Capital city caught in development squeeze

“This position is currently not eligible for staff housing.”

If you’ve read any government of Nunavut job ads recently, then you’ve read those words — many times. Even when the government of Nunavut is able to recruit hard-to-find professionals, they can’t offer them jobs — because there’s no place for them to live, especially in Iqaluit.

That’s just one symptom of the City of Iqaluit’s development dilemma, as the city struggles with a severe shortage of developed land to build new housing on — especially the kind of multi-unit apartments, rowhouses and duplexes needed for staff housing.

“Many public and private sector organizations are finding it impossible to find reasonably priced housing for their staff, or any housing at all,” says a report submitted to the city earlier this year by Yellowknife consultant Dave McCann.

As the city struggles to renew its badly outdated general plan and zoning bylaw, municipal officials face intense political pressure from all directions:

• Frustrated property developers and builders who accuse municipal officials of obstructing development;

• Environmentally conscious residents who accuse municipal officials of not using its bylaws to control developers;

• Homeowners, and would-be homeowners put off by high lot prices and utilidor hook-up charges; and

• Would-be tenants with no place to live.

Planning committee committed to change

At the centre of all this is Iqaluit city council’s planning committee — which oversees new building applications and the enforcement of the city’s zoning bylaws.

Councillor Keith Irving, an Iqaluit architect who chairs the city’s powerful planning committee, says he’s been feeling the heat for more than 18 months.

Irving says he already knows that many irate property developers, who accuse him and his committee of obstructing development through enforcement of what developers believe are petty and cumbersome zoning rules, would be more than happy to see him resign.

But Irving says he and other new councillors elected in the fall of 2000 feel they have a mandate to bring city planning into line with the wishes of Iqaluit residents.

“We all, basically, got on the radio [in the fall 2000 election campaign] and said town planning was an important issue — and we’re trying to do that,” Irving said.

He said he made a decision to run for council after attending a public planning meeting in December 1999. For two and a half hours, numerous residents complained about planning decisions that, in their opinion, have created unsafe, traffic-clogged streets downtown and an ugly physical environment.

Developers at odds with city

Irving believes one reason for this is that previous Iqaluit administrations have failed to enforce municipal zoning and building bylaws for many years.

But in attempting to correct that, Irving and his committee have enraged local developers.

In his highly critical report, submitted to city council in January, Dave McCann said the city’s zoning and building permit approval processes serve developers badly.

McCann said the city asks for too much information on development and building permits, and doesn’t have enough people on staff to process them efficiently and ensure that developers actually build what they promise to build.

He also suggested that Irving’s committee may now be too powerful.

“While the Planning Committee rightly concerns itself with following the zoning bylaw as it is, there is some evidence that it is operating on the basis that it is controlling development on behalf of council,” McCann’s report says.

McCann recommended that the full council “be recognized as the supreme decision-maker and arbiter of disagreements between citizens,” that the development permitting process be streamlined, and that the city hire more staff for its planning department.

Above all, he said the city badly needs a new general plan and zoning bylaw.

“There is no effectively operational General Plan in place at the present time — based upon balanced and widely agreed-upon and communicated objectives across the community,” McCann said.

Developers threatening to cash out?

He warned that if the city doesn’t fix it’s planning problems, developers will quietly move out of Iqaluit.

“The quietness of withdrawal is a necessary strategy to minimize losses in selling to a potential new ownership group,” McCann said.

Iqaluit councillors and city administrators, however, haven’t exactly taken the McCann report to heart.

At a city council meeting on April 23, council endorsed a memorandum from Iqaluit’s chief administrative officer, Rick Butler, that was itself a criticism of McCann’s critical report.

Irving says that’s because city officials believe McCann’s observations were mostly a reiteration of complaints from developers, which the city had already heard.

“We already knew what the opinions are, that the developer community was having some difficulty adjusting to change and a new political direction to actually enforce our laws,” Irving said.

But Irving admitted that over the past 18 months, the city may have changed direction too quickly.

“The one mistake that we made, and I made, was probably to do too much too quickly without the staff support to really drive things,” Irving said. “The community wanted us to enforce the law, and it’s taken us basically a year to revamp the planning department and get better staff in there, more staff, more resources.”

And, he said, the city’s new planning staff quickly discovered that the existing general plan and zoning bylaw is a “thin” document that does not reflect the wishes of the community.

“We were trying to work with a draft general plan and zoning bylaw that was done by the previous council which was not really grounded in the community,” Irving said, adding that neither the public nor developers are likely to be satisfied with it.

New public planning process

For that reason, the city has launched a new process aimed at creating a new general plan and zoning bylaw.

They’ve replaced their former planning consultant, J.L. Richards, with a firm called Fotenne Consulting Inc., and want to put a new general plan and zoning bylaw in front of council by February 2003.

Irving said residents will get a chance to make their views known in a series of workshops, focus groups and public meetings starting in June.

In September, the city hopes to hold public meetings to show people some draft zoning plans, Irving said.

Meanwhile, even simple adjustments aimed at creating the kind of multi-unit buildings required to house government workers are causing problems for the city.

A rezoning of some empty lots in the Road to Nowhere subdivision — which was mostly divided into single-family lots — has infuriated some Road to Nowhere residents, who say the move could affect the value of their property.

“We think we’re working through it in as balanced and efficient a way as possible, but as you can see, it isn’t easy,” said Rick Butler.

For his part, Irving said that in the retrospect, the Road to Nowhere subdivision was probably poorly thought out.

“It’s clear that multi-unit is where the action is,” Irving said.