Newsletter July 16, 2022. Doesn’t this sound Familiar?
An Oak Bay Resident’s correspondence to Council at the Committee of the Whole meeting on October 18, 2021, explained his concern about the Secondary Suite Survey referenced in the consultant’s September 21, Final Secondary Suite Report. He was also concerned about the length of the staff and consultant reports that residents and Council members are expected to “wade” through.
He explained that the 232-page Final Secondary Suite Report was daunting for him and would have been for 99% of the other Oak Bay Residents. To remedy this, he provided Council with an earlier District- established solution however, like so many residents' easily implemented recommendations, it was never acted on.
It turns out the resident’s survey concerns are not limited to Oak Bay. A July 2022 Focus Magazine Article “Missing Middle – What’s Going ON?” explained that a Victoria Survey on this single-family densification subject, has also been severely criticized. In fact, for many of the same reasons expressed about Oak Bay’s Survey.
It seems as though either the methods used in the Victoria’s “Missing Middle” Survey copied Oak Bay’s methods or, used the same suspect survey formula.
Concerned Oak Bay Resident’s October 18, 2022 correspondence:
"I am briefly responding as a citizen to the agenda item of a final report on secondary suites appearing in the October 18 agenda for the Committee of the Whole. Last spring and summer I tried to follow the discussion and reports on the topic, and read a 90 parge report along with studying a survey and report back."
“I corresponded with you on September 13 but have never seen any response. In that letter I commented that the (Secondary Suite) survey was unregulated survey - meaning that anyone who wanted to could complete a survey and hand it in – no questions asked. You can have no assurance that the respondents were who they claimed to be. For example, what was to prevent a number of UVIC students, all hungry for a ‘pad’ while at university, to answer the questions in a way that gave a response quite different from property owners?
In my response I commented that IF you took the results at face value you would conclude that Oak Bay already had many more secondary suites than what has been suggested and perhaps even to exceed the target that some might be aiming for. You also received a commentary from a professional in statistics who concluded that the results indicated no consensus to many of the ideas. He suggested and I agree that the data desperately needs more analysis – a procedure routinely done on such surveys but apparently not called for here.
“As a council you deserve better, much better analysis of the information.”
Respectfully
Oak Bay Resident
Excerpts from the Focus Magazine “Missing Middle” Article (full Article Appendix #1)
It is easy to see why the Development, Real Estate and Investment Industries would be “interested” in a favorable Survey densification response because, as the Focus Magazine Article points out, this single-family neighbourhood densification plan will create thousands of units of new housing, and new real-estate products worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Oak Bay Watch Perspective
Similar survey methods were used in the April 2019 Secondary Suite Survey. It also drew similar resident criticism about the lack of respondent control. The Show-and-Tell Secondary Suite meeting (called an Open House) held on April 25, 2019 used unsigned “sticky notes”, many of which sounded like developer mantra, as “credible” resident responses. It might also be noted that the last pro-development Council’s “single-family densification initiative” was introduced very early in this Council term.
It seems Oak Bay has an ”aptitude” for flawed surveys: the highly criticized original Secondary Suite Survey in 2010 (even by most of Council); the highly criticized Official Community Plan Survey and recently, the Oak Bay Infill Survey reporting under the Oak Bay News headline “90 percent of Oak Bay residents want infill housing”.
While this may be true it is very, very misleading because it is only partly true. If you read the article the survey finding were clear, and the misleading headline should have read, “In Favour of Some Form of Infill Housing ”. Even then, residents were insisting on many qualifying requirements and conditions.
And there is the concern about the hundreds of pages of lengthy Council reports, also objected to by residents in the last two Council terms. This has been the standard practice. It has also not gone unnoticed that a number of these exceptionally lengthy reports have shown up at the end of long Council meeting agendas. They are often placed with a number of other complex agenda items that often include presentations and an hour or two of discussion - perhaps also designed to put residents to sleep?
It has also not been that uncommon for residents to have to wait for two or three hours for the Agenda item they are interested in.
It is not clear who sets the agendas but, it seems to us that as some Council meetings have only one or two items that “more care” should be taken to not only balance out Council agendas. Also, that residents should be given the same consideration afforded non-residents, whose agenda items are almost always dealt with much earlier in the Council meeting.
______________________________________
“Nothing is inevitable if you are paying attention” Oak Bay Watch
Oak Bay Watch is a volunteer community association and its members have a variety of professional backgrounds in both the public and private sector.
