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The City of Regina is trying to encourage more development in the downtown, North Central and Heritage neighbourhoods.
At city council’s meeting Wednesday, councillors approved amendments to the city’s Housing Incentives Policy (HIP) to help encourage more builds in those areas.
That means home developments (combined rental and ownership) being built in those areas could be eligible to receive a capital contribution of $45,000 (up from $25,000 per unit).
In addition to that, homes being built by charitable non-profit organizations are now eligible to secure up to $20,000 per unit (up from $15,000) if they were built in the selected neighbourhoods.
Mayor Sandra Masters said council feels the changes were needed to help encourage growth in the core.
“The HIP has always been accessible across the entire city, but I think in nine years, one per cent (of building) has happened in that city core area,” she explained. “There are other barriers in place to developing or redeveloping in that same area that just add cost and risk for developers (in) those areas.
“So what you’ve seen over the last nine years is 90 per cent of everything going into greenfield developments because it’s being developed. The land is available (there) to develop and all of the things that go into a multi-family residential building are already kind of in place and can be worked out quite easily. You have to (sometimes) retrofit things in other areas.”
In order to spark more immediate change, the city has given developers a July 31 deadline to apply to have their buildings built in those areas.
The amendment allows for up to half of the annual program budget to be allocated to applications submitted by March 31, with the remaining funding available for allocation until July 31.
Applications from private sector developers for projects located in established and new areas will only receive capital grant funding after Aug. 1 based on the remaining funding available.
“Really, it’s a lever we can pull and a tool we can use if we focus and prioritize it for the first seven months of the year to just within the city centre core area,” Masters said.
Masters feels if the city can get developments in those areas, then there will be demand to live in the newer buildings.
“At the end of the day, we don’t have a lot of multi-unit residential family properties that have been built in the city centre core; we have very little in fact,” she explained.
“What we do know from the stats out there right now that will be released from (the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation) is that anything that’s been built new since 2005 has a really low vacancy rate, like under three per cent and one per cent in some instances, especially that greenfield area.
“That would be a test to the market. I’m not sure they’re going to the suburbs because they want to live in the suburbs. I think they’re going there because they get to have a new product, it’s modern, it’s fresh and so if you can build a new product in the city centre core, I suspect it would fill right up because people do want to live downtown. There’s just not a lot of new rental property to go after in that multi-family context.”
Over the past five years, more than $9.2 million in capital grants have been committed under the HIP to support the development of 538 affordable housing units and on-site support suites
Council approved the changes to the rules with an 11-0 vote.