Employers in Kingston are adopting a wait-and-see approach to any potential change to the city’s Official Plan intended to allow businesses to offer short-term housing for workers.
The goal of the policy change, first mentioned publicly in January, is to help employers experiencing recruitment and retention difficulties to temporarily house employees. The problem is particularly acute in Kingston, which has some of the lowest rental vacancy rates in Canada.
The specific change proposed is to add “workforce and institutional housing” as a type of housing allowable under the city’s soon-to-be-updated Official Plan.
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The change is being driven both by Kingston’s successful federal Housing Accelerator application and by several large employers who approached the city asking for the help.
One employer who supports the change is Anchor Concrete, a Kingston-based precast concrete manufacturer that is interested both in offering housing to its workers and in building this housing for others.
“This idea came from our experience with out-of-town employees who we hired during the COVID lockdowns, some of whom were sleeping in their cars,” said owner Jeff Bradfield. “We’re envisioning eight 400-square-foot units built atop garages and using our Lodestar modular building system.”
Other local employers contacted by EOBJ about the policy change declined to comment.
Following several months of internal discussion and external consultation, city planning staff are preparing an Official Plan presentation for the city’s planning committee in the spring or early summer. That presentation will kick off consultations on the policy change with the business community, alongside broader Official Plan consultations with the wider public, culminating in a vote on the changes by full council some time in 2025.
If the new plan is adopted, an employer would still be required to go through rezoning and site control processes for an existing property before building the housing, which would likely add more than another year to the timeline, depending on the size of the development.
Navigating some of the rezoning and other planning issues will require a strong and supportive policy framework, noted local planner Youko Leclerc-Desjardins with Fotenn Planning + Design.
“As with any policy change, we won’t really know where the difficulties lie until we’re implementing it,” he said. “As long as we have a mayor and council and staff that are prioritizing the creation of housing and meeting those needs, we’ll be in a good place to respond and make any adjustments in the future.”
A number of questions would need to be answered before implementation, likely during business consultations this summer. For example, whether an employer based in a neighbouring municipality would be able to build and manage housing for its workers within the City of Kingston’s limits. Also, how the city would secure the housing to ensure it is only used for workers, and how businesses would navigate potential issues under the Landlord and Tenant Act.
The city is already proposing to remove the “workforce and institutional housing” zoning should an employer sell the land associated with the housing and would also require third-party management of the housing.
“These Official Plan changes are a long-term project and we want to make sure we do it right,” said Tim Park, director of planning services for the city. “Employer-provided housing is not a new concept. Our challenge is, how do we make it work in today’s world?”
