How city councillors reacted to Yellowknife’s draft community plan

A draft plan that creates a 1,000-unit Yellowknife neighbourhood north of Frame Lake, introduces a new housing policy and makes other big changes had its first examination from council on Wednesday.

The plan is not final. This is the first draft and it’s now council’s job to scrutinize the details and decide if this plan meets the moment.

City staff are hoping for a final decision this summer.

We covered the basics last weekend, just after the draft plan was published. Alongside developing the green space north and west of Frame Lake, the plan would:

• encourage infill in Yellowknife’s downtown, across existing neighbourhoods and along the Old Airport Road corridor;
• create a new policy setting housing targets;
• make temporary worker accommodation easier to create;
• create a new “highway commercial” area between the dump and Old Airport Road; and
• stop most development in or near the Con Mine area to avoid problems if it’s turned back into a gold mine later.

As it stands, the plan is how city staff see the future – without council having had a say. That’ll change over a series of meetings in the coming weeks, with the first one taking place on Wednesday.

Charlsey White, the city’s planning director, told Cabin Radio her staff viewed the draft as doing two primary things.

First, she said, the plan must make sure that “the Yellowknife we have today is still here in 25 years when this plan ends.”

Second, she continued, the plan has to accommodate Yellowknife’s expected growth with massive military spending and possible big infrastructure projects on the way.

“Everywhere else in Canada may be talking about economic decline. We’re growing. We know it’s coming,” she said. “So how do we plan for that?”

Here’s how councillors reacted to four key aspects of the plan presented to them on Wednesday.

Frame Lake

Turning the green space north of Frame Lake into a new neighbourhood is one of the most profound changes contained in the plan.

There was little immediate pushback to that approach on Wednesday, and Frame Lake wasn’t a focal point as council questioned staff.

However, a few broad concerns were raised around how the draft plan and the city’s environmental objectives will interact. A briefing on April 22 is expected to deal with environmental issues in more detail, and the Frame Lake proposal could return to the table then.

Cat McGurk did express a concern that a proposed 15-metre buffer zone – designed to keep the Frame Lake Trail intact – was not sufficient to fully protect the trail.

City staff said the actual steps needed to protect the trail depend to some degree on how the land transfer from the NWT government looks. (Most land within the municipal boundary needs to be moved from GNWT to city control before development can happen.) Exactly how the trail will be handled has not been finalized, and it could involve minor rerouting for some portions.

In the draft plan, the city says it will ensure that as new development occurs north of Frame Lake, “the community retains its signature access to the beauty, solitude and peace of nature.”

Tom McLennan called that assertion “a bit much,” pointing out the area is under the flight path for Yellowknife Airport.

“If we’re having fighter planes 500 feet above these houses, it’s not exactly solitude and peace of nature. So I think [we should] change our language there a little bit,” he observed.

Making a more general point about development and the environment, city manager Stephen Van Dine said one approach could be to leave areas untouched so they are “accessible only to those individuals determined to do the blood, sweat, tears and bushwhacking.”

But, Van Dine said, another approach was to open up some areas “with thoughtful design, thoughtful consideration, thoughtful setbacks and thoughtful enhancements and improvements.”

White told Cabin Radio Frame Lake had been chosen for a new neighbourhood because it makes the most sense in terms of water and sewer provision.

The city doesn’t want to add on more trucked services, which are expensive, so it’s prioritizing building where pipes can be readily extended. It also has a medium-term goal of getting pipes out to the airport, which is currently on trucked water.

Creating a Frame Lake neighbourhood in between Niven Lake and Old Airport Road allows the city to check those boxes, White said.

“It’s responsible planning,” she said. “I know not everybody wants to do greenfield development but, if we do, let’s try to do it the best way that we can.”

More single-family homes

The housing policy contained within the draft community plan sets out what kinds of housing will be encouraged to add 2,000 units over the next 25 years.

For example, a target is set that states 600 of those units should be single-family detached homes. Another 600 should be so-called “missing middle” housing, a housing size between large apartment complexes and single-family homes. Two hundred should be “affordable and non-market.”

McGurk said the city should be curbing the number of single-family detached homes that are built, “as much as people want those things.”

“I know they’re nice, but they’re selfish,” McGurk said.

The city’s current community plan relies heavily on infill – creating housing in gaps within existing neighbourhoods – rather than new neighbourhoods and more single-family homes. The draft plan represents a shift in thinking.

