Building_development

9:26 city council adopted the new comprehensive plan. So it's massive achievement. Really it's a kind of a massive overhaul of our entire zoning kind of land use system and the city's policies around growth. I'll be sending you an email later today with links to the different documents if you want to dig in further. That, just the way that we do things administratively, council adopted it June one. It becomes effective August one. So any development applications that come in starting August one will be subject to the new code. And we've begun a lot of communication efforts to try and make sure everybody in the development community knows that this is an effect and trying to promote the opportunities

10:25 under the most significant, in addition to us updating and we think simplifying the zoning for a lot of areas that already were zoned for multifamily, we are, we obviously have upzoned nearly all single family zoning throughout the city. So that provides the opportunity for lower scale multifamily development in huge swaths of the city. And so what people generally refer to as middle housing. So we are beginning a very targeted communication effort to really reach out to existing and potential developers of mental housing to let them know about the new opportunities and really try and create a simplified way of them interacting with the city. These are likely to be smaller scale developers, maybe developers who are new to Vancouver. And so we'd like to be able to do a little hand holding

11:23 and help them work through some of these issues. We're also, we have in some internal teams that we've convened to work through some of the questions that pop up, that will pop up as a result of this, which relate to shared sewer connections or shared garbage service or things like that, which middle housing creates those. 'Cause traditionally we've had a single family way and then a multifamily way. And this is kind of in between the two. And so we're, we need to work through those issues and be able to present a fairly predictable path for middle housing developers. And we also wanna make sure that we're not unwittingly kind of undermining the aims of the comprehensive plan by making middle housing development more expensive per unit or, you know, in terms of the different fees and whatnot, but also creating disincentives for that kind of development. So we'll be, you know, probably have an opportunity

12:22 to present some of the implementation steps that we're taking at a later meeting. But we're working on all that right now and are trying to be ready when August rolls around so that we can, you know, communicate to potential developers, like I said, in a predictable way. Also, the news, since you last met, the city did adopt, and the, technically speaking, adopted an alternative path for constructing multifamily buildings that are six-story entirely wood frame. So it's the new six-story wood frame code. It basically offers developers the opportunity to use either the existing Seattle code or the existing Tacoma code. Those are two different ways of addressing some of the risks that, you know, the inherent risks in building that way.