*******Please help us continue to provide you with information about Community concerns and Council decisions and actions. Oak Bay Watch members also help community groups with their specific development concerns. Donate to Oak Bay Watch - even $5 or $10 dollars provides expenses for door- to- door handouts and helps us maintain our website. Oak Bay Watch is committed to ensuring the Community gets the full range of information on budget, governance and all key development issues – a well-informed opinion cannot be made without this.
(Please use Donate Button at bottom of oakbaywatch.com Home Page)
Keep informed and sign up for our newsletter – bottom of Newsletter Menu Item.
Appendix #1
Excerpt On the Discord forum run by the 300-strong pro-development group Homes For Living, dgrypma posted the link and wrote, “Stephen Andrew is asking for feedback on missing middle—you know the drill”.
Missing Middle: What’s going on?
By Ross Crockford
Only a passionate few know the City of Victoria is about to approve three-story condos everywhere.
ON THE MORNING of Monday, July 4, Victoria councillor Stephen Andrew tweeted that he’d posted a survey on his mayoralty campaign webpage, asking followers what they thought of the City’s Missing Middle housing initiative, which would permit multi-unit, three-story condos in every area currently zoned for detached single-family houses. By early afternoon, the survey link was pinballing around the internet.
“Stephen Andrew is asking for feedback on the Missing Middle Initiative,” d_jackrabbit posted on Reddit’s r/VictoriaBC forum. “Pretty important as he is likely the deciding vote on if this passes or not on August 4. If you want townhouses and plexes legalized in our city please fill out the survey and let him know!” Ken Roueche, a critic of the initiative, bcc’d the link to 75 friends and neighbours, asking them to “Please consider responding to this poll.”
On the Discord forum run by the 300-strong pro-development group Homes For Living, dgrypma posted the link and wrote, “Stephen Andrew is asking for feedback on missing middle—you know the drill”.
One might dismiss this as nerdy chat in obscure corners of the internet, but the stakes are real, and huge. Missing Middle has the potential to provide thousands of units of new housing, create new real-estate product worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and transform Victoria’s lawn-and-garden neighbourhoods into walk-up residential districts like those of Montreal, or Copenhagen.
First introduced in November 2019, the City’s Missing Middle initiative gradually evolved through workshops and online surveys, until the complete details were finally presented this past May. It immediately divided Council, and advanced only via a series of 5-4 votes—with Andrew voting on May 26 to have the plan rewritten after more public input, then voting on June 9 to reconsider that motion—to where we are today. City staff will hold “information sessions” on the Missing Middle plan this Tuesday, July 12: you can register for the noon virtual session at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/missing-middle-housing-pre-public-hearing-information-session-tickets-372379445947, or attend in-person at City Hall between 3 and 7:30 p.m. Then its bylaws will go to a public hearing and final Council vote, likely on August 4.
“So many different comments have come to me through emails, phone calls, people stopping me on the street, that I wanted to clarify what the points of those individuals were, and this is helpful,” Andrew says of the survey, which collected nearly 500 responses in its first two days. “Also, there are questions that the City hasn’t asked, such as: Have we sufficiently educated, engaged, and consulted you? A lot of people say to me, ‘I didn’t hear about this,’ or ‘This is the first I’ve heard about it,’ which I find stunning, but OK. So I wanted to get a real feeling for what’s going on.”
If the Missing Middle plan was so named to put residents to sleep, it succeeded. Over the course of two years, only about 480 people participated in the 28 workshops, focus groups, “ask a planner” sessions, community-association meetings and advisory-panel discussions where the City described the plan. (The only real pushback seems to have come from the City’s Heritage Advisory Panel: “These are laudable goals, but one could see wholesale demolition in existing neighbourhoods,” said one member at a December 2020 meeting.) Instead, and partly because of COVID, the City got most of its feedback through online surveys.
The first survey, open for four weeks in the autumn of 2020 and conducted through the City’s Have Your Say platform (engage.victoria.ca), asked vague questions about housing priorities: of 191 respondents, 142 identified “create more housing choice so families and other households can stay in Victoria as their housing needs evolve” as a priority, while only 36 identified “maintain incentives for heritage conservation and re-use of existing character homes.”
Only 191 people took the City’s first Missing Middle survey in late 2020, but results gave City planning staff the green light to proceed.
