Your first thought when driving downtown is: “Where am I going to park?”

That might be your first thought while driving home as well, under legislation just concluding debate.

The single-family home is fading out as the mainstay of residential development. The driveway is going with it.

After the wholesale rewrite of zoning and building laws by way of Bill 44 in 2023, the NDP government followed up with legislation this fall (Bill 25) to further support small-scale multi-unit zoning.

It continues the effort to reduce building costs by reducing parking requirements. The new mandate to provide triplexes, rowhouses and townhomes across urban B.C. is well underway. But where there is resistance, it is about to be stamped out.

The government says the bill “will prevent local governments from excluding zones where small-scale, multi-unit housing should be allowed or making further restrictions that make it more difficult to build anything other than single-family or duplex housing …”

One restriction that drew a lot of attention during debate is about providing off-street parking for residents of new units being shoe-horned into the........

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