Let me be clear about what is not being argued.

No one is arguing that Victoria should approve fewer developments. No one is arguing that developers are the enemy. No one is arguing for slower planning processes or more procedural hurdles for the sake of them.

It is arguing for delivery. The projects Victoria approves should actually get built. The promises developers make to earn a rezoning should be backed by something more than goodwill. The families who depend on this city’s housing pipeline deserve a pipeline that functions.

Victoria has the legal tools to make that happen. It has simply chosen not to use them.

Tool One: Sunset Clauses

When Coquitlam grants a rezoning third reading, the clock starts. The applicant has one year to complete all requirements and obtain final bylaw adoption. If they fail, the bylaw amendment lapses automatically. The rezoning expires.

Victoria has no equivalent. A rezoning, once granted, is permanent. The leverage council holds at the moment of approval, the only moment of real leverage in the entire process, evaporates the instant the vote is taken.

Consider what that means in practice. The Admiral Inn at 257 Belleville Street in James Bay was rezoned in 2011. In January 2025, Council issued the fifth development permit for that site. Fourteen years. Not a single unit has been built. And when Council met to consider that fifth permit, Councillor Caradonna said exactly what needed to be said: “I think the city has gotten played.” Then Council voted unanimously to issue the permit anyway. Because they had no choice. It did have a choice but its’s leverage and that choice was spent in 2011.

A sunset clause does not prevent development. It prevents indefinite inaction. It tells every applicant: you have approval, you have a timeline, and if you don’t build, the approval lapses. That is not a high bar. It is the minimum condition for a process that takes public interest seriously.

Tool Two: Financial Disclosure

When Vancouver processes a significant rezoning, it triggers a Community Amenity Contribution negotiation. As part of that process, the developer must provide a detailed breakdown of financing assumptions, including loan-to-value ratios, interest rates, and term lengths. The developer’s financial position is disclosed and examined.

Victoria has no equivalent. As documented here, (Victoria’s Receivership Problem) the Wintergarden Hotel rezoning went to Council in November 2021 with zero financial disclosure from the developer.

Vancouver’s system is imperfect. In 2014, developer Westbank committed $6 million in public realm improvements beneath the Granville Bridge as part of the Vancouver House rezoning. A decade later, a journalist requested the itemised list of what that commitment covered. The city’s response: “There is no pre-existing list of the Public Realm Improvements referenced in your request.” No specification. No performance bond. No inspection protocol. The city captured 10% of the $96 million land value uplift from the rezoning instead of the stated 75% policy target.

The lesson from Vancouver is not that financial disclosure fails. It is that disclosure without documentation, security, and enforcement fails. Victoria should adopt financial disclosure and do it properly, with written specifications, secured commitments, and a mechanism to verify delivery.

Tool Three: Section 219 Milestone Covenants

Section 219 of BC’s Land Title Act allows municipalities to register covenants against a property requiring specific performance. These covenants run with the land. They bind every future owner, not just the applicant who made the promise.

Victoria already uses section 219 covenants. It uses them to specify what gets built, including affordable housing units, heritage features, and design elements. What it does not use them for is to specify when, with enforceable financial consequences for failure.

The reform is straightforward. For significant rezonings, a section 219 covenant ties approval to construction milestones: a foundation permit pulled within a defined period, a building envelope complete within a defined period, with financial security held by the city forfeited if milestones are missed. The developer cannot hold the rezoning, holding up the project, indefinitely at no cost.

This is not legally novel. The power is already in the statute. It requires only the will to use it.

The Children Test

Here is the question I think every significant rezoning vote should be required to answer before Council raises its hand: will a family actually live here, and when?

Not “does this align with the Downtown Core Area Plan.” Not “does this add vibrancy to the corridor.” Those are process questions. They tell you whether the application is properly formatted. They tell you nothing about whether the people this city is supposed to serve will ever benefit from it.

Children need bedrooms. Families need homes they can afford. The city needs a development process that asks, at every step, whether those needs are being met, not just whether the application is consistent with the OCP.

What to Ask in 2026

Three reforms. All legal under existing BC law. None requiring provincial approval. None invented here, each borrowed from jurisdictions that have already implemented some version of them.

Sunset clauses so that approvals have consequences. Financial disclosure so that Council knows what it is actually approving. Section 219 milestone covenants so that promises are secured, not merely stated.

This is what good governance looks like. And this is what the 2026 Council election should be about.

Every candidate standing for Council in Victoria this fall should be asked to answer three questions: will you require sunset clauses on development approvals? Will you require financial disclosure from rezoning applicants? Will you use section 219 covenants to enforce construction milestones?

The answers will tell you whether they understand the problem. And whether they intend to fix it.

I do. And I will.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He believes Victoria residents deserve a City Hall that governs through evidence, transparency, and democratic consent rather than managed narratives and procedural opacity.

One of the most persistent fictions in Victoria municipal politics is the claim that Council has no choice. No choice but to approve a rezoning application once a developer has invested enough money. No choice but to advance a project once it has accumulated prior approvals. No choice but to give in to the scale of what is being asked, because the legal and financial exposure of saying no is too great.

A 2022 judgment from the BC Court of Appeal says otherwise: G.S.R. Capital Group Inc. v. White Rock (City), 2022 BCCA 46, G.S.R. Capital Group Inc. v. City of White Rock, et al., 2022 CanLII 115628 (SCC) (leave to appeal dismissed).

What Happened in White Rock

In White Rock, a developer called G.S.R. Capital had obtained a development permit to build a twelve-storey residential building. Later that same year, a new City Council was elected. The new Council was not in favour of the development. In its first week in office, it downzoned the land to a maximum of six storeys.

G.S.R. went to court. It argued two things: first, that the development permit it had already received protected the original zoning for two years; second, that its commitment to proceed with the project had established a lawful non-conforming use that could not be extinguished by a zoning change.

The BC Supreme Court dismissed both arguments. The BC Court of Appeal upheld that decision.

Justice Groberman, writing for the Court of Appeal, put it this way: “I am not persuaded the City’s interpretation of the section was an unreasonable one. It is true that the City had issued a development permit, and that, in that sense, the proposed development had moved beyond its earliest stages. It seems to me, however, reasonable to describe the project as a ‘proposed development’. Construction had yet to commence, and there was no assurance that it ever would. It is true that G.S.R. was bound by the terms of the development permit, but those terms did not compel it to go ahead with the project.”

The White Rock Mayor was direct about what the Council had done and why: “We did what we believed we had to do, and what we had the right to do under the Community Charter, to try and protect our community and maintain some of the levels within the community in regards to building heights. The ball is now in the hands of the proponents to decide what they want to do.”

The Court deferred. The developer’s claimed rights did not override the elected Council’s judgment about what kind of community it was governing.

What This Means for Victoria

The Bayview Place rezoning in Victoria West was the largest and most contested development application in the city’s recent history. For more than two years, the developer sought approval to build nine towers on a nine-acre site, at densities more than double what the city’s own Official Community Plan permitted and that the Heritage Advisory Panel voted to decline.

Throughout that period, Council’s behaviour suggested an inevitability to approval: that prior rezoning in 2008, the scale of the developer’s investment, the developer’s cost claims, and the provincial pressure around housing targets collectively left the Council with little room to move.

The White Rock judgment, delivered in February 2022 while the Bayview application was still before Victoria’s Council, established that this framing was legally incorrect. A Council elected to protect its community can revisit prior approvals. A development permit is not a vested right. Courts will give elected officials the benefit of the doubt when they exercise their judgment to constrain a development that does not serve the public interest.

Victoria’s Council was aware of this judgment. It was brought directly to their attention during the public hearing process. The decision to advance Bayview to approval despite it was a political choice, not a legal inevitability.

The Broader Principle

The White Rock case is not an isolated precedent. It reflects a consistent line in Canadian administrative law: elected Councils have broad discretion in land use decisions, and courts are generally reluctant to second-guess that discretion when it is exercised in good faith in the public interest.

What courts will not do is rescue Councils from the political consequences of decisions they made voluntarily. A Council that approves a project it knows to be inconsistent with its own Official Community Plan, that overrides its own planning staff and heritage advisors, and that advances a developer’s agenda over a documented public objection cannot, after the fact, claim it had no choice. It had the power. It made a choice.

That distinction matters because it tells residents something important about what a different Council could do. A Council that is prepared to exercise its lawful authority, to hold developers to what they agreed, to require what the Official Community Plan requires, to give its own planning staff and heritage advisors genuine weight, is not exposing the city to legal risk. It is doing exactly what Councils are elected to do. The courts have said so.

The question for 2026 is not whether Victoria has the legal tools to govern its own development. It does. The question is whether it will elect a Council prepared to use them.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and 2026 Victoria Council candidate. His recent writing focuses on governance, institutional accountability, and the relationship between political culture and public confidence in local government.

On November 4, 2021, Victoria Council voted 8 to 1 to approve the Wintergarden Hotel at Blanshard and Fort. The developer walked out with a permanent rezoning and a permanent increase in the value of that land.

What Council did not know, because nobody asked: the developer was already carrying approximately $58 million in debt against two Victoria properties. Eighteen months later it would default. Four years later it would be in receivership.

The process had no mechanism to ask. It still doesn’t.

What the Staff Report Said

The staff recommendation is on the public record. The project “reflects a continuation of recent development proposals with increased density and building heights along Fort Street.” It would “add a unique use to the area.” It would “diversify tourism offerings, add vibrancy.” It would “align with the city’s design guidelines.”