Based partly on that result, Council voted 5-4 in July of 2021 to continue with the initiative. A second survey, open for six weeks that autumn, specifically asked which missing-middle housing types (houseplexes up to six units, corner townhouses, heritage-property infill) should be approved by City staff alone, without the time and cost burdens of public hearings and Council approval: of 810 respondents, only eight percent said “none.” (That option was last, with no graphic beside it.) City staff concluded this showed “strong support” for all the housing types, and the general plan.
A key question in the City’s second online survey sought approval for Missing Middle housing types. Only eight percent of respondents voted for “None,” at the bottom of the page.
But as it’s now becoming apparent, the trouble with such limited engagement is it gives little indication of what the general public knows or thinks about a subject. “Real surveys have random samples of populations, and a range of questions which should be neutral, to create a projectable sample. They have to look like the whole population. That is clearly what is not going on here,” says Ian McKinnon, a former president of Decima Research who’s also served in central agencies of federal and BC governments.
Instead, consultations that are open to anyone frequently get dominated by small groups that feel passionately about an issue. “My concern is often: How are people informed about it, and who responds?” McKinnon asks. “With almost all public consultations, those who are strongly motivated often use their networks to encourage participation by people who they know to have the same viewpoint as themselves.”
Online consultations can also get skewed by people giving multiple responses, McKinnon notes, or chiming in from other jurisdictions. (It happens: one eagle-eyed member of the Downtown Residents’ Association noted that during the runup to Council’s approval of the controversial Telus Ocean, 81 of 140 letters of support came from people associated with the project, including Telus employees from other parts of Canada.)
On Homes For Living’s forum, members and developers regularly urge each other to respond positively to surveys, consultations and hearings on projects across Greater Victoria, with little concern whether they live in the municipality or not. Is that appropriate? “I never know myself,” Phil MacKellar, an HFL spokeperson tells me; he lives in Fernwood, but recently filled out a survey to support infill housing in Oak Bay. “Because Victoria’s never amalgamated, it feels like I’m part of multiple cities. A lot of people who live in Saanich but work in Victoria, or vice-versa, feel the same way.”
Andrew says some respondents have tried to skew his survey by using false names and email addresses, but they will be “filtered out” by administrators. The City’s Have Your Say platform only requires participants to provide an email address and a postal code; I was able to register different addresses and take the same survey several times. Given Missing Middle’s huge stakes, I asked the City if it was worried about its surveys being gamed. The City replied in a statement that it uses “industry standard engagement tools for local government,” and that “all online engagement is based on good faith.” (Although some platforms, such as Vancouver-based PlaceSpeak, go farther to prevent fraud by verifying every respondent’s physical address.) “Public engagement during policy development is important,” the City concluded, “but the real test of public position on the final bylaw is a public hearing.”
Anyone can register for the City’s online engagement platform by providing an email address and postal code.
Before anyone makes Trumpist allegations of foreign vote-rigging, however, they should read the comments on pages 171-231 of the City’s massive engagement report. Some 54 percent of the respondents to the City’s surveys identified as between 25 and 44 years old (that demographic comprises 32 percent of the City’s population), and the submitted comments match the survey’s numbers, showing that a majority want more housing options immediately, more public transit and cycling facilities, and don’t much care about preserving Victoria’s heritage. “Get this done, yesterday,” one wrote. “Every day of inaction, this housing crisis worsens.”
Andrew’s survey closes on July 13 at midnight, and he says the results will be published immediately afterwards—just before Council’s first reading of the Missing Middle bylaws on July 14. But he insists that the survey results won’t sway his final vote. “I have tried to be right down the middle of the lane on this, to not, in any way, respond affirmatively or in opposition to what’s going on with the Missing Middle. I’ve tried to get as much information, become as educated as I can, listen to what people have to say, so I can enter it, like any public hearing, with an open and disabused mind. I try to do that, I really do.”
For more information on this Focus Article visit https://www.focusonvictoria.ca/
Ross Crockford will try to explore all the implications of the City’s Missing Middle plan in his next article for FOCUS.
An Oak Bay Resident’s correspondence to Council at the Committee of the Whole meeting on October 18, 2021, explained his concern about the Secondary Suite Survey referenced in the consultant’s September 21, Final Secondary Suite Report. He was also concerned about the length of the staff and consultant reports that residents and Council members are expected to “wade” through.
