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 Coriolos 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.