That is the complete list of criteria applied before Council voted to grant a permanent rezoning on a prime downtown block. Not a word about whether the developer could finance the project. Not a word about comparable completed projects. Not a word about what debt the applicant was already carrying. Those questions are not part of Victoria’s rezoning framework. They were not asked in 2021. They are not asked today.

What Was True on November 4, 2021

Here is the financial timeline of Merchant House Capital in the years surrounding that vote, which the staff report did not show council.

In October 2018, Merchant House took out a $10 million credit facility from Timbercreek Mortgage Servicing, secured against the Blanshard site itself, the very property being brought to council for rezoning. In July 2020, Merchant House took out a $48.75 million first-ranking mortgage from Timbercreek against the Victoria Press Building on Douglas Street. On November 4, 2021, Victoria Council voted 8 to 1 to approve the Wintergarden Hotel rezoning. Total Timbercreek debt exposure: approximately $58 million across two Victoria properties. The lone dissenting vote, Councillor Ben Issit, opposed on heritage grounds. No one opposed on the grounds of whether the developer could build.

In April 2023, Merchant House defaulted on the Press Building mortgage. In August 2023, a forbearance agreement was reached: sell the Press Building, repay the loan by November 2023. In 2025, Merchant House defaulted again, and receivership applications were filed. In August 2025, MNP Ltd. was appointed receiver over the Press Building. In January 2026, the Blanshard site was placed in receivership and listed for court-ordered sale at $9.8 million.

When Council cast its votes that November evening, the developer it was approving had already borrowed $58 million it could not repay against properties it was not completing. The staff report called it vibrant. Council called it approved.

The Structural Gap

I want to be precise here, because this matters: this is not a failure of individual Councillors. The information about Merchant House’s debt load was not in front of them. It was not in the staff report. Best practice dictates that it should have been.

That is exactly the problem. Victoria’s rezoning process evaluates the project. It does not evaluate the developer. Staff assess whether the proposal aligns with the OCP, the Downtown Core Area Plan, and the city’s design guidelines. They assess use, height, massing, and community benefit. Nowhere in that framework is there a step that asks: does this applicant have the financial capacity to execute what they are proposing?

When Council approves a rezoning, the land value goes up that day. The developer captures that uplift immediately. What the city receives in return is a promise, a promise to build the project that justified the approval. In the Wintergarden’s case, that promise was made by a developer carrying $58 million in debt it was about to default on.

One Name to Remember

I said this is not a failure of individual Councillors, and in 2021, that is true. But there is one exception to the “we move on” part of that argument.

One of the eight who voted yes on November 4, 2021 is still at Victoria City Hall. Her name is Marianne Alto. She was a Councillor that evening. She voted yes. In October 2022 she was elected Mayor of Victoria.

She has been Mayor for three and a half years.

In January 2025, under her watch, Council issued the fifth development permit for the Admiral Inn site, rezoned since 2011, still not built. Councillor Caradonna said council had been “played.” The process that produced that outcome is the same process that produced the Wintergarden approval.

In January 2026, under her watch, the Wintergarden site went into receivership.

Mayor Alto did not create the structural gap in Victoria’s approval process. But she has had three and a half years, and all the powers of the mayoralty, to begin fixing it. The process has not changed. The framework that approved the Wintergarden Hotel without a single question about developer finances is the same framework in use today.

That is not a 2021 problem. That is a 2026 problem.

A Vote That Was Meant to Mean Something

The eight councillors who voted yes on November 4, 2021 believed they were approving something: vibrancy, tourism, heritage restoration, a downtown landmark. They were doing their jobs under the rules the process gave them.

The rules were not enough. And the rules have not changed.

Families who needed housing near that downtown core in 2021 are still waiting. The block at Blanshard and Fort has now been in productive limbo for four and a half years. The approval meant nothing to them. Council’s approval is only as good as the mechanism behind it. Right now, that mechanism stops at the OCP. It should go further.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He advocates for a more disciplined and transparent municipal government built around measurable outcomes, operational realism, and fiscal responsibility.

A prime block of downtown Victoria, the corner of Blanshard and Fort, a full city block, was approved four and a half years ago for a 20-storey hotel. It was never built. This week it went to court-ordered sale for $9.8 million, after the developer went into receivership owing more than $41 million to its lenders.

You might read that and think: one bad developer, bad luck, move on.

You would be wrong. This is a pattern. And Victoria Council has no mechanism to stop it because it was left too late.

The Wintergarden That Wasn’t

In November 2021, Victoria Council voted 8 to 1 to approve the Wintergarden Hotel at Blanshard and Fort. The developer was Merchant House Capital, run by David Fullbrook. The project was described as “the first hotel proposal for Victoria in 20 years.” It would bring 128 hotel suites, a rooftop restaurant, boutique office space, and a glass atrium. Council approved it. Staff said it would “add vibrancy” and “diversify tourism offerings.”

Not a single room was ever built.

Recently, a BC Supreme Court-appointed receiver listed the property through Colliers. The same developer, Merchant House Capital, is simultaneously in receivership on the Victoria Press Building at 2621 Douglas Street, where it owes Timbercreek Mortgage Servicing more than $41 million. A third Merchant House property in New Westminster went into receivership in February. Three receiverships, one company, one lender calling in debt across an entire portfolio at once.

The Wintergarden Hotel was never a project that was going to be built. It was a promise. Council accepted the promise, granted the rezoning, and handed the developer a permanent increase in the value of that land. Lenders of course use the rezoning to secure financing for their projects. What the city gets in return sometimes is nothing.

Fourteen Years and Counting

The Wintergarden is not the worst case. That distinction belongs to 257 Belleville Street in James Bay, where the Admiral Inn, a shuttered motel, still stands on a site that was rezoned in 2011 for an 8-storey, 35-unit condominium.

In January 2025, council issued the fifth development permit for that project. Fourteen years after the rezoning, the building still does not exist.

Here is what makes that worse. Because the site was rezoned in 2011, Council in 2025 had no leverage whatsoever. It could not require updated amenity contributions. It could not require a design refresh. It could not require anything beyond what was agreed to under conditions that are now a decade and a half old. The developer held a rezoning approval like a chip that never expires, and played it at a time of their choosing.

Councillor Jeremy Caradonna said what every Councillor must have been thinking: “I dislike everything about this project. I think the city has gotten played. We have learned a lot of lessons about what happens when developers come to us with a concept and then spend over a decade not building anything.”

Then Council voted unanimously to issue the permit. Because they had no choice. The leverage was spent in 2011.

The Long Game at Bayview

And then there is Bayview Place in Vic West, the largest master-planned development in Victoria’s history. Council has approved successive phases of this project for two decades. The final 2022 rezoning approved 1.9 million square feet at a floor-space ratio of 4.75. In 2008, the original zoning was FSR 2.0 and 80,000 square feet. The density more than doubled over those years, one application at a time.

Bayview still has 15 to 20 years of construction ahead. There is no independent financial viability assessment on the public record. There is no completion guarantee. The developer’s own estimate of carrying costs is $1 million per month.

What happens if those costs can no longer be carried? What happens to the heritage conditions, the affordable housing commitments, the public amenities that were promised at hearing after hearing? The Master Development Agreement binds successors on paper. But the personal vision, the financial staying power, the ability to deliver, none of that is secured.

The Approval Pipeline Is Not a Housing Pipeline

Here is the thing Victoria’s housing statistics do not capture: a rezoning approved is not a home built. An application approved is not a family housed. Council can vote yes all day long and children still need bedrooms, and families still cannot afford to live in this city, if what gets built is a receivership notice and a shuttered motel.

Every dead site is a site that could have housed someone. The block at Blanshard and Fort has now been in productive limbo for four and a half years. Council’s job is not done when the vote is taken. It is done when someone lives there.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He has consistently argued that accountability in government means more than consultation language; it requires enforceable commitments, public reporting, and consequences for failure.

The Bayview Place rezoning is routinely defended as an unavoidable response to the housing crisis. That framing is not wrong; it is incomplete. What the city approved in January 2024, nine towers ranging up to thirty-two storeys on the last undeveloped Inner Harbour frontage, was one of the most consequential rezonings in Victoria’s history. What the city did not do is equally significant: it sidelined the planning discipline specifically designed to ensure that growth is fiscally sustainable over the long term. The result is a textbook case of growth without asset stewardship.

This is not a dispute about building heights or neighbourhood character, though both matter. It is a question of whether the city treated Bayview Place as an integrated component of a long-term system of public assets, or merely as an isolated development opportunity to be maximised now and reconciled later. The evidence points firmly to the latter.

The Fundamental Principles of Asset Management

For some time the Province of British Columbia has encouraged local governments to adopt modern asset management practices. Through the Asset Management British Columbia Framework and the Union of British Columbia Municipalities, local governments are urged to integrate land-use decisions with infrastructure capacity, lifecycle costs, service levels, and long-term risk. These frameworks exist specifically to prevent municipalities from approving growth that creates “hidden liabilities” for future Councils and taxpayers.

In the case of Bayview Place, this lens was conspicuously absent. The city proceeded with a “growth-first” strategy, effectively deferring the true costs of the project onto future generations.

The Ownership Myth and the Infrastructure Handover

A central misunderstanding in the Bayview Place debate is the role of private ownership. While the developer, Focus Equities (or related vehicles), owns the land and the towers, the project necessitates a massive expansion of public infrastructure.

Under the “Build-and-Transfer” model common in North American development, the developer constructs the internal roads, water mains, sewer lines, and sidewalks. However, once construction is finalised, ownership of these assets is transferred to the City of Victoria. From that moment forward, the city, and by extension the taxpayer, is legally and financially responsible for the decades-long lifecycle of those assets, including their operation, maintenance, and eventual replacement.

