City council is proposing to increase the density in Charlottetown without changing the landscape.
It’s one of the amendments proposed in the zoning and development bylaw.
Council voted unanimously at its monthly public meeting Monday to go to a public meeting to take the suggested changes to the residents.
“One of the big changes in the zoning and development bylaw is accessory apartments,’’ said Coun. Greg Rivard, chairman of the city’s planning and heritage committees, noting that accessory apartments are common in municipalities of Charlottetown’s size.
“It’s allowing people who have residential homes to have any accessory apartment, as-of-right, in their basement, up to 800 square feet, with a maximum of two bedrooms.’’
There is certainly a major need for more density, especially in the downtown area. There is plenty of demolition going on in the city in favour of apartment buildings as landlords try to keep up with demand for housing.
The city embarked on the process of updating its zoning and development bylaw by hiring someone who used to work in its planning department.
Rivard said today’s zoning and development bylaw is simply not user-friendly.
“It’s about 305 pages, total. We’re looking to reduce it to about 150 to 155 pages and, by doing that, we took out the redundancies. We took out a lot of the wording.’’
The city also reviewed its 500 Lot plan as part of the process.
The city is proposing to remove the heritage components from the bylaw and create a separate heritage bylaw, one associated with the province’s heritage act.
“It (will give) council some discretion when it comes to demolitions in the downtown area. Council in (an emergency situation) can put a temporary heritage resource on a property for 65 days. (It) gives council an opportunity to review the property and make sure that if it does have heritage value that we take steps necessary to save it.’’
Under a proposed heritage bylaw, Rivard said the city is looking at different ways to help homeowners with costs, perhaps creating some financial incentives in the hope that property owners do want to make their home a heritage resource.
“Right now, I think that people tend to shy away from it simply because of the expense, but we want to try and intensify that a little bit and see if we can get more homeowners jumping on board.’’
A public meeting has been scheduled for June 25 at the Rodd Charlottetown Hotel.