He explained that the 232-page Final Secondary Suite Report was daunting for him and would have been for 99% of the other Oak Bay Residents. To remedy this, he provided Council with an earlier District- established solution however, like so many residents' easily implemented recommendations, it was never acted on.
It turns out the resident’s survey concerns are not limited to Oak Bay. A July 2022 Focus Magazine Article “Missing Middle – What’s Going ON?” explained that a Victoria Survey on this single-family densification subject, has also been severely criticized. In fact, for many of the same reasons expressed about Oak Bay’s Survey.
It seems as though either the methods used in the Victoria’s “Missing Middle” Survey copied Oak Bay’s methods or, used the same suspect survey formula.
Concerned Oak Bay Resident’s October 18, 2022 correspondence:
"I am briefly responding as a citizen to the agenda item of a final report on secondary suites appearing in the October 18 agenda for the Committee of the Whole. Last spring and summer I tried to follow the discussion and reports on the topic, and read a 90 parge report along with studying a survey and report back."
“I corresponded with you on September 13 but have never seen any response. In that letter I commented that the (Secondary Suite) survey was unregulated survey - meaning that anyone who wanted to could complete a survey and hand it in – no questions asked. You can have no assurance that the respondents were who they claimed to be. For example, what was to prevent a number of UVIC students, all hungry for a ‘pad’ while at university, to answer the questions in a way that gave a response quite different from property owners?
In my response I commented that IF you took the results at face value you would conclude that Oak Bay already had many more secondary suites than what has been suggested and perhaps even to exceed the target that some might be aiming for. You also received a commentary from a professional in statistics who concluded that the results indicated no consensus to many of the ideas. He suggested and I agree that the data desperately needs more analysis – a procedure routinely done on such surveys but apparently not called for here.
“As a council you deserve better, much better analysis of the information.”
Respectfully
Oak Bay Resident
Excerpts from the Focus Magazine “Missing Middle” Article (full Article Appendix #1)
- “Stephen Andrew is asking for feedback on the Missing Middle Initiative,” jackrabbit posted on Reddit’s Victoria BC forum. “Pretty important as he is likely the deciding vote on if this passes or not on August 4 (2022). If you want townhouses and plexes legalized in our city please fill out the survey and let him know!”
- “In the Discord forum run by the 300-strong pro-development group Homes For Living, dgrypma posted the link and wrote, “Stephen Andrew is asking for feedback on missing middle--you know the drill”.
- “The first survey, open for four weeks in the autumn of 2020 and conducted through the City’s Have Your Say platform (engage.victoria.ca), asked vague questions about housing priorities”
- “If the Missing Middle Plan was so named to put residents to sleep, it succeeded.”
It is easy to see why the Development, Real Estate and Investment Industries would be “interested” in a favorable Survey densification response because, as the Focus Magazine Article points out, this single-family neighbourhood densification plan will create thousands of units of new housing, and new real-estate products worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Oak Bay Watch Perspective
Similar survey methods were used in the April 2019 Secondary Suite Survey. It also drew similar resident criticism about the lack of respondent control. The Show-and-Tell Secondary Suite meeting (called an Open House) held on April 25, 2019 used unsigned “sticky notes”, many of which sounded like developer mantra, as “credible” resident responses. It might also be noted that the last pro-development Council’s “single-family densification initiative” was introduced very early in this Council term.
It seems Oak Bay has an ”aptitude” for flawed surveys: the highly criticized original Secondary Suite Survey in 2010 (even by most of Council); the highly criticized Official Community Plan Survey and recently, the Oak Bay Infill Survey reporting under the Oak Bay News headline “90 percent of Oak Bay residents want infill housing”.
While this may be true it is very, very misleading because it is only partly true. If you read the article the survey finding were clear, and the misleading headline should have read, “In Favour of Some Form of Infill Housing ”. Even then, residents were insisting on many qualifying requirements and conditions.
And there is the concern about the hundreds of pages of lengthy Council reports, also objected to by residents in the last two Council terms. This has been the standard practice. It has also not gone unnoticed that a number of these exceptionally lengthy reports have shown up at the end of long Council meeting agendas. They are often placed with a number of other complex agenda items that often include presentations and an hour or two of discussion - perhaps also designed to put residents to sleep?
It has also not been that uncommon for residents to have to wait for two or three hours for the Agenda item they are interested in.