The “blind spot” in the Bayview Place approval is the absence of a Lifecycle Cost Impact assessment. The city has not publicly demonstrated that the property tax revenue generated by these nine towers will exceed the long-term costs of maintaining the infrastructure required to service them. Without this data, the city is essentially accepting a massive private gift today that may become a massive public deficit tomorrow.

The Sewage Flow Finesse: A Case Study in Pre-Approval Manipulation

The infrastructure transfer problem was not abstract. There is a specific, documented example of how the technical record submitted to Council understated the true servicing burden of the Bayview rezoning and it involves sewage flows.

The City of Victoria has a long-standing policy governing new development applications: any rezoning that would generate higher sewage flows than the original zoning must attenuate the additional flow on-site, releasing to the municipal system at no more than the maximum peak flow permitted under the original zoning designation. This is a sound principle. Applied correctly, it prevents a developer from effectively downloading a sewage capacity subsidy onto the public system. The question is whether it was applied correctly at Bayview.

Focus Equities retained Stantec Consulting, a firm with a long-standing retainer relationship with the developer, to calculate the permissible sewage flows for the site. On September 7, 2022, Stantec engineering technologist Deb Becelaere submitted a report to the city setting out those calculations. The critical number was the pre-development Peak Dry Weather Flow (PDWF): 33.14 L/s. That figure, drawn from an earlier Stantec report dated April 10, 2012, would serve as the ceiling against which all future attenuation requirements would be measured. The higher that baseline, the less the developer is required to attenuate. The manipulation lay in how the 2012 baseline was constructed.

The Roundhouse site at the time of the 2012 report was zoned industrial: M1 Limited Light Industrial (7,150 sq m), M2 Light Industrial (20,475 sq m plus 4,895 sq m of rail easement), M3 Heavy Industrial (3,270 sq m), and a small SRS Single Family Residential parcel (1,570 sq m). To arrive at the highest defensible pre-development flow, and thus the most permissive attenuation ceiling, Stantec calculated flows based on the most sewage-intensive uses the zoning bylaws theoretically permitted: car washes, gas stations, restaurants, manufacturing plants, dry cleaners, and laundromats. The 2012 report was candid about what it was doing. It acknowledged that the scenarios used were “not a realistic proposition” and that “the scenario presented here is a very unlikely one in practicality.” It further admitted that this method “allows for an infinite number of potential scenarios” and that flows calculated this way could “match and exceed the post-development sewage flows.” In other words, the methodology was selected precisely because it could produce a pre-development baseline high enough to neutralise the attenuation requirement for whatever came next.

The 2022 Becelaere report then compounded those already-inflated assumptions. It used 900 square feet as the average condo size and estimated two people per unit, noting this was a “conservative” population density estimate, conservative, that is, in the direction of underestimating future residents and therefore underestimating future sewage flows. For hotel uses, where the area designated for hotels was acknowledged as unknown (there may be as many as three hotels in the development), Stantec folded hotel flows into residential calculations using the same conservative assumptions. The word “conservative” appears twice in the Stantec reports. Both times, it means conservative in the direction that benefits the developer and reduces the attenuation obligation.

The practical result: by building a 2022 attenuation analysis on a 2012 baseline constructed from hypothetical heavy industrial uses that were never going to materialise, Stantec produced a pre-development flow figure that made the rezoning’s sewage burden look manageable. The city accepted this analysis. No independent peer review of the sewage flow calculations appears in the public record. The rezoning proceeded on figures the consultants themselves described, in writing, as based on scenarios that were “very unlikely in practicality.” This is precisely the kind of hidden liability that asset management frameworks are designed to prevent and precisely what the city’s approval process failed to catch.

The National Historic Site as a Cultural Service

The Esquimalt and Nanaimo Roundhouse is not merely a collection of old buildings; it is a National Historic Site and a primary cultural asset. Under the City’s Sustainable Service Delivery Framework, heritage assets are defined by the “Level of Service” they provide to the community in terms of identity, tourism, and civic value.

By approving thirty-two-storey towers in immediate proximity to this low-scale industrial heritage site, the city has prioritised floor-space ratio over the preservation of a public asset. High-density “podium and tower” designs introduce significant environmental stressors, including altered wind patterns and shadow impacts, which can accelerate the deterioration of historic masonry and timber.

The city has treated the National Historic Site as a “backdrop” for development rather than a sensitive public system that requires a dedicated stewardship plan. If the scale of the new development compromises the integrity of the historic site, the city has effectively depreciated a non-renewable cultural asset to facilitate a short-term real estate objective.

The Impact of New Provincial Legislation

The urgency of this critique has intensified since the original rezoning vote. Between 2023 and 2025, the Province introduced Bills 44, 46, and 47, mandating increased density near transit hubs and reforming how Development Cost Charges and Amenity Cost Contributions are collected. In June 2025, the Province also amended the municipal liabilities and short-term capital borrowing regulations, giving municipalities expanded authority to take on debt for capital projects without a referendum or alternative approval process, changes explicitly designed to accelerate infrastructure delivery in growing communities.

These changes accelerate the housing delivery pipeline while simultaneously compressing the margin for error. Bill 46 permits collection of funds for initial capital costs, but provides no mechanism for long-term infrastructure renewal. The expanded borrowing authorities introduced in 2025 make it easier for the city to take on debt, not to manage it wisely. By approving Bayview Place density without a rigorous asset management plan, Victoria is “front-loading” growth while leaving its back-end sustainability plan entirely blank. In this legislative environment, asset management discipline is no longer optional. It is the only safeguard that remains.

Mandatory Reporting: The Test Is Now Underway

The Province of British Columbia moved to mandatory reporting for local government asset data in 2025. The City of Victoria is now required to provide detailed information in three categories: Capacity versus Demand Utilisation (how much room remains in the pipes and roads before they fail); Asset Age and Condition (the physical state of infrastructure inherited from developers); and Financial Linkage (confirmation that the Long-Term Financial Plan is directly tied to Asset Management Plans). This reporting regime is now active.

Bayview Place will be among the first major test cases under these rules. If the density of this project causes the surrounding infrastructure to reach capacity limits prematurely, the city will be obligated to document that failure in its provincial reports, potentially jeopardising future infrastructure grants from the Canada Community-Building Fund and exposing the fiscal gap that the original approval left unexamined. Mandatory reporting does not fix the problem. It makes the problem impossible to hide.

A City-Wide Pattern: The Evidence Is Now Accumulating

Bayview Place would be troubling enough in isolation. It is not in isolation. The same governance failure, approving large capital commitments without rigorous lifecycle cost analysis, appears across Victoria’s most significant recent projects.

The Crystal Pool replacement is the most telling current example. Victoria voters approved a referendum in February 2025 to borrow up to $168.9 million toward a project now budgeted at $209.2 million. The pool was built in 1971. Decades of deferred maintenance and three separate Council cycles of indecision produced a facility so degraded that the city must close it entirely in fall 2026 while construction proceeds over a five-to-six-year window. The debt servicing alone will cost $1.23 million in 2026. This is asset management failure made visible: a public facility allowed to deteriorate past the point of affordable rehabilitation because no Council wanted to make the politically uncomfortable decision earlier. The Bayview Place infrastructure pipeline is heading down the same road, except that the assets are newer, less visible, and buried underground. By the time the pipes fail, the Councillors who approved the rezoning will be long gone.

The Christ Church Cathedral Commons rezoning, which Council approved at the May 2026 Committee of the Whole, adds a further dimension. The Anglican Diocese sought rezoning for up to four buildings of eight to eighteen storeys on the Cathedral block, with the stated rationale that development revenue is needed to fund $30 to $50 million in seismic upgrades to heritage buildings. The Heritage Advisory Panel recommended the application be declined, specifically citing the absence of a detailed financial analysis demonstrating that the proposed scale was actually required to fund those upgrades. Council approved it anyway. The pattern is consistent: heritage assets are treated as leverage for density rather than as public goods requiring dedicated stewardship plans. The Roundhouse lesson was not learned.

Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge replacement, budgeted at $77 million, completed at $105 million, three years late, was supposed to be a turning point. The city’s own project manager published a lessons-learned report at the time noting the inadequacy of the contingency fund and the failure to present Council with a clear account of the risks it was assuming. Debt servicing on the bridge alone, combined with the $775 million CRD wastewater treatment plant, will cost taxpayers over $50 million in interest charges through at least 2040. None of that institutional memory appears to have survived into the Bayview Place approval process.

Centennial Square offers the most instructive case of all, because it exposes the asset management failure from a different angle. The square was built in 1964. For sixty years it has served as Victoria’s main civic plaza, the public space immediately adjacent to City Hall. By 2016 the infrastructure beneath it was already failing: staff reports documented cracked pavement, heaving caused by shallow tree roots, and damage to underground utilities. The sequoia planted in the early 1980s had, predictably, given sandy and shallow soil conditions, sent its roots into hydro equipment and other buried services. None of this was a surprise to anyone paying attention to asset condition. What Councils did for the next nine years was plan, re-plan, commission consultants, debate the fountain, debate the sequoia, reduce the scope, reallocate the funding, and ultimately, in December 2025, cancel the project entirely.

