Serving Kelowna's Diverse Housing Needs

Housing forms the basis of our neighbourhoods and plays an important role in building healthy, inclusive and sustainable communities. It can provide a sense of identity, belonging and social support, and is the foundation on which we build our lives, families and city.

Everyone deserves access to affordable safe and adequate affordable housing. It is why affordable housing is one of six Kelowna City Council priorities aimed at increasing quality of life and delivering on our community vision of a vibrant, inclusive community for all.

Affordable housing impacts everyone

When there is a shortage of affordable housing, it becomes harder to attract new residents, including middle-income earners. As a result, businesses may find it difficult to find staff. Imagine having a shortage of nurses, teachers, labourers, and other professionals to provide the services a fast-growing city needs, or your favourite restaurant only being able to offer take-out due to a lack of serving staff.

When everyone has a home, we will all thrive. We will attract talent and investment, welcome economic growth, and more opportunities to encourage sustainable and energy-efficient development. There are many benefits but, most importantly, as improved affordability cascades through the various housing types, we will see improved stability for our most vulnerable residents, reducing the risk of homelessness and improving community functioning and wellness.

Achieving our housing goals

Today, housing in Kelowna includes a lot more variety than just single-family homes and condominiums. We are starting to see a larger variety of housing options including record breaking purpose-built rentals housing, as well as new forms of infill housing/missing middle housing designed to complement the form and character of our existing core neighborhoods. Affordable and diverse housing also includes non-market rentals for middle- and moderate-income earners, as well as subsidized and supportive housing for people with disabilities, or at risk of homelessness.

While there are many factors largely beyond the control of local government, we are doing everything within our scope to support our community’s housing needs. The City’s primary tools to influence housing affordability are development process and incentives.

By streamlining our permitting processes and pre-zoning our urban centres for more density, as well as the recent provincial changes that allow up to six units on a single-family lot, it is becoming much easier—and quicker—to develop all types of housing in Kelowna.

But there remains a huge need for more affordable and supportive housing to prevent people from being pushed out of the housing system. And we need more multi-level partnerships to get housing built more quickly.

Partnerships are key

To facilitate the construction of affordable housing, we partner with the provincial and federal governments, non-profits, and organizations such as Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and BC Housing.

The recent $31.5 million federal Housing Accelerator Fund grant we secured is a prime example of a partnership that will enable us to welcome higher density development along transit corridors, make city-owned lands available for affordable housing development in various types of partnership, and expand the use of technology to our permit processes. The grant will support the permitting of about 950 housing units over the next three years and make way for up to 20,000 more homes over the next decade.

We are also focused on creating innovative partnerships with the business community and working closely with home builders and the development industry to help increase the construction labour pool and develop ideas and improvements to build more housing faster.

Meeting our housing targets

Our Housing Needs Assessment, completed in September 2023, determined that our city will need up to 2,650 new homes (including subsidized, supportive and market rental) annually for the next 10 years.

Through the introduction of our new permitting tools and technology, Kelowna continues to have one of the most efficient building permitting processes in British Columbia. With a fourplex now taking just two to four weeks to permit (and the pending introduction of further fast-track measures), versus in other cities where it can take six months or more, we are well positioned to achieve our housing need targets.

Pursuing Progress

Our housing shortage is not a challenge that is going to be solved overnight. It is going to take a lot of years of well-aligned efforts to get there. However, we are making progress, and I am confident we can meet the future housing needs for our growing and diverse population.

I encourage you to visit the 2023 Progress Report on the 2022–2026 Council Priorities to learn about some of the key actions we have taken to continue advancing this and other community priorities in Kelowna. It is part of our commitment to measuring our performance and key to ensuring we are achieving our desired results.

For more information, visit council.reporting.kelowna.ca.