In its own understated way, the City of Kelowna says 2016 was a “very strong” year for residential development here. And 2017 is shaping up to be the same.
According to city hall, there was a 36 per cent jump in the number of residential housing units built in the city last year compared with 2015, and a whopping 90 per cent more than were build in 2014.
So far this year, the number is up an astounding 216 per cent over the first quarter last year.
And it’s not just residential development that has seen an increase. Commercial, industrial and institutional development were all also up according to the city’s latest development summery report.
And all that is good news for the city—especially when a closer look is taken at the type of residential development the city is seeing.
With astronomically low vacancy rates, 64 per cent of the 1,950 housing units built in the city last year were in multi-family developments, with 47 per cent of those being rental units.
All those numbers mean development is helping the city grow at the rate predicted by Kelowna’s latest Official Community Plan, about 1.5 per cent per year. And by doing so, the city can basically keep doing what it’s doing when it comes to planning.
In the 1990s, growth in the city took off at such an unprecedented rate that planning became almost secondary to dealing with the harsh reality of what seemed like out-of-control growth. As a result, mistakes were made that took years rectify in terms of getting development plans back on track and cleaning up what seemed to be the Wild West of planning at the time.
Of course, growth—even at break-neck speed— is far more preferable to no growth at all for any city. But it does pose its own unique set of challenges.
In a market where house prices are rising, rents are going up too and the availability of rental accommodation is low, much of the positive used to sell the community to potential newcomers can be lost because of a seemingly lack of truly affordable housing.
Recently, the Capital News published a number of stories about the explosion in development across the Central Okanagan. In the words of Kelowna Mayor Colin Basran this week, “there appears to be no slowing down right now.”
So the city has to be mindful that while Kelowna may be a place where people want to come to, the challenge of housing them remains.
At this point, the economic slowdown of just nine years ago—when development project were put on hold in this city—seemsto be a distant memory.
Alistair Waters is the assisstant editor of the Capital News.