The financial trail is a case study in compounding indecision. Council approved $750,000 for design and consulting fees in 2023. In July 2024 it approved a $12.1 million revitalization concept, with $4.5 million from the province and $7.6 million in city debt. In July 2025 it stripped $2.5 million from the project budget to fund its Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan instead, reducing scope to half the square. In November 2025 Councillors Hammond, Gardiner, and Coleman moved to cancel the project entirely. In December 2025, Council voted 8-1 to do exactly that, redirecting the remaining $2 million to the Crystal Pool replacement and Royal Athletic Park upgrades. The $750,000 paid to Dialog Design produced no physical improvement. The square is left, as Councillor Caradonna put it, “to languish.” The infrastructure beneath it is a year older and in no better condition. The cost of eventual remediation has increased.

The Centennial Square story inverts the Bayview Place problem, but the underlying pathology is the same. At Bayview, the city approved large-scale growth and deferred the question of what it would cost to service and maintain the infrastructure that growth requires. At Centennial Square, the city owned a deteriorating asset, acknowledged the deterioration in its own staff reports, commissioned a design solution, spent $750,000 developing it and then cancelled it because the fiscal position created by other deferred decisions (the Crystal Pool, the Community Safety plan, the 2026 budget pressure) left no room. Deferred maintenance on one asset cannibalises the capacity to maintain another. That is not a coincidence. It is how asset management failure compounds across a municipal portfolio when no Council is willing to impose the discipline of lifecycle cost accounting on its decisions. The 2026 Council will inherit this compounded deficit. Bayview Place will add to it.

A Call for Pro-Responsibility Planning

The approval of Bayview Place reveals a pattern in Victoria’s governance that has now repeated itself across the Johnson Street Bridge, the Crystal Pool, the Christ Church Cathedral Commons, Centennial Square, and the CRD wastewater plant: major commitments are made or deferred, costs are understated or avoided, and future Councils and taxpayers absorb the consequences. This is not a technical failure. It is a failure of stewardship, and it is structural.

An Official Community Plan is not a flexible obstacle to be adjusted whenever a sufficiently large developer arrives. It is a long-range investment strategy that integrates land use, infrastructure capacity, and fiscal reality. Good planning is not anti-development; it is pro-responsibility. Victoria cannot credibly claim leadership in climate resilience or urban sustainability while approving major rezonings that bypass the very discipline designed to measure sustainability in concrete terms. Bayview Place will almost certainly be built. The question for the 2026 Council, and for voters choosing that Council, is whether the city will finally demand a lifecycle cost analysis before the next major rezoning application lands on the table, or whether it will repeat this pattern until the infrastructure bills come due and there is no one left to blame.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and candidate for City Council in Victoria’s 2026 municipal election who led much of the opposition to the rezoning of Bayview Place.

“Unfortunately, we are frequently beguiled and teased by alluring images produced by architects, urban designers and planners, where everything is just perfect, if not wholly realistic. These images portray perfect scenarios for a perfect future. Photorealistic perspectives depict a sky that is always blue, where everything is clear and perfect. Life is frozen in one perfect moment. We sell these images to our clients, and some of them still live under the illusion that this is possible.”

That is not the assessment of a sceptic. Those words belong to Professor Justyna Karakiewicz, a Professor of Urban Design at the University of Melbourne and one of the world’s leading specialists in speculative urban thinking. She wrote them in 2023, in a journal article about the gap between how cities are imagined and how they are built.

She is describing a structural problem with how development applications are packaged and presented. Victoria’s Councillors, residents, and planning staff encounter this problem in every major rezoning application that comes before them. Most of them do not know what they are looking at.

Why Drawings Matter More Here Than Almost Anywhere Else

In most fields, documentation is secondary to the thing itself. In architecture and urban planning, images are the thing itself, at least until construction begins. The drawings submitted in support of a rezoning application are the only available representation of what a development will do to a neighbourhood. There is no prototype. There is no trial period.

This gives developers’ architects extraordinary power to shape how a proposal is received. And it has given rise to a set of standard techniques, not unique to any one developer or application, through which large proposals are routinely made to look more modest, more open, more green, and more compatible with their surroundings than they will actually be.

The Bayview Place application in Victoria West was an exceptionally well-documented example of all five of these techniques in use simultaneously. Each deserves to be named and understood.

The Five Techniques

Planimetric Drawings

A planimetric drawing shows a building or site from directly above, as a plan view. It is useful for understanding how space is arranged horizontally. It is entirely uninformative about vertical scale and relationships.

Tall buildings are tall. Their defining characteristic, the one that most affects the people who live near them, is their height and the way that height interacts with light, shadow, and sky. A planimetric drawing systematically suppresses this information. An application dominated by planimetric drawings is an application that is communicating as little as possible about what is most important.

The Bayview rezoning application relied heavily on planimetric drawings. Reviewing it, one could study page after page of site plans and spatial diagrams without developing any reliable understanding of how tall the proposed towers would be, how much sky they would block, or how they would relate to the heritage buildings they would surround.

Selective Shadow Studies

Shadow diagrams are graphical representations showing how sunlight and shadows will interact with a development over time. Done properly, they are among the most honest tools in a planner’s toolkit. Done selectively, they can hide the most uncomfortable truths about a tall building’s impact.

The standard shadow study in the Bayview application showed shadows at the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. What it did not show was the Winter Equinox, the point in the year when shadows are longest and sunlight is most scarce. That is precisely when the impact of tall buildings on adjacent properties and public spaces is most severe.

Better practice would use a parametric approach: modelling the new buildings’ shadows in isolation, then subtracting what already exists to show the incremental shadow impact of the new construction specifically. This would allow a straightforward comparison: how much additional shadow does this development impose on the neighbourhood, and on which days of the year? That question was not answered by the Bayview submission. It was not required by the City.

Cropped Eye-Level Perspectives

Eye-level perspectives are the drawings that most closely approximate what a person walking past a development would actually see. They are also the drawings where selective framing does the most work.

The standard technique is to compose eye-level perspectives that show the base and mid-section of buildings while cropping the tops of towers out of the frame. The result is a drawing that accurately depicts the streetscape at ground level while obscuring the mass above. A 28-storey tower shown to the 12th floor in an eye-level perspective looks nothing like a 28-storey tower. It looks like a mid-rise building with an indistinct top.

In the Bayview application, eye-level perspectives consistently avoided showing towers at their full height. The repetition of this technique across multiple drawings created a cumulative impression of a development that was substantially smaller and less imposing than the application’s own specifications described.

Sketch-Like Graphics and Watercolour Softening

Architectural renderings today are capable of photorealistic precision. Many developers choose not to use this capability. Instead, they commission drawings that look like concept sketches: loose, hand-drawn lines, watercolour washes, soft edges.

The technique achieves several things simultaneously. The loose, incomplete quality of a sketch creates an impression of openness and possibility. Watercolour washes avoid the hard shadows and reflective surfaces that make a tall building look like a tall building. Green space, trees, and pedestrian areas are typically exaggerated in scale and rendered in the most flattering light. The more imposing elements of a proposal, the building mass, the height, the relationship between towers, are minimised or kept in soft background.

In the Bayview application, a proposed plaza at the centre of the site was drawn as an expansive, sun-drenched public space. The same techniques were in use simultaneously in Vancouver, in renderings supporting a development application for the Jericho Lands.

Birds-Eye Perspectives

A birds-eye perspective shows a development from high above, typically at a 45-degree angle. It is visually striking and creates the impression of a complete overview. It is also the view that almost no one who actually lives near a development will ever have.

From directly above, or from a high oblique angle, tall buildings appear relatively small: their width is more visible than their height, and their relationship to the surrounding cityscape looks compressed and manageable. The people who live in Vic West do not see Bayview Place from a helicopter. They see it from the street, from their windows, from the park. They see its height, its shadow, and the degree to which it blocks the sky and the views they relied on.

The Bayview application presented multiple birds-eye perspectives surrounded by what appeared to be significant green space. From the ground, those buildings will look very different.

What Better Practice Looks Like

Citizens’ groups in Vancouver have become increasingly sophisticated about these techniques, and the awareness has produced demands for higher standards: accurate scale drawings showing full building heights, parametric shadow studies covering all seasons, and three-dimensional interactive digital mapping that allows the public to explore a proposed development at ground level from multiple points of view.

Victoria has not caught up. The city’s development application requirements do not mandate the kind of representation that would allow councillors and residents to make genuinely informed assessments of large projects.

For any application proposing buildings above eight storeys or involving significant additions of density to an established neighbourhood, a minimum standard should include: full-height eye-level perspectives from each adjacent street, complete shadow studies at Winter Equinox as well as Summer Solstice, and a digital model accessible to the public before the consultation period begins.

These are not expensive requirements relative to the scale of the applications they govern. They are expensive only to developers who have found that what they are proposing looks worse when it is accurately depicted.

The Responsibility This Places on Council

What matters is that City Council is the final decision-maker, and that its decisions are only as good as the information it requires.

A Council that accepts selective shadow studies, cropped perspectives, and watercolour sketches as the basis for approving nine towers in a heritage neighbourhood has not done its job. It has been shown what the developer wanted it to see.

Victoria’s planning staff have the expertise to identify these techniques and require better. The Heritage Advisory Panel did exactly that during the Bayview process, and was ignored. What was missing was a council prepared to back up its own staff and demand the information that residents deserved.

That is a governance failure, not an architectural one. And it is one the 2026 election can address.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He supports restoring public hearings, strengthening neighbourhood-based planning, and closing the governance loopholes that increasingly sideline residents from major land-use decisions.

When a Council stops enforcing its rules, it eventually stops asking the public for permission. Not long ago Vancouver residents woke up to find their public hearings gone, their input erased, and massive rezonings executed behind closed doors. No warning. No recourse. Just towers.