It is not clear who sets the agendas but, it seems to us that as some Council meetings have only one or two items that “more care” should be taken to not only balance out Council agendas. Also, that residents should be given the same consideration afforded non-residents, whose agenda items are almost always dealt with much earlier in the Council meeting.
______________________________________
“Nothing is inevitable if you are paying attention” Oak Bay Watch
Oak Bay Watch is a volunteer community association and its members have a variety of professional backgrounds in both the public and private sector.
*******Please help us continue to provide you with information about Community concerns and Council decisions and actions. Oak Bay Watch members also help community groups with their specific development concerns. Donate to Oak Bay Watch - even $5 or $10 dollars provides expenses for door- to- door handouts and helps us maintain our website. Oak Bay Watch is committed to ensuring the Community gets the full range of information on budget, governance and all key development issues – a well-informed opinion cannot be made without this.
(Please use Donate Button at bottom of oakbaywatch.com Home Page)
Keep informed and sign up for our newsletter – bottom of Newsletter Menu Item.
Appendix #1
Excerpt On the Discord forum run by the 300-strong pro-development group Homes For Living, dgrypma posted the link and wrote, “Stephen Andrew is asking for feedback on missing middle—you know the drill”.
Missing Middle: What’s going on?
By Ross Crockford
Only a passionate few know the City of Victoria is about to approve three-story condos everywhere.
ON THE MORNING of Monday, July 4, Victoria councillor Stephen Andrew tweeted that he’d posted a survey on his mayoralty campaign webpage, asking followers what they thought of the City’s Missing Middle housing initiative, which would permit multi-unit, three-story condos in every area currently zoned for detached single-family houses. By early afternoon, the survey link was pinballing around the internet.
“Stephen Andrew is asking for feedback on the Missing Middle Initiative,” d_jackrabbit posted on Reddit’s r/VictoriaBC forum. “Pretty important as he is likely the deciding vote on if this passes or not on August 4. If you want townhouses and plexes legalized in our city please fill out the survey and let him know!” Ken Roueche, a critic of the initiative, bcc’d the link to 75 friends and neighbours, asking them to “Please consider responding to this poll.”
On the Discord forum run by the 300-strong pro-development group Homes For Living, dgrypma posted the link and wrote, “Stephen Andrew is asking for feedback on missing middle—you know the drill”.
One might dismiss this as nerdy chat in obscure corners of the internet, but the stakes are real, and huge. Missing Middle has the potential to provide thousands of units of new housing, create new real-estate product worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and transform Victoria’s lawn-and-garden neighbourhoods into walk-up residential districts like those of Montreal, or Copenhagen.
First introduced in November 2019, the City’s Missing Middle initiative gradually evolved through workshops and online surveys, until the complete details were finally presented this past May. It immediately divided Council, and advanced only via a series of 5-4 votes—with Andrew voting on May 26 to have the plan rewritten after more public input, then voting on June 9 to reconsider that motion—to where we are today. City staff will hold “information sessions” on the Missing Middle plan this Tuesday, July 12: you can register for the noon virtual session at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/missing-middle-housing-pre-public-hearing-information-session-tickets-372379445947, or attend in-person at City Hall between 3 and 7:30 p.m. Then its bylaws will go to a public hearing and final Council vote, likely on August 4.
“So many different comments have come to me through emails, phone calls, people stopping me on the street, that I wanted to clarify what the points of those individuals were, and this is helpful,” Andrew says of the survey, which collected nearly 500 responses in its first two days. “Also, there are questions that the City hasn’t asked, such as: Have we sufficiently educated, engaged, and consulted you? A lot of people say to me, ‘I didn’t hear about this,’ or ‘This is the first I’ve heard about it,’ which I find stunning, but OK. So I wanted to get a real feeling for what’s going on.”
If the Missing Middle plan was so named to put residents to sleep, it succeeded. Over the course of two years, only about 480 people participated in the 28 workshops, focus groups, “ask a planner” sessions, community-association meetings and advisory-panel discussions where the City described the plan. (The only real pushback seems to have come from the City’s Heritage Advisory Panel: “These are laudable goals, but one could see wholesale demolition in existing neighbourhoods,” said one member at a December 2020 meeting.) Instead, and partly because of COVID, the City got most of its feedback through online surveys.
