City developing infill design templates to streamline, improve building process

The City of Edmonton says a catalogue of templates for infill homes will make the building process easier and faster.

The City of Edmonton is developing a catalogue of design templates for infill homes.

A city spokesman said Thursday the templates will make the building process easier and faster, and “help developers and the community understand what types of product will be coming into their neighbourhoods.”

Right now, permitting takes about twice as long for infill as it does for home builds in new neighbourhoods.

“Once we have that standardized design process, it also allows the fast tracking of development timeframes,” Stuart Kehrig, the acting director for the city’s housing action team, told CTV News Edmonton.

The housing action team’s production of the catalogue excites Mayor Andrew Knack, who said Thursday that the more the city “provides greater opportunities for certainty, it benefits everyone involved.”

“In turn, it can result in even more housing getting built, which is still our end goal,” Knack told CTV News Edmonton. “We’re doing really well in Edmonton. We are, far and away, the most affordable major city in all of Canada when it comes to housing, but there’s still more work to be done.

“We still know there are more people within the city who are in a core housing need, and so even with as much housing that’s being built, if there’s a way to try to streamline that process to give people more certainty all around ... I think that’s worth going down that path.”

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) published its own catalogue of infill templates last year. It includes designs targeted at different regions of the country, but the Alberta section has just seven to choose from, and no designs for eight-plexes, a common layout under Edmonton’s new zoning.

Kehrig says the catalogue it plans to release will have designs that align with Edmonton’s specific zoning and neighbourhood character.

He said the city wants to promote a diversity of options for housing.

“These infill designs can be of a certain high quality standard if we have the ability to help create them, so that’s one of the biggest focuses,” Kehrig said, adding the city’s templates will also have a certain “curb appeal” intended to minimize imposing infill walls.

The city is using up to $1 million in funding from the CMHC’s Housing Accelerator Fund to develop its infill templates.

Kalen Anderson, the chief executive officer of the building development industry advocate BILD Edmonton Metro, says some of her members are interested in the templates, but she expects new or amateur developers will benefit from them the most.

“It’s not a completely professionalized part of the building system, so we have a lot of individual, personal homeowners who want to redevelop their own site, and they might really enjoy and benefit from some guidance like this,” Anderson told CTV News Edmonton.

City staff are still determining whether the templates will be free to use and expect to publish them by the end of the year.