Victoria, meaning the Mayor and the Gang of Five, is following the same game plan. The only difference is timing. We are one election cycle behind Vancouver.

Vancouver Lost - Victoria Is Next

Retired lawyer Mike Mangan delivered a talk called “Voiceless in Mount Pleasant: Towers and the Death of Public Oversight,” part of Local Focus Vancouver’s community planning speaker series. He wasn’t speaking theoretically. He walked out his front door in September 2024 and discovered that an 18-storey tower had been approved for his quiet residential street pursuant to the Broadway Plan. Most of his neighbours had never heard of the Plan.

It is worth noting: Victoria’s new Official Community Plan also enables 18-storey towers in designated nodes. Residents here should take Mangan’s story seriously. Vancouver is what the end of resident input looks like in practice. Victoria is on the same path.

Five Changes That Stripped Your Voice

Before returning to the legal tools Council refuses to use, understand what happened, because it happened fast, and most of it happened quietly.

Between 2022 and 2023, through the Missing Middle initiative, Council enabled up to six units on most residential lots and twelve townhouse units on corner lots, as-of-right, with no rezoning needed and no public hearing. Most owners and renters in affected blocks found out after the fact.

In 2023 and 2024, the province’s Bill 44 eliminated public hearings for rezonings consistent with Official Community Plans and for small-scale multi-unit housing changes. Victoria did not push back. If you doubt how far the provincial government will go to strip your voice, consider Bill 26 from 2023. When a Kitsilano neighbourhood group took Vancouver to court to challenge a controversial tower rezoning, the government passed legislation designed to retroactively legalise the rezoning and instantly terminate the residents’ lawsuit. The Court of Appeal eventually struck the legislation down as unconstitutional. The message from the province was unmistakable: if the rules allow the public to get in the way, the province will simply rewrite the rules.

In October 2025, Council adopted Victoria 2050, a new long-term land use framework enabling denser forms across village and corridor nodes citywide. What emerged is a document most residents have still not read, one that now legally justifies almost every significant rezoning application Council will receive for the next twenty-five years. It is worth pausing on what Council did here. The province’s Bill 44 mandated up to six units on residential lots. Victoria took that floor and multiplied it by roughly ten, upzoning from six units to six storeys. No other municipality in BC made that leap.

Also in October 2025, Council rolled out new zoning categories across residential areas, villages, town centres, and corridors as part of a single, massive legislative package. Framed as “One City. One Plan,” this move instantly changed the legal building rights across the entire map with a single vote.

Once a project aligns with Victoria 2050 and falls within the new zoning envelope, it proceeds administratively. No public Council vote. No hearing. Staff approval only.

The combined result is that developers know precisely what they can build, but residents won’t know what’s coming until the signs go up.

Tools Council Has But Won’t Use

This is the part that rarely gets discussed. Council behaves as though its role ends at approving applications. It does not. Victoria has meaningful legal leverage over developers at multiple stages. Council simply declines to pull those levers, or pulls them so gently they have no effect.

When the city issues a development permit, it can attach conditions covering form, massing, setbacks, ground-floor activation, tree retention, and affordable unit mix. These are not favours. They are legal requirements that travel with the permit. Council routinely approves permits with vague or weak conditions. Developers know it. These conditions are then often negotiated away during construction or ignored outright. The City rarely enforces them. Strong, specific, enforceable conditions are the difference between a development that serves a neighbourhood and one that extracts value from it. Council writes weak conditions because it has chosen to.

When a property is rezoned, particularly when Council grants height or density above the base zone, it can enter into a Master Development Agreement requiring affordable units, local hiring, construction timelines, public realm contributions, and use restrictions. An MDA is a binding contract. Breach it, and the city can pursue every legal remedy available. Bayview is the clearest example on record. The city agreed to an MDA in 2007 but then replaced it in 2025 with Council granting relief to the developer rather than enforcing the original MDA’s terms. That first agreement was rock solid. The city simply chose not to enforce it.

The Community Amenity Contribution framework allows the city to collect contributions from developers when rezoning delivers additional density value, a share of the land value uplift that the city’s own decision created. Victoria’s CAC rates are publicly known. What is less publicly known is how often they are negotiated down, deferred, or absorbed into project pro forma terms without scrutiny. Council created the value. It has the right to capture a fair share of it. Choosing not to is a policy decision that benefits one party only.

Developers crave certainty. For multi-decade projects, they want a guarantee that future Councils will not downzone their land. Section 516 of the Local Government Act provides the compromise tool. A Phased Development Agreement grants up to ten years of absolute zoning lock-in. In exchange, the city can demand an ironclad delivery schedule for housing and amenities. Victoria signs these agreements without rigid performance guarantees. The developer gets a decade of zoning certainty. The public bears all delay and non-delivery risks.

What Mangan’s Warning Means for Victoria

Mangan closed his Vancouver talk with a clear instruction: “Your last bit of voice, if you’re concerned about this, is the election in October.”

Victoria’s municipal election is also in October. The question is not whether Victoria should allow more housing. It should. The question is whether the legal tools available to every BC municipality will ever be used, used effectively, and with enforcement teeth, to ensure that approved housing gets built at the densities promised, with the affordability and amenity commitments honoured, on a timeline residents can expect. Right now, the answer is no.

This post draws on reporting by Carol Volkart in Dunbar News (April 16, 2026), covering Mike Mangan’s talk “Voiceless in Mount Pleasant: Towers and the Death of Public Oversight,” delivered as part of Local Focus Vancouver’s community planning speakers’ series.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He believes Victoria’s future depends on rebuilding confidence that City Hall decisions are being made openly, lawfully, and in the broader public interest.

In most cities, the development lobby operates at a distance from City Hall. It submits applications, hires consultants, and attends public hearings. The relationship between developer and regulator is arm’s length, visible, manageable, subject to scrutiny.

In Victoria, the Urban Development Institute (UDI) functions differently. Through a web of memberships, donations, and shared personnel that spans the developers, the city, the local newspaper, and the housing NGOs that appear at public hearings in support of projects, the UDI has constructed something more structural than ordinary lobbying. Researcher and citizen journalist Sasha Izard, working through Freedom of Information requests and documented on crdwatch.ca, has mapped what he calls “a full circle” of shared interest. His analysis deserves the widest possible attention.

The Developer, the City, and the Lobby

The UDI Capital Region is a registered lobbying organisation. Its Executive Director is listed on the BC Lobbyists Registry as an in-house lobbyist. The organisation is registered as having lobbied the province, including specifically the Housing Solutions Advisor to the Premier, who is Victoria’s former Mayor.

This is not a secret. It is a matter of public record.

Yet when UDI’s Executive Director appeared before View Royal Council in September 2023, she stated: “UDI is not a lobbying group.”

Izard’s research documents that the BC Lobbyists Registry says otherwise. The UDI is registered as a lobbying organisation and its Executive Director is registered as its in-house lobbyist. The gap between the public statement and the public record matters, because the UDI’s influence on Victoria’s planning environment depends in part on being perceived as a neutral industry association rather than a registered lobby advocating for specific development outcomes.

The City Joined Without a Vote

According to Izard’s documented research at the time, the City of Victoria was a paying member of the UDI, and this membership was not approved by elected Councillors. City staff signed the municipality up unilaterally, without a vote by the people’s representatives.

The same lobby that represents the interests of developers seeking rezoning from the City of Victoria is also receiving membership dues from the City of Victoria. The city is not a neutral regulator of the lobby’s clients. It is a paying participant in their organisation.

Saanich and View Royal both voted unanimously to leave the UDI after similar concerns were raised. Victoria did not leave until very recently.

The Developer’s Connections Run Deep

Focus Equities, the company behind the Bayview Place rezoning, is itself a paying UDI member. Its principal, Ken Mariash, has donated to the last three successive Mayors of the City of Victoria and the Mayor of Esquimalt. At material times both the City of Victoria and the Township of Esquimalt are UDI members.

An Executive Director of the UDI Capital Region previously worked for Bayview Properties, Focus Equities’ predecessor company. A recent head of the UDI donated to the previous Victoria Mayor’s re-election campaign in 2018.

These are not isolated coincidences. They are a documented pattern of shared personnel, shared membership, and shared political support connecting the developer, the lobby, and the City.

The Media Is a Member Too

The Times Colonist and its parent company Glacier Media are both paying members of the UDI. Until it was taken down following investigative scrutiny, the UDI Capital Region’s website listed the Times Colonist as a “Media Partner.”

In a Times Colonist article titled “Investing in community is Mariash’s modus operandi,” the first example given of Mariash’s donations to a community development organisation was the Urban Development Institute.

A media outlet that is a paying partner of the development lobby is not well-positioned to investigate that lobby’s influence on municipal governance. Whether or not individual journalists are compromised, the institutional relationship creates an appearance problem that neither the Times Colonist nor the UDI has addressed publicly. The absence of critical coverage of UDI’s influence in the mainstream BC press is consistent with this relationship.

Housing NGOs Complete the Circle

The Greater Victoria Housing Society (GVHS) has appeared at public hearings in support of development projects, including Bayview. Of the organisations listed as funders and supporters on the GVHS website, eight of eleven were UDI members in 2023. At the time this article was written, on the GVHS “Coming Soon” page, five projects were listed, all with connections to UDI member companies.

Izard’s analysis is precise: “There is more than enough material to suggest that there are serious potential conflict of interest issues involving the City of Victoria, its politicians over the years, and the company seeking to gain favourable rezoning in this application due to their shared relation with the lobby they are both simultaneously paying members of.”

