God only knows how anyone can build affordable housing in British Columbia these days. And it turns out even those closest to the divine get stuck on the issue.
The regional head of the Anglican Church—one of the largest charitable landowners on Vancouver Island—is calling on the B.C. government to bring in deadlines on affordable housing approval processes after the organization’s tireless but frustrating attempts to deliver community housing on their lands.
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“We’re not trying to make money, we’re trying to build the community housing that municipalities themselves say they need,” says Anna Greenwood-Lee, the bishop of the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia. Yet, she says, faith-based and charitable groups face even more obstacles than the private sector.
“As a taxpayer, it frustrates the hell out of me.”
Leave it to B.C.’s byzantine municipal development system to get a bishop to curse.
The Anglican Church has 45 parishes and over 130 parcels of property across the Island, reaching from Port Hardy to Victoria. The organization is also part of seven housing societies that have been delivering secure, low-income rental housing for decades.
Nearly 10 years ago, the diocese reviewed its land holdings to address reconciliation goals and an aging population. But turning that work into actual housing has been, to paraphrase the bishop, a hell of a challenge.
It took six years to get an 85-unit below-market seniors housing addition built at the diocese’s existing Dawson Heights seniors site in Saanich. The municipality, which desperately needed the low-income elder housing, still tied up the church in delay after delay.
“That building cost us $9 million more than it would have originally, because it took so long to get a development permit,” says Greenwood-Lee. “What that meant was we had less deeply affordable units.”
The delays increased costs for provincial and federal taxpayers too, through the project’s funding partners, BC Housing and the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
B.C.’s senior’s advocate hailed the Dawson Heights project as an example for other developments. And at the grand opening last year, a Saanich councillor apologized to Greenwood-Lee. It was nice to hear, but not good enough, she says now.
“If you are looking at a volunteer board trying to build affordable housing for folks, the least a municipality can do is work with us and provide some kind of certainty in some timelines,” says Greenwood-Lee. “Not a big ask.”
Going forward, Greenwood-Lee wants a six-month cap on municipal development approvals for affordable housing.
It sounds like something Premier David Eby would consider, given he’s cracked down on red tape, public hearings, NIMBYism and density in recent years.
“We’ve actually had a number of religious institutions, religious property owners, partner with the province on a number of different housing developments, and they have been very successful, and we managed to deliver a significant amount of housing with them,” Eby said when I asked him recently.
The diocese has at least 20 other properties with development potential. A few it has sold, while others, after years of exploration, are now going to be placed on the shelf with the cancellation of the Community Housing Fund in February’s budget.
The Anglicans sometimes step in to save projects that aren’t even theirs. In Duncan, the church leased land around its church for one dollar for 60 years to enable a 130-unit affordable housing project after the city withdrew previously committed land years into the process.
Development consultant Kaeley Wiseman, who had worked on the St. John the Baptist project in Duncan for a decade while costs doubled to nearly $60 million, says bluntly: “Without the church, the project would have died.”
Wiseman has also been helping the Anglicans rezone the iconic Christ Church Cathedral site in downtown Victoria, as part of an initiative to fund upward of $50 million in repairs and seismic upgrades the cathedral needs to stay open as a community amenity.
Not surprisingly, that project has also been jammed up by Victoria city staff for more than four years.
“Every step of the way there has been a quagmire the city refuses to own up to,” said Wiseman. “A private sector developer would have just lawyered up… whereas the diocese has tried to be a good neighbour every step of the way.”
The church has sunk close to $1 million into trying to work with city staff. And the project still hasn’t gone before council.
Adding salt to the wound: literally across the street from the cathedral, Victoria’s Official Community Plan and downtown area plan allows double the density the Anglicans are seeking.
Despite it all, the diocese keeps chugging along, turning land into affordable housing, offering up land for free to provincial partners and struggling through the obstacles that municipal planning officials toss haphazardly, and unaccountably, in their way.
Brendon Neilson, diocese executive director, says he’s been sharing hard-learned lessons with other faith-based organizations, as well as trying to come up with solutions to streamline government processes on affordable housing.
“I get that there’s challenges with any of these ideas,” he says. “But if it is a community need, if it actually is a priority that we build affordable housing, then we actually need to think about different ways of motivating these processes.”
Bishop Greenwood-Lee says she feels it is “immoral” for governments to tie up affordable housing when there are partners with land and people in need.
“My experience in B.C., to be frank, is we say the right things and then we get in our own way and create processes to make sure we can’t do it,” she says.
Or, put another way, if a church with free land that’s not looking to make a profit can’t get affordable housing built for seniors, does anyone else even have a prayer?