“All of the land that we have for infill isn’t enough [and] not everybody’s in love with infill,” White acknowledged to Cabin Radio after Wednesday’s meeting.

“So what is the other piece we can offer and then where do we put it so we can make sure it’s responsible development?

“We are growing, and that’s just the reality we have to deal with.”

Enabling nimbyism?

Other councillors had broader concerns about whether having this kind of housing policy baked into the community plan – which hasn’t happened before – might do more harm than good.

McLennan said he wasn’t sure of “the downstream impacts of including four pages of criteria in the community plan” for housing. Overall, he said, the plan felt “a little bit too prescriptive” in places.

Rob Warburton outlined why, in his view, having that level of detail in the plan’s housing policy was inviting trouble.

“I’m very nervous about having this big housing policy in this document,” he said, calling it a “can of worms” containing so many criteria that it could be readily utilized by people to challenge any development they don’t want built beside them.

Warburton and Steve Payne also queried the affordable housing targets contained in the plan.

The draft plan has a goal of 17 percent of all new housing being affordable. Documents accompanying the plan suggest the city views affordable homes as being targeted at households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 a year.

Warburton worried the affordability requirements placed on developers, alongside other criteria, could ultimately become “a housing killer” rather than an enabler.

“We are going to be hard-pressed to see housing built in this city” in the first place given current costs, he said, adding he was “seeing layers and layers of little incremental things that add up to a big barrier to doing stuff.”

The city doesn’t see it quite the same way. City staff argue their overarching approach is “reducing barriers by reducing the number of permits, which then reduces the amount of time people have to spend on applications.”

Schools and daycares

Creating a neighbourhood and adding 2,000 units means the city is expecting growth.

The most recent forecast estimated Yellowknife’s population could reach 26,659 by 2051 at the upper end. That was before the Department of National Defence started announcing billions in northern military spending. (Van Dine said those recent announcements had made the need for a new community plan even more urgent.)

Councillors on Wednesday wanted to know how schools and daycares would be made available for the thousands of new residents the plan predicts.

In terms of schools, planning boss White told Rob Foote meetings were being held with other authorities like education bodies about that kind of detail. The community plan, Van Dine said, is a high-level document that doesn’t get into the planning of individual schools.

The city doesn’t make decisions about creating new schools, White added, but education bodies do. “We make the space for them to make those decisions,” she said.

Multiple councillors picked at the draft plan’s provisions for daycares, including the criteria given to developers that set out when a development must account for daycare space.

“Right now, there is more than a 500-person waitlist in Yellowknife,” said Ryan Fequet, who has experience as a daycare board member. “We need to do more to make sure there are more daycares.”

Other items of note

Mayor Ben Hendriksen was extremely keen for residents to understand that the plan is a draft and council is seeing it for the first time.

“Council is having our first bite at this today. We want to hear from residents,” he said, noting the process ahead lasts for months. It also includes a public hearing.

“We’ll be getting into the weeds over the next several weeks,” he promised.

More: Read the draft plan in full

City staff suggested the draft plan is earmarking areas for Indigenous governments to help develop as land claims are settled.

For example, White said the new “highway commercial” area overlaps tracts of land withdrawn as part of the land claims process.

“This is an economic development opportunity for [Akaitcho First Nations] that we’re predesignating so they wouldn’t have to come in afterward to do a community plan amendment,” she said.

White offered a similar explanation for the draft plan’s proposal that “Indigenous-led” housing be built as part of the new Frame Lake neighbourhood.

“We’re talking about collaboration and partnerships where we are going to be developing areas that will benefit adjacent rights holders,” she said.

“We’re trying to make the space because we’ve heard through our consultation that there is work we as the city can do to have more opportunities available.”

Hendriksen queried city staff about Tin Can Hill’s status in the draft plan, noting that while some residents have called for it to be protected, the green space remains open to development according to the plan’s wording.

“There is the potential for other uses in that area but there’s no active consideration of any applications at this particular point in time,” Van Dine responded.

White added the city was “making sure we are keeping all of our options available.”

Lastly, the Con Mine area – dubbed “Mineral Extraction” in the draft plan – was briefly discussed.

The Mineral Extraction area is off-limits to most new development under the draft plan. While most of the region is the former Con Mine, which exploration firm Gold Terra is trying to turn into a new mine, the area also includes a few streets of homes.

Those homes may yet be given a different designation, White said, to make sure the city demonstrates that it knows the homes are there and “we know they’re not going anywhere.”