How Langley can win at Incremental Development
Change is an opportunity, not a threat
The Township of Langley is currently working through a new Development Permit Area bylaw for “Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing,” the Provincial legislation that allows garden suites, multiplexes, and other small additions to the housing form on residential lots. The bylaw passed first and second reading this Monday, before going to a public hearing soon. The bylaw will add further restrictions to this kind of development, including the requirement to hire a consultant to verify a project meets “neighbourhood character,” along with other style restrictions.
As a supporter of more housing options in Langley, I think the discussion and approach has become sidetracked. There is a lot of talk of provincial guidelines, frameworks, and bylaws, and little discussion about the reality of how expensive housing has become in Langley.
We have become distracted by the process instead of recognizing the benefits that allowing incremental change can bring, should we embrace these ideas rather than try to stifle them with harsh regulation like this DPA bylaw proposes.
More importantly, SSMUH is a very small step in a direction that Langley could take much further on its own terms. Some are upset that the Province gave us a floor; I say we should be building a ceiling.
What Is Incremental Development?
Incremental development is, in essence, how villages, towns and cities developed prior to the strict regulation we see today. If someone wanted to sell bread and cakes, they might just convert the ground floor of their home to a bakery. If someone wanted to open a café, they might build their café next door to another existing business, leading to the organic formation of a Main Street or Public Square. Fort Langley is probably the clearest local example of this “Traditional Development Pattern.”
Housing also grew organically during this process. Apartments were often added above the businesses for the owner to live in. Houses might initially be built very small but expanded as families grew, with additions and extensions. In old heritage houses, you can sometimes spot the “seams” where additions were added on. One local example of this is Tracy Cakes in Murrayville, where inside you can see the building is across multiple levels with visible joints between sections.
This ability to extend and change housing easily allowed building to be flexible and to scale to meet demand. And if a building couldn’t be extended further, it would be torn down and rebuilt with something larger.
This ongoing process leads to urbanization, where land use becomes maximized organically over time as economic productivity, activity, and population increase in an area due to demand.
How Is This Different from What We Do Now?
Philosophically, the difference is that residents who lived in a town would have a hand in shaping it by actually being involved directly in the built form. Today that is rarely the case. Large developers develop a large area according to a specification, and it is then frozen in time with zoning and land use regulations.
Imagine today if you wanted to open a bakery. You would have to look for vacant retail or commercial space. If a planner failed to account for enough space in the neighbourhood plan, or a developer hasn’t built enough for the community, then you might be out of luck.
In most residential areas of the township, zoning regulations prohibit you from opening a retail bakery out of your home. It cannot be adapted to provide that opportunity. The inverse is also true: most commercially designated areas do not allow the construction of a residential unit attached.
There are a small number of “live-work” mixed use units located around the Township of Langley, and while these are welcome, they do not enable this dynamic process, instead relying on people being able to buy into the one or two complexes that have that built form ready to go. If someone is happy where they live, they are often out of options.
Housing is a similar story. If you want to add an extension to your house, to the Township of Langley this is almost the same as constructing a home brand new, with engineering drawings, drainage calculations, and so on all being required. Gone are the days of what happened at Tracy Cakes, easily just making your house larger to meet your needs. We could simplify this process.
Every new housing unit added also requires the purchase and consumption of more land, adding to the development cost and final selling price of the unit. With incremental development, a homeowner may already have the land sitting unused.
And finally, instead of residents having a direct stake in the development of communities, responsible for shaping the town, this has been largely outsourced to real-estate development corporations, and the only say residents get is at a public hearing. The public hearing becomes the one remaining chance at input, is usually just a binary “yes or no” to a project, and due to fear of change, and due to the changes often feeling “imposed,” these hearings typically bring out opponents and remain largely ineffective at helping guide community growth.
SSMUH Is a Small Step. Langley Could Go Further.
I believe it is fairly clear from what we observe, including lack of suitable commercial spaces, lack of opportunity, and rising commercial and residential ownership and rental costs, that the regulated development model often fails to live up to the expectations and needs of the community.
SSMUH was imposed top-down by the Province, and allowing garden suites, multiplexes, and other small-scale changes to the housing form is a very small step towards breaking free of these kinds of regulatory barriers. But SSMUH only addresses the housing piece. It does nothing to enable the neighbourhood retail, the corner lot café, the home-based bakery, or the live-work flexibility that made towns function as complete communities in the first place.
