Huron County planner Victor Kloeze outlined some of the steps the county is taking to address the housing shortage in Huron County.
Kloeze told Goderich council they're looking at three specific initiatives, residential intensification guidelines, pre-zoning and a review of planning documents in the county.
“From neighbours and the perspective of developers, people want some more clarity on what things will look like," he said while explaining residential intensification. "How some of this intensification will happen and how it will fit into our communities and our department really saw it as an important item to help support the rest of the work that we're hoping to do.”
He explained part of that is designing homes that will blend in with the neighbour's homes without having to be exactly the same.
“We'd be working with municipal staff and looking at their municipalities and seeing whether there are any properties that could have developed, but haven't and what the issues are and whether pro-actively zoning those properties for higher density development might be appropriate.”
The third focus is a review of planning documents in the county to see what the best practices are across the whole county and whether there are any old provisions in there that aren't meeting today's goals and that they might want to either change or cut out of the bylaws to help streamline the process.
Kloeze said they're working on all of these initiatives now and freeing up resources to move forward as quickly as possible, recognizing the urgency of addressing the housing shortage.