On March 31st, Vancouver City Council enacted new regulations to help more detached houses reduce their energy use and emissions.
Single-family and two-family projects that are committed to zero emissions standards, including Passive House, can now access the following:
- a simple 16% floor space ratio exclusion for single family houses, and 18% for duplex that provides extra space for projects
- a conditional height increase up to 1.0 m
- a conditional front yard variance of 0.5 m to complement existing regulations on the rear yard and building depth
- flexibility in external design regulations and partial storeys
- improvements to manage solar heat gain, including better solar access to the basement
The new regulations can be found in Appendix A of this Council report: https://council.vancouver.ca/20200121/documents/rr2.pdf.
Questions can be directed to Andrea Wickham (andrea.wickham@vancouver.ca) and Sailen Black (sailen.black@vancouver.ca).