate at the council table.
The final report, which is expected to contain options for the city to consider in amending its policy, is expected in July. The city budgeted $45,000 for the study.
Some things for the city to consider in the meantime, the report states, are whether to create a maximum allowable bonus, whether to narrow the list of amenities the city is willing to trade density for, setting up a more rigorous system of keeping track of the value of density bonuses, deciding whether to continue bonusing on a site-by-site basis or setting up new bonus density districts, as well as updating the city's terminology and communication process to make it all more understandable with the public.