Think about what Langley could look like if we actually embraced this. A baker who owns a small house in Murrayville converts part of her ground floor into a neighbourhood bakery, building a local following one loaf at a time. A retired couple in Walnut Grove adds a garden suite they can rent out, offsetting their property taxes and staying in their home longer. A family on a corner lot in Brookswood builds a small mixed-use building with a coffee shop at street level and two rental apartments above.
None of these are hypothetical development applications waiting in a planning queue. They are the kinds of things that happen naturally when regulations allow them, and they are the kinds of things that build real communities.
None of this requires waiting for Victoria. The Township has the authority to shape its own zoning today, and out-do every other municipality in the region, but right now, the existing restrictions on setbacks and lot coverage make even adding a garden suite challenging.
“But We’re Already Building Housing”
One response to any call for more housing flexibility is that Langley is already growing. New townhouse complexes go up in Willoughby. Apartment buildings rise along the 200 Street corridor. Development permits are issued. It can feel like things are moving.
The numbers tell a different story. Over the past 16 years, housing completions in the Township have averaged about 1% of the population per year. In 2025, with a population of roughly 164,000, the Township completed around 2,041 units. That sounds like a lot until you look at the trend: the completion rate has hovered around 1% growth relative to the population for over a decade.
The conventional development model has a structural ceiling. Large projects depend on financing, market conditions, and developer capacity. When interest rates rise or markets soften, projects stall. A townhouse complex that gets a development permit in 2024 might not see occupants until 2027 or later. Permits give the impression of activity, but the housing itself can take years to materialize, and real estate cycles can pause delivery entirely.
Incremental development works on a completely different logic. Instead of one developer building 200 units on a single site, you have hundreds of property owners each making small changes: adding a suite, building a garden cottage, converting a garage. Each individual project is small, but the aggregate production can be enormous, and it does not depend on any single financing deal or market cycle.
The evidence from other jurisdictions supports this. In California, after the state streamlined ADU approvals starting in 2016, ADU permitting surged. As of 2022, nearly one in five housing units produced in California is an ADU, and in Los Angeles, one in three new housing permits is an ADU. Almost none of these units would have been legal to build before 2016.
Langley Township has 14,000 lots eligible for SSMUH. If just 5% of those property owners added a single unit in a given year, that would be 700 new homes, comparable to the entire annual output of single-family construction in the township. Unlike a stalled condo tower, those 700 units would come from 700 separate decisions by 700 separate households, each with their own financing, their own timeline, and their own reasons for building. That kind of distributed production is resilient in a way that the conventional model is not.
The question is not whether the Township is building housing. It is whether the current model can ever do more than tread water at 1%.
“I Wouldn’t Want One Next to My House”
People bought into a neighbourhood with certain expectations, and change feels like a threat to those expectations. But it is worth looking at what “neighbourhood character” actually means in practice, because the results are sometimes hard to take seriously.
This is a single-family home in Northeast Gordon (69 Ave / 205 St). From the back, it has the scale and appearance of a small apartment building. It is fully permitted, because the zoning says “single-family.” Meanwhile, an actual small apartment on the same lot, one that could house 6 or more people or families affordably, would be prohibited.
A multiplex that looks identical to this building but contains separate affordable units rather than one large expensive one will soon face tougher regulatory barriers that this house does not, should the DPA bylaw pass.
That is what “neighbourhood character” protects in practice. Not a particular look or feel or scale. A single-family home can be as large as the lot coverage and height limits allow, but divide that same building into units that working families can afford, and suddenly it becomes a concern.
In Langley, the average home price now exceeds what most working families can afford. Young people who grew up here cannot afford to stay. Essential workers, the people who staff the schools and the grocery stores and the fire halls, commute in from elsewhere because they cannot afford to live in the community they serve.
It Costs You Money
There is a fiscal argument that should matter to every homeowner, and it runs directly counter to the instinct to block change. A single-family home on a large lot generates a certain amount of property tax revenue. That revenue has to cover the cost of the roads, water, sewer, and services that reach that lot. In many cases, especially in sprawling suburban development, it does not cover those costs. The shortfall is made up by drawing from reserves, from development fees paid by new growth, or by raising taxes across the board.
