Applicant's Statement - Alan Lowe Architect

Development Permit Application – 280 Island Highway

Your Worship Mayor Screech and Councillors;

We are pleased to submit this development permit application for your approvals. Our client is proposing to construct a 37 unit multi-family wood framed rental building on the former View Royal Fire Hall site with one level of underground parking. The Town of View Royal had rezoned this property to RM-3 Mixed Residential with an allowable density of 1.5:1.0 and an additional 0.1 density with the provision of 80% underground parking. We are proposing a mix of 9 two bedroom and 28 one bedroom units in this development. The parking requirements within your bylaws require us to provide one parking stall per unit and an additional 0.5 parking stalls for each additional bedroom. The parking requirements for this proposed development would be 42 parking spaces. We are requesting a parking variance of 2 stalls as we can only accommodate 40 stalls within our development. We will provide secured bicycle parking for 37 bicycles for the development. We feel that it is important to balance the dependence on automobile use with alternate modes of transportation. The Island Highway also has transit service that is accessible.

The greater Victoria area has a vacancy rate of less than 1% for rental accommodation and with the housing prices in this market, more and more residents are looking for new rental accommodation. We feel this rental accommodation will be an asset for the Town of View Royal, allowing more residents to live within the community.

We have met with both the planning department and the engineering department to determine how we can design a building that will meet immediate and future needs. We understand that the Town of View Royal has a master plan for the corridor along the Island Highway. We have designed our sidewalk and boulevard to allow for the master plan to be realized once funds are available to complete the work.

In order to fit our four storey building on this site, we are requesting some minor setback variances. Our front yard setback is 4.25 metres instead of the required 7.5 metres. As there will be a sidewalk, boulevard, and bike lane along the Old Island Highway frontage, we feel this reduction in the setback will still be set back far enough from the street that it will feel comfortable. There will be a retaining wall at the north end of the property due to the grades along the Old Island Highway and the existing grades of the site. The other setback that we are requesting a variance on is the rear yard setback. The required rear yard setback is 7.0 metres and we are proposing 3.57 metres. This is only for a very small portion of the rear setback and will not cause any privacy problems to the neighbours in this location.

Our building is within the building height of 13.5 metres but when we measure to the pop up roof elements which break up the building and gives a more unique roof line, we are at 14.4 metres. We would request that a variance be granted for the height.

The construction of this project will take about 18 months to complete and will create jobs within the community. Where the property does not pay any property taxes at this time as it is owned by the Town of View Royal, the completed project will be paying annual taxes based on a value of approximately $6.5 million.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Yours truly,

Alan Lowe, MAIBC Alan Lowe Architect Inc.