New CBS Municipal Plan could make for a very different looking town

By Craig Westcott

A public forum on Conception Bay South’s proposed new Town Plan last week attracted few people, but unveiled big changes that could well alter the suburban and rural feel that has long characterized the community.

The event was held at the Parsons Rotary Clubhouse in Seal Cove. Besides the two staff from Upland Planning and Design, the consulting firm hired to develop the plan, the meeting attracted four councillors, one property developer, four members of the Kelligrews Ecological Enhancement Program (KEEP), and yours truly, covering it for The Shoreline.

With such a small crowd, Uplands’ senior planner Ian Watson was able to field many questions and obliged with good humour as scepticism seemed to grow about some of the changes in the works.

Among the key changes is the Town’s intention to do an about face on its 50-year-old policy of trying to stamp out backlot development and the problems caused by it. It’s doing this by allowing subsidiary apartments and backyard suites to be built alongside or behind main dwellings on many properties. The so-called “backyard suites” will be limited in size to 80 square metres (that’s 861 square feet), and one per lot. There would also be a restriction on their height. But it may well mean a warren of new side houses and second driveways throughout CBS that could pose problems for firefighters and ambulance drivers answering emergency calls, and an undetermined impact on the town’s water and sewer infrastructure.

Another key change would be that the minimum lot sizes and frontages in new subdivisions and even infill developments will be smaller than they are now, and even new roads will be narrower.

The Town is also looking at removing the Residential Estate Zone, which required new houses in such zones to be done on what it is calling “oversized lots.” The removal will make it much easier for developers to build townhouses, duplexes and other multi-unit apartment houses on streets such as Cherry Lane, Fowlers Road, and Red Bridge Road where the lots are of a more traditional size. A resident could see his neighbour move out, the house torn down and replaced with a four or more-unit apartment building.

The Town is also looking at “pre-zoning” sections of land on Route 60, mostly in Foxtrap, “to encourage higher density residential development in key locations.”
Other changes include:

• permitting many home-based businesses in residential areas without having them apply for discretionary approval from council
• permitting more Airbnb and short-term rentals
• loosening the rules on traffic access to driveways to allow for more development of commercial properties.
• exempting home offices and home studios from regulation
• making most activities in the Main Street Commercial Zone running from Manuels to Long Pond allowable without council’s discretionary approval
• allowing more hobby farms on regular sized lots throughout CBS as part of an “urban agriculture” policy
• removing the tree planting requirement for new building lots
• requiring electric vehicle charging stations for multi-unit dwellings and some commercial developments
• requiring fewer parking spaces for strip malls and stores

Not surprisingly, the recommendations raised eyebrows. I reached down into the bottom of the tickle trunk of timeworn reporter guises – employing everything from my well-honed if ineffective skeptical voice to the occasionally used incredulous sounding and even haughty ones – to gauge how serious the planners are about proceeding with these changes, but nothing seemed to shake them. The Town’s planning department, and by extension one presumes, council, appears determined to change the way CBS is developed. Whether it will be for the better is debatable. Crowding more people onto smaller lots on narrower streets and into more multi-unit dwellings may ease some of the pressure for housing caused by a federal immigration policy that has grown out of hand (CBC reported last week less than one per cent of rentals across Canada are vacant or affordable) but it may also make CBS a less attractive place to live. The one big advantage CBS has over its neighbours Mount Pearl, Paradise and St. John’s is that there is room to breathe here. Bigger lots, longer lanes, leafier streets. It’s a nice place to live and raise a family. Why change it?

At the end of the session, I asked the councillors who attended the meeting if they felt confident the plan will make CBS a better place, or at least preserve the qualities that make it special.

All professed confidence that it will, and offered the supporting argument that many of the changes are being driven by the need to find smaller, affordable housing for the town’s seniors, many of whom would like to downsize and stay in CBS but have few options.

There’s a lot of logic and truth in that argument.

But mulling it over later, I realized there has already been a lot of “seniors housing” built in CBS in recent years, with more on the books. Much of it is good looking, practical stuff. I can’t see how any of it has been impeded by existing regulations.

There’s more to the changes being proposed for CBS, which are similar to ones being proposed for St. John’s and Mount Pearl and across Canada at the urging of the federal government, which has created this unprecedented housing crisis.

The Uplands planner pointed out that work on this plan started some years ago but was placed on hold during Covid. A lot has changed since then, principally an explosion in immigration, which has sparked the severe housing crisis, thrown thousands of Canada’s most vulnerable and desperate people onto the streets, spiked inflation and forced the Central Bank to boost interest rates, a motley mix that has made owning a home an impossible dream for a whole generation of young Canadians.

Like many councils across the country, CBS council is grappling with the repercussions of that. It has no control over the federal immigration policy. All it can do is react to the circumstances on the ground caused by it. The result in this case is a proposed Town Plan that could very well make CBS a much different place than the one many of us grew up in.

There will be some who will say this is an argument against immigration. It is not. It is an argument for a return to a more moderate and sensible immigration policy, one that allowed Canada and our communities to grow organically and at a pace we could contend with.

A more detailed version of the plan is available to view on the Town’s website. The consultants reckon that with the required regulatory and legislative changes required to make it law, it will be next fall before it’s adopted. That’s around the time of the next council election. The changes could make for some interesting campaign discussions on CBS doorsteps.