When that same lot gets a fourplex, or a mixed-use building with a shop and two apartments, the property tax revenue from that piece of land goes up significantly while the infrastructure serving it barely changes. The road was already built. The water and sewer lines already run to the property. But now instead of one household contributing to the cost of maintaining those systems, there are three or four.
Finally, the “frozen in amber” approach to development after it is complete makes people “over-buy” a larger home in anticipation of any possibility - future kids, live-in parents, long-term guests - this works out great for the real-estate industry, but not so good for people’s pocketbooks. Allowing incremental change allows your home to scale with your needs, just as people easily scaled up and extended their homes in the past.
It Makes Your Commute Worse
The Township recently released its draft Transportation and Mobility Strategy (TMS), a 250-page document that has been in development since 2023. The TMS makes positive steps. But these steps are also treating the symptoms of a land use problem. When every neighbourhood is exclusively residential and every errand requires a car trip to a commercial zone somewhere else, the roads fill up. When most households need to drive to get groceries, pick up prescriptions, or grab a coffee, that is not a transportation problem. It is a zoning problem.
Incremental development with neighbourhood retail directly reduces the pressure on roads. If there is a small grocery on the corner, a café down the block, and a barber a few streets over, a significant number of trips that currently require a car become a five-minute walk instead. That is not just better for the person walking but every driver still on the road, because there is one less car in front of them. The TMS is spending enormous energy figuring out how to move cars more efficiently through intersections. Incremental development asks a simpler question: what if people did not need to make the trip at all?
And lastly, concerns about parking minimums fade away when most people who frequent these businesses don’t need to drive there. We see this in practice with many heritage buildings in Fort Langley that fail to meet parking minimum requirements (and why Fort Langley has had a cash-in-lieu program to bypass parking minimums since the 90s.)
It Looks Fine
As we already addressed, there are already very large houses around the Township that have the appearance of multiplexes. Even better, there are examples of fourplexes built within reasonable height and setback limits, on a lot with an existing house next door, will look like a slightly larger building on the same street, no consultant required.
If we expand on the SSMUH framework with neighbourhood retail, existing residents benefit directly with local shops and services within walking distance. That is not a threat to neighbourhood character, but an improvement to it.
Infrastructure and the Case for Floor Area Ratio
Infrastructure is one of the most common concerns raised about allowing more development, and it came up repeatedly when the Province announced SSMUH. The worry is reasonable on its face: if we add more housing, will the water, sewer, and road systems keep up?
But this concern is often viewed through the lens of the suburban development model, where a large developer builds hundreds of units at once and hands the infrastructure costs to the municipality. Incremental development works differently. When a homeowner adds a suite, converts a ground floor to a small shop, or builds a fourplex, they are connecting to systems that already exist. The load increases gradually and in small increments, not all at once.
The bigger problem is that under the current system, the Township has limited ability to predict or manage how intensely a given area will develop. Langley’s SSMUH bylaw (Bylaw 6020) regulates development through unit count (maximum four units per lot), lot coverage (35%, or 45% with infill housing), height limits (9 metres), setbacks, and storey restrictions. These controls shape what a building looks like, but none of them measure or limit total floor area relative to the lot. There is no Floor Area Ratio.
This matters because the bylaw applies the same rules uniformly across all 14,000 eligible lots. A property on a quiet local street with a narrow road and aging infrastructure gets the same four-unit allowance and the same 45% lot coverage as a property on a well-serviced collector road with modern water and sewer capacity. The bylaw does not differentiate. It counts units and measures setbacks, but it has no mechanism to connect what gets built to the capacity of the infrastructure serving it. The Township is left to manage infrastructure reactively, trying to keep up with whatever gets permitted.
This is where Langley has an opportunity to do something smarter than what the Province has mandated.
How Japan Does It
Japan’s zoning system takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of regulating by use or unit count, Japan regulates by building envelope, using Floor Area Ratio (FAR) and Building Coverage Ratio (BCR). FAR is the ratio of total floor area to lot size. A FAR of 1.0 on a 500 square metre lot means you can build 500 square metres of floor space total, whether that is a single-storey building covering the whole lot or a two-storey building covering half of it.
In Japan’s Category 1 low-rise residential zones, there is no distinction between a single-family home and a small apartment building. Residential is residential. A property owner can build a house, a duplex, a triplex, or a small apartment. What keeps the scale appropriate is the FAR, which caps at between 50% and 200% depending on the area. A neighbourhood zoned at 100% FAR will have small, low-rise buildings regardless of how many units are inside them. The municipality knows the maximum possible floor area on every lot in the zone, which means it can plan infrastructure to match. The demand is predictable.