Developer. City. Newspaper. Housing NGO. All connected through the same lobby. All participating, in different ways, in the same approval process. And none of those connections, not the memberships, not the donations, not the shared personnel, were disclosed at the public hearing when the rezoning was considered.

That is the full circle.

From Victoria to the Province

Izard’s Freedom of Information investigation extends beyond Victoria. A November 2024 report drawing on FOI documents reveals that the Province of BC was actively working to implement what the UDI had been advocating, and that this culminated directly in Bills 44 through 47 (2023), the housing legislation that overrode local government authority on zoning and significantly reduced public participation in development decisions.

Following Izard’s reporting, UDI branch websites and member directories were taken down. The timing was noted.

The implications reach beyond any individual development application. If the UDI successfully shaped the provincial legislation that now governs how all BC municipalities must handle zoning, legislation that stripped public hearing rights, removed Council discretion, and fast-tracked development approvals, then the full circle is not just local. It is provincial.

What Accountability Requires

The minimum steps are not complicated. The City of Victoria took a long time to end its UDI membership, as Saanich and View Royal had done much earlier. It should never have been a paying participant in a lobby whose clients seek rezonings from it.

Councillors with connections to UDI-linked organizations should disclose those connections when voting on applications involving UDI members. The public is entitled to know when the regulator and the regulated share institutional affiliations.

And the media, local and provincial, should ask harder questions about the relationship between the development lobby, the housing legislation it successfully advocated for, and the planning decisions that legislation enables.

Sasha Izard did the work to make those questions possible. The answers remain outstanding.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and candidate for City of Victoria Council in 2026. He has written extensively on developer influence in municipal governance and Victoria’s planning process.

Sasha Izard is a candidate for Saanich Council in 2026.

Summary

On April 16, 2026, Victoria City Council unanimously approved a $677,500 grant from the Victoria Housing Reserve Fund to the Midtown Affordable Housing Society, a newly formed, unproven non-profit, to help purchase the 179-unit Tresah West apartment building at 611 Speed Avenue. The stated justification was to convert a failed condominium project into co-operative housing for moderate-income families.

The real story raises a series of serious questions. The grant is just the smallest visible layer of a multi-tiered public subsidy structure that totals over $105 million. The building itself underwent three distinct ownership and housing-model pivots in five years, from strata condos to market rental to co-op, with each pivot driven by private-sector failure. Council approved the grant unanimously with no recorded dissent, despite the transaction raising significant questions about institutional capacity, value for money, and the city’s role in backstopping a developer’s distressed asset sale.

The Three-Pivot History

The site at 611 Speed Avenue has a long municipal history. The city approved a rezoning from low-density residential to a mixed-use apartment zone as far back as 2010, eventually approving a development permit for two residential towers in the 2016 to 2020 period. Mike Geric Construction conceived the 12-storey, 179-unit Tresah West as strata condominiums, to be Victoria’s first high-rise condominium in Midtown, adjacent to Mayfair Shopping Centre. Construction began in 2020.

By late 2023, Mike Geric Construction (MGC) was offering homes starting at $399,000 with an unusually low $10,000 deposit option, a market-leading incentive designed to boost flagging sales. The company stated that 70 per cent of the 179 suites had already sold. Despite this, about 30 per cent of buyers rescinded contracts earlier in 2024 when the company changed the terms of sale due to rising costs.

By September 2024, the situation had become critical. MGC admitted in letters to purchasers that rising costs had “irreparably damaged Tresah West’s viability as a market condominium project.” Construction costs had escalated more than 30% above the original forecast, driven by pandemic-era material price increases, supply chain disruptions, and interest-rate-driven carrying cost increases. Approximately 90 presale buyers were told their contracts would be terminated and deposits returned. The building pivoted to a purpose-built market rental model.

By the time Tresah West neared completion in early to mid 2025, the building had transitioned to rental, but something happened around spring 2025 that is not fully explained in public documents: the building was placed up for sale. The city’s own staff report states, matter-of-factly, that the applicant identified 611 Speed Avenue, advertised for sale in spring 2025, as a candidate for conversion into cooperative housing.

The Midtown Affordable Housing Society was formally incorporated on October 1, 2025, the same month as the conditional purchase. While the applicant’s own cover letter described both entities as having been “quickly incorporated in mid-2025,” the Date of Incorporation field on the application records the precise date as October 1, 2025. The application form itself, however, carries a preparation date of May 12, 2025, meaning the grant application was drafted before the society legally existed.

The Money - $677,500 Is the Smallest Number

The framing of this transaction as a $677,500 city grant obscures the full fiscal picture. Based on public documents presented to council, the total direct public contribution supporting this purchase is approximately $103.7 million.

There are two distinct CMHC instruments involved. The first is an $85 million CMHC MLI Select construction loan, an existing private-lender loan insured by CMHC under its MLI Select program, taken out during the building’s construction. This is not new government money; it is the existing construction debt that must be refinanced on acquisition. The second is a separate application by the Society to CMHC’s Co-operative Housing Development Program, seeking $83 million in a repayable loan plus nearly $20 million in a forgivable loan. The repayable portion would function as the permanent acquisition mortgage, replacing the construction loan on closing. The forgivable portion would serve as equity, reducing the debt the co-op must service and enabling the below-market housing charges.

The city’s $677,500 grant is the smallest and most visible piece, functioning primarily as a trigger to unlock the federal funding rather than as meaningful standalone capital.

Who Are the New Non-Profits?

The Midtown Affordable Housing Society was incorporated as a BC society in October 2025. The contact person listed on its application is Joseph Stoltz, President of the Board, whose registered address is identical to that of Red House Solutions Ltd., a Victoria-based firm he leads as Founder and CEO. Red House Solutions describes itself as providing consulting services to non-profit housing providers including mortgage applications, capital planning, and refinancing advice. The BC Lobbyist Registry shows a registration for Red House Solutions Ltd. with the status listed as “Inactive.”

In other words, the organisation applying for public money to purchase an $85-million-plus building was incorporated within months of the application, operates from the same address as a housing consultancy whose business model is to service affordable housing non-profits, and had no prior projects funded through the Victoria Housing Reserve Fund at the time of application. The application itself acknowledges this under the “Experience and Capacity” section, noting that the Society “will utilize board members with previous co-operative membership experience,” a thin record for an organisation seeking to steward an $85-million-plus asset for 60 years.

The co-operative itself was also incorporated in mid-2025. It will operate the housing under a 60-year lease from the Society. The governance design separates building ownership from day-to-day operations, but its implementation by two newly formed entities, dependent on securing enormous federal financing that is not yet confirmed, is a significant risk not adequately interrogated in the Council report.

The Developer’s Position

The application lists Mike Geric Construction as the developer responsible for construction. However, at no point in public documents does the city disclose the actual sale price that MGC is receiving from the Society for the building. The financial logic suggests it exceeds $85 million, but the equity portion, what MGC walks away with after paying down the construction financing, is not on the public record.

The staff report neutrally notes that “lease agreements arranged by previous owner Mike Geric Construction, may result in up to three one-bedroom units rented at market rates, independently of the cooperative.” Even as the building is sold to a non-profit co-op under a 60-year affordability covenant, up to three units remain under existing market leases controlled by the developer.

From MGC’s perspective, the co-op transaction provides an exit from a project that had become financially untenable. Ed Geric described the condo-to-rental pivot as “an extremely difficult decision but in the face of the current market it was the right decision.” By spring 2025 the building was already being advertised for sale. The non-profit co-op structure, backed by CMHC insurance and federal forgivable loans, offered MGC a buyer with access to government-subsidised acquisition financing that no private buyer could match.

Approximately 90 presale buyers had their contracts terminated in late 2024. The developer stated they would receive full deposits back. While deposit refunds in this scenario are legally required under BC’s Real Estate Development Marketing Act, the opportunity cost to purchasers who had contracted to buy homes at agreed prices was not addressed in the City’s deliberations.

The Affordability Question

The proposed monthly housing charges are $1,900 for one-bedroom units and $2,400 for two-bedroom units. By comparison, Tresah West was advertising one-bedroom market rentals starting at $2,150 as recently as early 2026. The “below-market” savings on a one-bedroom represent approximately $250 per month, modest, and only achieved if the full federal forgivable loan comes through.

Income limits are set at $76,000 per year for one-bedroom units and $96,000 per year for two-bedroom units. These are not low-income households by any standard Victoria definition. The public subsidy here is targeted predominantly at households that fall into what is commonly called the “missing middle” rather than Victoria’s most vulnerable populations.

Ten units are earmarked for women and children fleeing domestic violence, provisionally operated by a BC Housing-appointed service provider. This critical component is presented as a proposed future arrangement, not a confirmed commitment.

A 60-year affordability covenant will be registered against the title as a condition of the grant. This is a meaningful and positive aspect of the deal. However, the covenant’s enforceability over six decades rests on the institutional health of two newly incorporated non-profits with no track record.

Procedural and Accountability Concerns

The staff report explicitly flags that this is “the first cooperative housing application to the VHRF.” This is presented as an innovative milestone rather than a cause for heightened scrutiny. Any time a city uses public money through an entirely new mechanism for the first time, the appropriate response is more rigorous analysis, not less. The report contains no comparable projects, no analysis of co-op failure rates nationally, and no stress-test of what happens if the federal funding does not materialise.

