Won't your development just mean more cars and less parking on our street?

This is a very common question for any development, as we’re putting more people with more visitors into the same amount of space.

However, across the country, more people are choosing to walk, cycle and take public transit to work instead of their cars. Recent Statistic Canada data shows that in the last two decades, the number of people taking their bikes to work rose nearly 90 % and the number of people taking transit rose by nearly 60 %. In addition, the data shows that Victoria has the largest percentage of people in the country who either walk or cycle to work.

Active transportation is the most sustainable and least expensive way to get around, and in our projects, we look for opportunities to encourage people to choose or continue to use more active and public transportation, like transit, cycling and car sharing.

This starts with building in areas that are walkable and well connected to bike lanes and public transit. And in means bringing in Modo car share vehicles, building good bike storage and even buying electric bikes for the new strata.

Why are you removing those trees? Doesn't your company care about the urban canopy?

Absolutely we care. Mature trees reduce pollution, provide habitats for animals and birds and help improve our mental health and quality of life. They also reduce storm water runoff, and can even help lower heating and cooling costs by creating shade and sheltering houses from wind.

This is one of the reasons why our company focuses on creating supply within well-established communities, rather than by building sprawling developments further out of the city centre that remove forests and farmlands.

In addition, wherever we can, we design our developments to preserve healthy, older trees as much as possible. At Five Two One Foster, we went through three different landscaping and construction designs to preserve three of the four mature trees on that lot.

Sometimes, however, keeping trees isn’t possible. But wherever we need to take trees down, we'll plant replacements -- often two or three more for each tree we remove.

A house you removed was in good condition. Why did you remove it?

For most of our projects, we look for houses that are nearing the end of their life, either because they haven't been properly maintained or the quality of the original building was poor.

But in some cases, we need to remove a house that is in okay condition to create more homes on the site. Ideally, we'd like to simply up and move the entire house to another part of the city. Moving a house, however, is very difficult and expensive, and it's very hard to find a company or person who wants it -- even though we'd happily give the house away for free.

Since a house move is usually out of the question, wherever possible, we'll look to reuse or donate materials from a house that's in good condition. Our ability to do this is often similarly challenging because of asbestos and other hazards that would have been used in the older building, as well as the current building codes that require builders to use only certain materials.

The alternative to creating more homes in an existing neighbourhood, and from time-to-time taking down a house that is in fair condition, is to expand our city into forested and farmland areas, changing those ecosystems and creating a greater reliance on car travel that creates more pollution. We prefer to densify.

By getting rid of older houses with affordable rents, aren't you contributing to rising prices?

This is another good question that stirs up quite a bit of debate in the housing community. To us, the answer is complex but by building more houses we are, in part and over time, helping to address some of the challenges.

People want to live in Victoria. Whether you’re here already or moving in from outside of the city, the close proximity to the ocean and the outdoors, the mild winter, and the great amenities makes it a great place to live.

My family, your family, your friend’s daughter in Gordon Head who is moving out of her parent’s house, as well as people moving here for work, school or retirement, all want a place to live. The existing and growing population creates competition in the marketplace. More competition means that without new homes, there are fewer houses to go around. And the lack of housing, whether new or old, puts pressure on prices, which means they rise and become more unaffordable.

The other side of the pressure is that many people see the rising prices in Victoria, the opportunities created by Airbnb, and our strong economy as a reason to buy up properties as investments. Much of this is rented out, but some is used for Airbnb and some is left empty, which leaves fewer homes, and more pressure on prices.

Both of these challenges need to be tackled: The first through building more; the second through smart, government policies.

We address the first part of the challenge by creating more housing for more people in the same amount of space. Yes, what we build can be more expensive initally, but by building more houses we’re reducing the number of people who don’t have a place to live, eliminating some of the pressure on the existing housing supply. We think with good and efficient municipal development processes that, over time, this will help reduce the pressure on prices.

We love this stuff and people’s ideas around it, so feel free to shoot us an email if you want to discuss.

Despite the building boom, rent and house prices keep rising, so is building more really helping?

Again, this is a great point on quite a complex issue and probably not an easy one for a short Q&A. But I'll give it a try!

For decades, we have been creating and enforcing policies through zoning regulations that protect neighbourhoods for single family homes on large pieces of land.

In the past, we had plenty of space to accomodate this type of housing. As population grew (and Victoria will always be an attractive place to live!), builders would simply build new homes in a matter of a few months in new neighbourhoods to accomodate the demand.

Over time, we have used up our land, and this puts more and more pressure on prices.

As land prices rise, multi-family housing becomes a more affordable housing style as people share the cost of land with each other. But this type of housing is much more challenging to build than single family housing. And long and complicated development processes mean a multi-family housing project in our core can take between 3-7 years to go through development and be built.

Even with the building boom, the policies in place today haven't allowed builders to be responsive enough to keep up with the growing demand.

Unless these processes change, it's unlikely we'll build enough housing to accomodate the population growth.

We, however, believe that Victoria is changing and wants to be inclusive. We believe that people are becoming more and more aware of these challenges and that municipalities will begin to adopt policies that support more homes for our current and future families.

What about now? What are you doing to create affordable housing?

Building costs are high and are on the rise. Land is expensive and it, too, is on the rise. While what we build is affordable to some, we know that housing is difficult to afford for many in our community.

Lapis Homes is committed to donate a significant portion of our profits from projects into affordable housing projects – ideally in the communities where we build.

From our project at Five Two One Foster, we donated $60,000 to a non-profit organization that will be building affordable seniors housing in Esquimalt. From our project at Lampson and Colville, we donated $10,000 to Habitat for Humanity for a future housing project.

As our company grows, we will invest more into affordable housing projects.