Fredericton council voted Monday to adopt controversial and widespread zoning changes, but not before Mayor Kate Rogers threatened members of the public with removal from council chambers if they continued heckling.
She was speaking to more than 70 people who filled the gallery for council’s final vote on changes in the zoning bylaw that will allow up to four units on residential lots across the city.
“I allowed you to clap, but I will not allow you to boo, and the next person who boos, I will ask the security guard to remove you,” Rogers said.
Rogers’s warning came after Coun. Cassandra LeBlanc spoke in favour of the changes.
“Single-family zoning, from where I’m sitting as a 32-year-old who’s grown up in this city and loves this city, is expensive and inefficient at best, and exclusionary and discriminatory at worst,” LeBlanc said before the gallery erupted in boos.
“I’ve received a standing ovation,” LeBlanc said after. “Now I’ve received a boo. I think I’ve done everything on council.”
The changes allow up to four units on residential lots, up from the former limit of just two, across most of the city — subject to lot frontage and size requirements.
The vote came after about an hour of impassioned comments by some councillors who spoke at length about why they supported the changes.
“Fredericton has a major shortage of rental units,” said Coun. Jocelyn Pike, noting the vacancy rate was 0.9 per cent as of last fall.
“Demanding that city neighbourhoods be preserved in perpetuity for the lucky few who live in them is shortsighted at best and discriminatory at worst.”
The meeting also heard from councillors against the proposal, including Bruce Grandy, Steve Hicks and Eric Megarity — the only three who voted no.
Change agreed to in 2023
The change was a central part of a suite of initiatives the city agreed to in 2023 a conditions for receiving $10.3 million under the federal government’s Housing Accelerator Fund.
Fredericton and other cities across Canada were allowed to tap into the $4 billion fund, but only if they loosened zoning rules to allow up to four units on a residential city lot.
In Fredericton’s case, city planners came up with a proposal they considered to be a gentler approach to meeting the condition.
Zoning bylaw changes to allow almost every home to be split into four units are a necessary step to help spur the creation of new housing in Fredericton, but the effect will likely be slow and minimal, experts say.
Rather than make amendments that would allow homes to be razed and replaced with buildings containing four identical units, the property owers can only take advantage of the zoning changes by creating accessory dwelling units in a home.
A home will have to contain a larger primary dwelling unit, with up to three smaller accessory units, such as a basement apartment, in-law suite, or garage loft.
While a homeowner will no longer need to apply for a zoning amendment to add the units, they will still need to apply for a building permit.
Forced by ‘out of touch’ federal government, councillor says
Of the councillors who opposed the change, a concern was that the requirement lacked sensitivity to the circumstances of individual cities.
“These decisions are being made by a bureaucracy that is out of touch with what municipalities are facing,” Grandy said before the vote.
“They paint every municipality with a single brush, not taking into account that each municipality is not the same.”
The three nay-voters also pointed to the federal funding that hung in the balance if council voted against it, with Megarity calling it a “dramatic incursion into municipal planning authority.”
At a previous meeting, city staff informed council that if the proposal didn’t go ahead, the city would not receive half of the $10.3 million still to be paid out by Ottawa over the next two years.
Another $61.3 million in federal money rested on council’s approval of the zoning changes, as this was also a requirement for tapping into the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund.
“Municipalities can build the necessary service infrastructure that we’re very good at but should not be put into position to change well-designed planning directions based on a cookie-cutter policy approach being imposed by the federal government through funding threats,” Megarity said.
Last-minute tweaks
Before the final vote, councillors approved two tweaks to the new rules.
The first amendment, put forward by Grandy, prevents secondary dwelling units from being converted into short-term rental accommodations.
The second amendment, introduced by Coun. Ruth Breen, requires that a homeowner occupy the home for at least a year before being able to apply for a building permit to create more than one secondary dwelling unit.
Planning director Ken Forrest said the city is able to rely on New Brunswick property records to verify whether an owner has in fact lived in a home for at least a year.
“So it’s an easy way for us to monitor that, and there’s a start date to that,” Forrest said. “So it’s very effective and simple from the city’s perspective to make sure that that requirement is met.”
