Sunday August 25, 2024 | LANGFORD, BC [Updated August 26, 2024]
by Mary P Brooke | Island Social Trends
Langford is already known as a city with robust population growth. This year the City of Langford is undertaking a significant refresh of their Official Community Plan (OCP).
They say that the population will double to about 100,000 over the next 25 years.
Homes have been developed in many parts of town, including Westhills and Kettle Creek areas where the construction of 1,000 homes has been surpassed, as well as in the Bear Mountain area. There has been densification in the Happy Valley and Luxton areas as well as in the downtown core.
To be ready for the population surge that is already underway, several strategic plans are underway in order to inform and update the OCP.
Public input:
Public input is an important part of undertaking the massive changes that Langford will see soon and over the coming decades. When people have their say it’s less likely to incur pushback, resistance or complaint.
Pop-up information booths have been held around town this summer.
Another Community Fun Day with OCP and strategic plan information will be held on Wednesday August 28 in the Happy Valley area — at Happy Valley Elementary, 3291 Happy Valley Road, from 2 to 7 pm. They are hoping for good weather this week, compared to last week’s rainy days.
Online survey to September 15:
Available online 24/7 is a public survey where residents can offer their ideas and indicate their preferences for how Langford should grow toward 2050.
As Langford Mayor Scott Goodmanson said at the last Community Fun Day on July 18 on the grounds of Ruth King Elementary, change is happening and that informing the directions of change is what the city hopes to do well.
The OCP survey is available through Let’s Chat Langford online. Participants need to be registered with the Let’s Chat Langford online portal, or can sign up if not already registered.
While the survey intro says it will take about 10 minutes, realistically if you have something new or detailed to say it could take up to an hour. That includes reading any background material that you may not already be familiar with.
About the OCP:
“The existing OCP has a lot of strong and important policies that remain relevant, and we don’t need to start over,” says the City of Langford OCP information portal.
“But we have the opportunity to clarify, adjust, strengthen, and even rethink some key aspects of our city-building to better address our big challenges and opportunities. We want the new OCP to represent a turning point for the city in many important ways,” the survey intro says.
“Langford’s current OCP was created in 2008, and a lot has changed and become more clear since then!”
The city says they need to “rethink and reposition the OCP for the future and a projected population of 100,000 people”.
There is a strong emphasis on building neighbhourhoods and a sense of belonging based in large part on providing suitable and sufficient housing, transportation, services and ameinties.
A direction of the new council:
Building a whole new plan can take years. By updating the original, the city feels it can improve a quality plan while making efficient use of public resources and time so we can start seeing the benefits much sooner.
Right from the start, this has been the view of the new council that was elected in 2022: Scott Goodmanson, Mayor; and city councillors Kimberley Guiry, Colby Harder, Mark Morley, Lillian Szpak, Mary Wagner, and Keith Yacucha.
The “refreshed” OCP aims to strategically meet the needs and opportunities of 100,000 people while addressing the big challenges of affordability, housing, sustainability, climate change, equity, urban health, infrastructure costs, better transportation, and more.
Crises were introduced last year:
At a public meeting held at the Belmont Secondary School in Langford in May 2023, the City of Langford’s hired urban planning consultant Brent Toderian introduced the idea of urban challenges as ‘crises’ — claiming that if it’s called a crisis then people will react more readily to find solutions. That was followed by another public meeting in January 2024 at the Langford Legion.
However there is the danger of referring to a crisis over a long period of time. A crisis requires immediate action, where a long-term challenge accept input and adjustment over time.
Big ideas:
Emerging from a need to address the crises, Langford is working with eight ‘big ideas’:
- Planning for the Five Crises
- Quality City Building
- Parks, People-Places and Urban Nature
- A New City Centre Policy
- Measuring Success
- Transportation and Mobility
- Centres, Corridors and Complete Communities
- A ‘Made in Langford’ apprroach to ensure that we address the new Provincial housing legislation.
Policies will have wide scope:
“All policies of the OCP will address the challenges of climate change, housing and affordability, social equity, public health, and rising infrastructure costs,” it is stated in the OCP survey backgrounder.
The City’s current approach to growth management identifies three types of urban centres – Village, Neighborhood, and Mixed-Use.
The existing policy sends mixed messages around permissible density, and thus lacks clarity for both the community and applicants.
Further, there is no real difference established for density for the different scales of centres despite imagery that suggests such a difference exists.
Aiming for ‘complete communities’:
Planning for ‘complete communities’ provides many benefits by offering convenient non-auto access to local services and activities
that result in financial savings, health and environmental benefits, and local economic activity.
Obviously, there will always be the option to meet such needs outside one’s community, but we can provide choice and freedom by reducing car-dependency within communities, the city says.
The key to achieving a more Complete Community is to add more choices in housing and local, walkable services and amenities within
individual communities.
The City is considering new policies around housing choices (factoring in the new provincial legislated requirements), as well as new
policies that would enable more small corner convenience shopping/coffee shops/services within neighbourhoods.
The goal isn’t necessarily for every community to be totally complete, but rather for each community to have many more local,
walkable choices than currently exist as an alternative to needing the car for everything.
===== RELATED:
- Langford community fun day coming up Aug 28 in Happy Valley area (August 20, 2024)
- Alistair MacGregor attends Langford Community Fun Day (July 18, 2024)
- Langford Community Fun Day to launch master plan engagement (July 15, 2024)
- Langford Canada Day just simply fun (July 2, 2024)
- Opinion: Langford OCP refresh faces some challenges (January 26, 2024)
- Well-attended intro to Langford OCP refresh (January 24, 2024)
- Langford OCP refresh presentation Jan 23 (January 18, 2023)
- High-density transit-oriented housing development will have exceptions & municipal input (Dec 4, 2023)
- BC takes transformative action on housing in fall session (November 30, 2023)
- View Royal town hall: housing shortage, societal change, government overreach (November 24, 2023)
- Apply urgency to urban planning goals, consultant tells Langford (May 18, 2023)