As I review documents so that I make comments about the direction for the City of Victoria OCP, I discovered an interesting factoid. The City of Victoria has a maximum capacity of 95,700 people based on the current zoning that is in place across the the city. This piece of information comes from the 2004 City of Victoria Population Projections 1971-2026, found on this page.
The problem with this limit is that the population of the city has grown significantly faster than anticipated. The current population is estimated to be 83,000 but only a few years ago it was estimated it would only about 78,000 at this time. At the current projections of growth, the City will reach zoning capacity in 2023.
This one fact alone makes the need for a new OCP utterly crucial. To deal with the coming limits to zoning, there needs to be some serious considerations of changes to the city to deal with this problem. The OCP will have to have enough vision to find places where the more housing can be built and push for denser zoning.
Densify! Strengthen Downtown! Eyes on the street! Preserve the suburbs! Council nod their heads at this great concept. But when an actual development comes before them they get cold feet. How will elevators operate after peak oil, wonders Councillor Chandler. We should chop a few storeys off this proposal. How many? The preferred number of storeys to chop from a building seems to be about 15%, whether it's five storeys or 25.
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