City Receives over $10.4 Million from Housing Accelerator Fund

The City has been allocated over $10.4 million in federal funding through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Housing Accelerator Fund to stimulate housing growth.

The CMHC’s Housing Accelerator Fund is helping increase housing supply by removing barriers. For municipalities like ours, funding contributes to housing solutions such as capacity-building, updating development regulations to promote densification and improving internal processes and policies that accelerate the development of diverse housing types throughout St. John’s.

The City’s action plan includes various new incentives and process improvements which are outlined below.

Incentives & Grants

Funding will support the development of incentive and grant programs for various types of development, including:

• Purpose Built Rentals: Our plan is to create incentives for PBRs such as development fee reductions or exemptions and prioritization of applications. This initiative will target key priority areas the City needs to see densification.
• Mixed-income multi-unit developments: we want to promote mixed income multi-unit housing by providing tax exemptions to the affordable units included in a development. Doing this will require modernization of our tax legislation, so we look forward to working with the province to enable this.
• Grant program for Subsidiary Dwelling Units (SDUs), Backyard Suites and Tiny Homes: This program would incentivize the development of SDUs, as well as newer housing forms like tiny homes and backyard suites, with a grant. This program will provide an opportunity to align with the Province’s recently announced grant for secondary units in order to further support residents in building the kinds of housing we need in the capital City.

City-Owned Land 

The City will develop a land disposition program to identify City-owned land, prepare for development, and make available to non-profit housing providers through a scheduled expression of interest process.

Improved Internal Processes

The City will take a number of steps to improve its internal processes in an effort to break down barriers for developers and speed up development. These include:

• E-permitting: The City will implement an e-permitting system to improve processing times for digital permit assessments, approvals, and fee payments.
• Pre-Approved Design Concepts: The City will also accelerate recently introduced housing types, such as tiny homes and backyard suites by providing pre-approved design concepts that meet our standards. This initiative will build local capacity and predictability in the housing sector, which will be particularly beneficial to emerging non-profit and small-scale housing developers.

Update Regulations

The City will propose various amendments to its Development Regulations to increase opportunities for densification across the City. This includes adding backyard suites as a permitted use in residential zones, increasing “as-of-right” development approvals for a larger variety of housing types, and permitting apartment buildings in more zones. 

Advocate for Clear Legislation

The City will work with the province in seeking clear language around community benefits and Inclusionary Zoning related to rezoning applications in the Urban and Rural Planning Act. This aims to strengthen the City’s ability to negotiate with developers around including desired housing types in rezoning/development applications.

Timelines

The City will receive funding over the next three years to implement its action plan. Work is already started on many of these initiatives, such as development regulation changes.

Naturally, items that require legislative change, such as the Mixed-income multi-unit developments incentives, will take longer. However, other incentive and grants programs will become operational within the next year.

The e-permitting will take approximately 2.5 years to implement.

Read CMHC’s News Release