The first survey, open for four weeks in the autumn of 2020 and conducted through the City’s Have Your Say platform (engage.victoria.ca), asked vague questions about housing priorities: of 191 respondents, 142 identified “create more housing choice so families and other households can stay in Victoria as their housing needs evolve” as a priority, while only 36 identified “maintain incentives for heritage conservation and re-use of existing character homes.”
Only 191 people took the City’s first Missing Middle survey in late 2020, but results gave City planning staff the green light to proceed.
Based partly on that result, Council voted 5-4 in July of 2021 to continue with the initiative. A second survey, open for six weeks that autumn, specifically asked which missing-middle housing types (houseplexes up to six units, corner townhouses, heritage-property infill) should be approved by City staff alone, without the time and cost burdens of public hearings and Council approval: of 810 respondents, only eight percent said “none.” (That option was last, with no graphic beside it.) City staff concluded this showed “strong support” for all the housing types, and the general plan.
A key question in the City’s second online survey sought approval for Missing Middle housing types. Only eight percent of respondents voted for “None,” at the bottom of the page.
But as it’s now becoming apparent, the trouble with such limited engagement is it gives little indication of what the general public knows or thinks about a subject. “Real surveys have random samples of populations, and a range of questions which should be neutral, to create a projectable sample. They have to look like the whole population. That is clearly what is not going on here,” says Ian McKinnon, a former president of Decima Research who’s also served in central agencies of federal and BC governments.
Instead, consultations that are open to anyone frequently get dominated by small groups that feel passionately about an issue. “My concern is often: How are people informed about it, and who responds?” McKinnon asks. “With almost all public consultations, those who are strongly motivated often use their networks to encourage participation by people who they know to have the same viewpoint as themselves.”
Online consultations can also get skewed by people giving multiple responses, McKinnon notes, or chiming in from other jurisdictions. (It happens: one eagle-eyed member of the Downtown Residents’ Association noted that during the runup to Council’s approval of the controversial Telus Ocean, 81 of 140 letters of support came from people associated with the project, including Telus employees from other parts of Canada.)
On Homes For Living’s forum, members and developers regularly urge each other to respond positively to surveys, consultations and hearings on projects across Greater Victoria, with little concern whether they live in the municipality or not. Is that appropriate? “I never know myself,” Phil MacKellar, an HFL spokeperson tells me; he lives in Fernwood, but recently filled out a survey to support infill housing in Oak Bay. “Because Victoria’s never amalgamated, it feels like I’m part of multiple cities. A lot of people who live in Saanich but work in Victoria, or vice-versa, feel the same way.”
Andrew says some respondents have tried to skew his survey by using false names and email addresses, but they will be “filtered out” by administrators. The City’s Have Your Say platform only requires participants to provide an email address and a postal code; I was able to register different addresses and take the same survey several times. Given Missing Middle’s huge stakes, I asked the City if it was worried about its surveys being gamed. The City replied in a statement that it uses “industry standard engagement tools for local government,” and that “all online engagement is based on good faith.” (Although some platforms, such as Vancouver-based PlaceSpeak, go farther to prevent fraud by verifying every respondent’s physical address.) “Public engagement during policy development is important,” the City concluded, “but the real test of public position on the final bylaw is a public hearing.”
Anyone can register for the City’s online engagement platform by providing an email address and postal code.
Before anyone makes Trumpist allegations of foreign vote-rigging, however, they should read the comments on pages 171-231 of the City’s massive engagement report. Some 54 percent of the respondents to the City’s surveys identified as between 25 and 44 years old (that demographic comprises 32 percent of the City’s population), and the submitted comments match the survey’s numbers, showing that a majority want more housing options immediately, more public transit and cycling facilities, and don’t much care about preserving Victoria’s heritage. “Get this done, yesterday,” one wrote. “Every day of inaction, this housing crisis worsens.”
Andrew’s survey closes on July 13 at midnight, and he says the results will be published immediately afterwards—just before Council’s first reading of the Missing Middle bylaws on July 14. But he insists that the survey results won’t sway his final vote. “I have tried to be right down the middle of the lane on this, to not, in any way, respond affirmatively or in opposition to what’s going on with the Missing Middle. I’ve tried to get as much information, become as educated as I can, listen to what people have to say, so I can enter it, like any public hearing, with an open and disabused mind. I try to do that, I really do.”
For more information on this Focus Article visit https://www.focusonvictoria.ca/
Ross Crockford will try to explore all the implications of the City’s Missing Middle plan in his next article for FOCUS.