The VHRF application was submitted in September 2025, before even a conditional purchase agreement, but the Committee of the Whole report was not delivered until April 2026. The gap is explicitly attributed to the applicant needing time to confirm federal funding and affordability details, raising the question of whether the city’s approval process was effectively held hostage to a federal application process over which the City has no oversight.

Council approved the grant unanimously at the April 16, 2026 meeting. Councillor Caradonna noted that the city had approved 1,727 units of affordable housing this term and requested future housing progress reports include co-op data, framing the decision positively. No recorded opposition or substantive questioning of the developer relationship, the Society’s new-entity status, or the total public subsidy architecture appears in available reporting.

Letters to the editor published in the Times Colonist shortly after the vote reflect a different civic mood. One April 28, 2026 letter was headlined “Co-op housing a bad deal.” Public commentary described the transaction as a bailout of a failed private development.

Closing Analysis

The 611 Speed Avenue co-op housing transaction shows how the language of “affordable housing” can obscure a very different reality: a failed condo project, rescued by two newly created non-profits tied to a housing consultancy, and underwritten by more than $100 million in public financing that Council approved unanimously without disclosing the purchase price or seriously probing institutional capacity or downside risk.

The 60-year covenant and the co-op model are genuine public goods, and co-ops have a strong record of stability and affordability. The real question is whether this deal, on these terms, with these organisations, backed by this volume of public money received the level of scrutiny the public is entitled to expect before it was waved through. On the available evidence, it did not.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He believes Victoria’s future depends on rebuilding confidence that City Hall decisions are being made openly, lawfully, and in the broader public interest.

On Thursday, April 2, 2026, during a Committee of the Whole meeting, Council debated a Member Motion brought forward by Councillors Matt Dell and Krista Loughton authorising a one-time grant of $175,000 to the Victoria Curling Club for the replacement of its ice-making plant, with funds to be drawn from the 2026 Contingency Budget.

What followed was a debate that perfectly exposed the growing gap between the city’s published grant policies and the ad-hoc, discretionary spending of this Council.

One must begin by saying that the Victoria Curling Club is a genuine community asset. Over seventy years old, it gets seniors out of the house and runs a youth program, but its aging ice plant had become a legitimate safety and operational problem. Replacing it was necessary. This is not an attack on the Club or the sport. It is, however, a serious critique of how Victoria City Council manages public tax dollars and bypasses its own rules when it suits them.

Before we even get to the grant, it’s worth understanding what the city already provides the Club. The Curling Club operates on city-owned land under a lease with a rent of one dollar per year, a “peppercorn lease” in legal terms, first agreed in 1950. During the debate, Councillor Coleman raised the question of what that arrangement costs taxpayers, suggesting the foregone market rent could be as much as $20,000 per month. If that figure is in the right range, the city is already subsidising the Club to the tune of roughly $240,000 annually. That context was largely absent from the debate, and it matters. The case for a $175,000 gift looks different when the recipient is already receiving what amounts to a quarter-million dollars per year in indirect public support.

A news article on the Curl BC website dated November 28, 2024, titled “Victoria Curling Club, Road to Renewal,” states that the Club’s lease had lapsed approximately ten years before the 2023 renewal, meaning it had lapsed around 2013, and it took 18 months of negotiation to get a new one signed. The Club was operating on city land without a valid lease for roughly ten years. The new lease, signed May 2023, agreed to one and the same $1 per year rent. This was not something the Assistant Director of Strategic Real Estate, Kevin House, saw fit to mention during his lengthy question and answer session with Council.

But the $175,000 is not the end of it. The Club’s own engineers have assessed the full cost of necessary renovations at $10 million, with critical infrastructure representing half that figure. The ice plant is merely phase one. Next comes the refrigerated floor, leaking for years and requiring either full replacement or a new brine delivery system. After that, an elevator and full accessibility retrofit across a building with four floors and eight staircases. The Club has disclosed that it applied for over $2.7 million in grants in a single year. The $175,000 from Victoria taxpayers is one early instalment in what appears to be a sustained, multi-year campaign targeting public funding. None of this means the Club’s needs aren’t real. They are. But Council voted to treat this as a one-off act of community generosity while the Club’s own documents suggest something closer to a long-term funding relationship that Council has now formalised without any policy framework to govern it.

Sleight of Hand and the North Park Background

There was some sleight of hand involved. Read the background to the official motion, and you’ll find that this was never just an ice-plant grant. It was an improvised fix for a neighbourhood crisis the city helped create.

By tying the funding to North Park Neighbourhood Association access and explicitly framing the Club as a new home for the NPNA’s displaced food hamper program, the city let slip what this may have really been about, making small amends for the previous mistreatment of North Park.

For years, North Park has been ground zero for the city’s supportive housing and homelessness response. During the pandemic, the city permitted continuous sheltering in Central Park, the heart of the neighbourhood, which led to significant frustration and loss of green space. The city also placed the “Tiny Town” supportive housing shipping-container facility in North Park. Councillor Caradonna himself acknowledged that North Park has “been expected to shoulder much of the obligations of sheltering and supportive housing for the entire region.”

Despite bearing the brunt of these social services, North Park lacks a dedicated community centre. In a highly controversial move, the city purchased land on the 900-block of Pandora Avenue, the epicentre of the city’s unhoused crisis, with the promise of building a long-awaited community centre there. The NPNA strongly pushed back, arguing that the location was unsafe and entirely unsuitable for neighbourhood amenities like senior yoga or parent-and-tot groups.

With the impending demolition of United Commons, 932 Balmoral Road, formerly known as the First Metropolitan United Church, North Park would be left with almost nowhere to gather or run its services. The United Church of Canada, in partnership with Aryze Developments, is razing the existing community structures to make way for a brand new six-storey, mixed-use rental building. However, Aryze and the Church made no commitment to provide affordable, dedicated, or low-barrier space for the local non-profits and community groups that had relied on the old building.

Compounding the problem, the NPNA’s access to the Bosa Room at 1025 Mason Street, provided as a community amenity during the building’s original rezoning approval, was unilaterally reduced from four to five days weekly to once monthly by the private building management. Because the city does not own the room and only secured its use via a loosely worded amenity agreement, City Hall has very little leverage to force the private building management to restore the NPNA’s access. This loss of access, combined with the impending demolition of the United Commons, created the perfect storm that would leave North Park without any community space, forcing the city to use a $175,000 Curling Club grant as a desperate workaround.

Policy Bypassed

It is not as if the city had no framework for making grants in the first place. It maintains a suite of at least five separate, named grant programs, each with its own published policy and guidelines. If a neighbourhood association or arts non-profit wants $5,000, it navigates online portals, submits financial statements, undergoes staff technical review, and competes against other applicants for limited funds. The system is designed to be fair and consistent. None of that happened here. When Council voted to give the Curling Club $175,000, there was no competitive application, no staff-led technical review, and no policy-driven grant stream. There was just a fast-tracked political motion.

Contingency Funds Misused

The money didn’t come from the recreation budget. It was pulled directly from the city’s Contingency Fund, a reserve that the Director of Finance and Deputy City Manager, Susanne Thompson, confirmed during debate was intended for “unforeseen events.” A 40-year-old ice plant reaching its end of life is not an unforeseen event. It is predictable capital depreciation. Councillor Stephen Hammond identified the real danger: using emergency reserves for capital upgrades to private facilities and the precedent it sets. Once the contingency fund becomes a backdoor grant program, budget discipline is gone.

Compromise Ignored

There was a better option on the table. Councillor Marg Gardiner proposed a simple amendment to convert the word “grant” to “loan.” That way the Club would still get its ice plant in time for the next season, and taxpayers would get their money back. Councillor Hammond noted the logic given the Club lacked collateral for conventional bank financing, making a city loan the obvious municipal tool for exactly this situation. The majority voted it down.

Policy Became Patronage

Why? Listen to the reasoning from those who opposed the loan. Councillor Matt Dell found it “just frankly morally wrong that we’re treating this as some sort of business loan proposition. This is a gift to a community centre.” Councillor Caradonna argued the city had a “moral obligation” to fund the Club because of its “unique relationship” with the organisation.

This is where the governance failure becomes impossible to ignore. Moral obligation is not a municipal policy. The city does not exist to distribute six-figure gifts from emergency reserves based on relationships Councillors happen to value. When elected officials allocate public money through subjective sentiment rather than published criteria, it stops resembling governance.

Councillor Kim, while voting to approve the bailout, openly lamented that the city was forced into a “clumsy” solution, explicitly blaming Ottawa for the Curling Club’s shortfall and expressing frustration at being “pigeonholed into filling that gap in as clumsy of a way as we’re doing right now.” But since when is the federal government responsible for replacing the ice plant at a private, municipal curling club? Blaming Ottawa is a convenient excuse for a Council that finds it hard to say no.

When a $175,000 taxpayer grant is justified as a “moral obligation,” the city crosses the line from policy into patronage. Without clear, consistent published criteria, how does any other organisation know whether it qualifies? What other worthy organisations are being denied funding simply because they haven’t caught the personal attention of Councillors Dell and Loughton? Good governance is about applying consistent, transparent rules across the board, not substituting a Council’s moral compass for fiscal discipline and clear policy.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He believes residents should never need a freedom-of-information request to understand how their money is being spent or why major decisions are being made.

Hermann’s Jazz Club closed April 30. The City of Victoria spent nearly $4 million to prevent exactly that. Victorians deserve to know how this happened.