Compare this with Bylaw 6020. The bylaw allows up to four units per lot with 45% lot coverage and a 9-metre height limit, but it does not cap total floor area. Two different property owners on identical lots could build very different amounts of floor space depending on how they configure their units, basements, and storeys. The Township has no simple metric to estimate the aggregate infrastructure demand across the 14,000 eligible lots, because the bylaw does not give it one. It counts units and measures setbacks, but it cannot tell you how much total building will result.
A FAR-based approach for SSMUH would fix this. The FAR would likely need to be set higher than what a typical single-family house currently occupies, to make multiplexes and garden suites feasible. But the number would be fixed and known. The Township could look at any block in Murrayville or Walnut Grove, multiply the lot areas by the FAR, and get a reliable ceiling for how much development that block could produce. Infrastructure planning becomes straightforward: you know the maximum demand, you plan for it, and individual property owners build what they want within the envelope.
Japan’s Category 1 zones also allow small shops under 50 square metres to operate within homes, as long as they take up less than half the floor space. The result is that even quiet residential streets have a bakery on the corner, a clinic down the block, and a small grocery within walking distance. That is not utopian dreaming, it’s how most of Japan’s residential neighbourhoods actually work, and it is the kind of flexibility that Langley’s bylaw does not even begin to consider.
Is a DPA Bylaw the Right Approach?
The proposed DPA bylaw reflects a misunderstanding of what SSMUH actually is and what incremental development is meant to accomplish. A Development Permit Area is a tool designed for large-scale projects where form and character controls make sense, like a new town centre or a major corridor. Applying it to someone building a garden suite or adding two units to their lot adds cost and delay and will end many of these projects before they begin.
Requiring a homeowner to hire a consultant to demonstrate that their small project meets “neighbourhood character” imposes a financial barrier on exactly the kind of small-scale, resident-driven development that SSMUH is supposed to enable. It signals that the Township views this kind of building as something to be managed rather than an opportunity to be encouraged.
Jane Jacobs argued in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) that cities and neighbourhoods are not problems to be solved by designers but living systems shaped by the people who inhabit them. The vitality of a neighbourhood comes from the accumulated small decisions of residents, builders, and shopkeepers responding to real needs over time. Planning that tries to dictate outcomes at the level of individual buildings does not protect that vitality. It prevents it from happening in the first place.
If the goal is to ensure that new buildings are compatible with their surroundings, a FAR-based system does this more effectively and more fairly. It controls building mass directly, it connects development to infrastructure capacity, and it does not require subjective design review for small projects. A homeowner who wants to build within the FAR limit on their lot should be able to do so without hiring a consultant and waiting for a discretionary approval.
Where Do We Go from Here?
The Province gave Langley SSMUH, and Langley is responding by adding restrictions. The conversation should be going in the other direction. Instead of asking how to limit what the Province has allowed, we should be asking what else Langley can enable on its own. This is a leadership opportunity for Langley.
Neighbourhood retail on corner lots. Mixed-use buildings where residents can live above a small business. Home occupations that include a storefront. Easier additions and extensions. A FAR-based system that ties development intensity to infrastructure capacity and gives both property owners and the Township predictability about what can be built and where. More property tax revenue per acre from the land we have already serviced, reducing the burden on existing homeowners instead of increasing it.
At the December 1st 2025 public hearing, corner store retail was embedded and encouraged in the Official Community Plan of the Township, but only allowed in extremely limited areas and cases. This was done the same time Strip Malls were prohibited in urban areas. This shows me that council knows what people like, and what people don’t, we just have to take the next step to make things easier.
None of this is radical. It is how towns were built for centuries before we regulated it away. Tracy Cakes is still standing in Murrayville, with its visible seams and bulkheads, as a reminder of what Langley used to allow. The question is whether we are willing to allow it again, and go even further.
Strong Towns Langley is a community group dedicated to making Langley, British Columbia a better place. We advocate for incremental development, sustainable transportation solutions, housing accessibility, public spaces, and responsible growth strategies. Our group is part of the larger Strong Towns movement, focusing on creating financially resilient and people-oriented communities.
To learn more visit https://strongtownslangley.org