The Red Flags Were Visible Before the City Spent a Single Dollar

The city purchased the building on March 18, 2024. Just six days earlier, on March 12, the Times Colonist had already reported that Arts on View was in serious financial distress. Executive director Clay Barber told the paper that despite sold-out shows at Hermann’s Upstairs, “revenue continues to be a challenge,” and that attendance at Hermann’s Jazz Club had still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels, with sales at the jazz club less than two-thirds of what they were before COVID. He described closing Hermann’s Upstairs as a “drastic step.” This was public information, reported locally, days before Council signed the cheque.

The City’s Due Diligence Claim Doesn’t Hold Up

When asked about the purchase, Deputy City Manager Thomas Soulliere offered only this to the Times Colonist: “We have been exploring that and completed our due diligence around what would be involved, and we were able to successfully negotiate a deal with the owners.” No elaboration on what due diligence meant, no mention of reviewing Arts on View’s books, no discussion of the Society’s financial trajectory.

He would not be drawn into offering an opinion on how residents might react, saying only that the purchase “aligns with the existing strategic priorities, which Council has endorsed.” He was not asked about the tenant. He answered a question nobody posed.

Due Diligence Meant Evaluating the Building, Not the Tenant

The Society’s own history shows an organisation that had never managed to get onto a stable financial footing. The Arts on View Society attempted a private purchase of the building back in 2017, raising $100,000, far short of the $3 million asking price at the time. They had been living on a five-year lease since 2019, and even then, the Society’s executive director knew their lease could only protect the historic performance spaces for so long. The City apparently never asked why.

The Timing Makes It Worse, Not Better

The city didn’t swoop in to rescue a healthy organisation facing an external threat. It bought the building at the precise moment Arts on View was publicly collapsing. Barber told the Daily Hive the Society had begun asking for rent relief. A city that had done genuine due diligence on the tenant would have seen an organisation actively seeking rent relief, with jazz club attendance still well below pre-pandemic levels, as a serious liability and not cause for a celebratory press release.

The Politicians Celebrated While the Warning Signs Flashed

Councillor Dell declared on social media that “the potential for arts, city revenue and eventual land assembly are huge,” and that the purchase “will generate both tourism and direct revenue for the city.”

Mayor Alto said in a press release: “This purchase demonstrates Council’s commitment to preserving and investing in music spaces downtown as reflected in our 2023-2026 Strategic Plan. This venue’s importance was also identified during development of the Victoria Music Strategy, and I hope it will continue to contribute to Victoria’s vibrant arts and culture scene for years to come.”

Neither Dell nor Alto appears to have publicly reckoned with the fact that the organisation they were entrusting to run the venue had just described its own situation as requiring drastic steps to survive.

What Council Owes Taxpayers

The city now owns a piece of downtown real estate, so the asset itself is not lost. But the policy goal, the reason this purchase was sold to Victorians, failed completely, and it failed in a way that a more thorough process could have caught.

The warning signs were not buried in financial statements. They were in the newspaper the same week the deal closed. Council owes taxpayers a clear accounting of what due diligence took place, what they knew about Arts on View’s finances before the cheque was signed, and why a Society actively seeking rent relief and describing its own situation as dire was considered a sound basis for a nearly $4 million public investment.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He believes residents should never need a freedom-of-information request to understand how their money is being spent or why major decisions are being made.

I received a message after posting on the impending closure of Hermann’s Jazz Club from a local musician who has played there in the past and even has a scheduled gig coming up. While he lamented the loss of another venue he did not shy away from pointing out some of Hermann’s and the Arts on View Society’s shortcomings. The message prompted me to take another look at the issue, and this time offer some prescriptions for what the city might have done differently.

First of all, when the city announced they had completed their due diligence for this acquisition, they clearly missed the big picture. In a policy-driven purchase like this, inspecting the roof and plumbing is only half the job. True due diligence required a hard look at the Arts on View Society’s financial trajectory, which was publicly described as dire just days before the deal closed. When acting as a white knight, the municipality had to ensure the organisation it intended to rescue had a viable engine, rather than simply buying them a taxpayer-funded garage.

Secondly, pouring $4 million into a single piece of real estate is a remarkably high-risk, low-reach approach to cultural preservation. To genuinely safeguard our arts venues, City Hall needs to deploy regulatory and operational levers that bypass these huge capital outlays entirely. For example, targeted multi-year grants could have served as an operating stabiliser while the society restructured its post-pandemic business model. Implementing permissive tax exemptions for non-profit arts spaces would have provided immediate rent relief without burdening the city with the heavy liabilities of property ownership. Finally, cost-effective zoning protections specifically designed for music venues could have shielded such a vital space from any attendant market speculation.

Mayor Alto and Council repeatedly justified this purchase by pointing to their 2023-2026 Strategic Plan. However, a profound gap exists between investing in music spaces and subsidising a building for a tenant already in a state of public collapse. The city managed to acquire a piece of downtown real estate but still lost the very jazz club it claimed to be saving. Victoria needs a local government that recognises arts preservation as an operational challenge rather than a simple real estate transaction. And Victorians still deserve a fuller explanation of why an organisation actively begging for rent relief was deemed a sound basis for a $4 million investment.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He has argued that public confidence is rebuilt when governments explain not only what they intend to do, but how they will pay for it, implement it, and measure success.

Colliers International is currently marketing a development site in James Bay under the name One Point. Here are six points in reply.

The marketing materials for One Point perform a revealing sleight of hand. Page after page celebrates James Bay as one of Victoria’s “most walkable and bikeable neighbourhoods.” It’s an historic, human-scaled “bedroom community” surrounded by water, filled with local shops, Fisherman’s Wharf, Beacon Hill Park, and a beloved streetscape of Victorian-era homes. The brochure photographs are practically pastoral. Then the proposal arrives. It holds out two six-storey residential blocks totalling 123,624 gross square feet on less than a one-acre site with no commercial uses at grade and no community facilities.

The central irony is plain. The very qualities being marketed as the site’s appeal are precisely what the proposed development would erode.

Height and the Official Community Plan

The planning overview section makes a curious move. It notes that the OCP’s Legislative District designation supports high-rise development and characterises a “proposed 14-storey development” as a “strong fit within this framework.” It then pivots to a six-storey proposal. Read charitably, this is contextual framing about the broader district. Read less charitably, it is teeing up a future upzoning argument, signalling to buyers that latent density entitlement exists beyond what is currently proposed. A sophisticated purchaser would read it as an option, not a ceiling.

The Legislative District designation is primarily associated with the BC Legislature precinct and the Inner Harbour gateway. Applying its high-rise framing to a residential street corner in James Bay stretches that designation’s intent considerably. The OCP language about high-rise development being appropriate “where thoughtfully designed and appropriately sited” is doing a great deal of work here, and the brochure presents it as settled rather than contested planning ground.

Scale, Massing, and the Missing Ground Floor

One of the cardinal lessons of post-war urban renewal, learned the hard way, is that large residential buildings which sit inert at street level destroy the conditions that make urban neighbourhoods liveable. One Point reproduces this error almost by design. The brochure explicitly warns: “No daycare or commercial units are proposed as part of the development.”

In a neighbourhood where street-level activation is both the primary amenity and a fragile social good, a fully residential ground floor represents a significant planning concession that the proposal does not justify. A three-street confluence of this scale is exactly the kind of site where a corner café, a small grocer, or community space at grade could contribute to the neighbourhood rather than merely extract rent from it.

The 51% site coverage at six storeys also means this is a wide, ground-hugging block rather than a slender tower. In low-rise residential streets, this massing casts long shadows and creates hard street edges.

Subdivision, Phasing, and the Long Game

The brochure repeatedly emphasises that the concept has been “thoughtfully designed for potential subdivision and phasing.” This is presented as flexibility and prudence. It deserves a second look.

Subdivision means Building A (137 units) and Building B (59 units) could be sold and developed by different owners on separate parcels. This is not inherently problematic, but it does raise questions about long-term design coherence, shared infrastructure obligations, and the risk that one phase proceeds while the other stalls, leaving an incomplete development on a prominent corner site for an indeterminate period.

Parking and the Public Realm

The proposal provides 82 vehicle stalls underground and 267 bicycle stalls. The bicycle provision is commendable given the neighbourhood’s 87 bike score. Underground parking is also the right solution. But 82 car stalls for 196 units is still a meaningful traffic generator, and the materials make no mention of traffic impact assessment, pedestrian realm improvements, or how the three generous street frontages will be treated at grade. Street trees, cycling infrastructure, permeable surfaces, and seating are not mentioned. A site with this much frontage has an unusual opportunity to contribute to the public realm, but the proposal does not appear to take it.

Unit Mix

The mix of 35 studios, 113 one-bedrooms, and 48 two-bedrooms skews heavily small. Only 24% of units have two bedrooms; there are no three-bedroom units. This is a market-driven choice, but it limits the project’s contribution to family housing in an already constrained Victoria market and raises questions about what kind of community this development is intended to serve.

One Genuine Credit is It’s a Parking Lot

The strongest argument in the project’s favour, and the one the brochure wisely leads with in its aerial photography, is that the current use is a surface parking lot. This is, by almost any urban planning framework, among the least productive uses of land in a dense, desirable neighbourhood. Redevelopment here is conversion from dead asphalt to housing. That matters. Victoria faces a genuine housing shortage, and this site can make a meaningful contribution to supply.

The question is not whether to build but what to build and how. A design that earns its place in the streetscape with active ground-floor uses, genuine family housing, a thoughtful treatment of three significant street frontages, and a massing strategy that respects the neighbourhood’s scale would be both a better project and a more defensible one through the approvals process.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He argues that public trust is not restored through slogans or branding exercises, but through transparent processes, enforceable standards, and measurable accountability.