Construction of the new Duncan Manor will begin in early 2025 at the St. John’s Anglican Church property on Jubilee Street after Duncan’s city council voted unanimously to give the project a development permit at its meeting on April 15.
The six-storey, 130-unit building will offer below-market independent housing for seniors and persons with disabilities.
The facility will replace the existing Duncan Manor on nearby First Street, which is an aging three-storey, 122-unit building that is more than 50 years old and has reached the end of its life.
When construction is completed, expected in the fall of 2026, the tenants at the current Duncan Manor will be moved to the new facility.
The plan is that the old building will then be torn down in phase two of the Duncan Manor replacement project, and more new and affordable rental housing units will be built at the site.
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Mayor Michelle Staples said she is grateful that the project is moving forward.
“We are in desperate and dire need [for this kind of housing] and this will not even fill 20 per cent, if that, of the need that actually does exist now, and it continues to grow,” she said.
“But it definitely sets us in the right direction to continue to build this type of housing.”
The non-profit Duncan Housing Society, which operates Duncan Manor, had originally proposed replacing it with a new six-storey expanded facility at the current site on First Street with 134 new and affordable housing units when completed.
A memorandum of understanding was signed between the City of Duncan and the DHS in 2021 in which the city committed to considering swapping a portion of the nearby Lawn Bowling Club for a section of Centennial Park’s parking lot to make way for the construction of the new building on a portion of the parking lot.
But Duncan city council turned down plans for the land swap later that year after many in the community raised concerns about the loss of green space in the city if the proposal was given the green light.
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Plans for the new building include retaining the existing St. John’s Parish church on the site adjacent to it, and a new hall for parishioners will be constructed.
At the council meeting on April 15, Wiser Projects’ Jordan Brietzke, speaking on behalf of the DHS, said most of the funding for the new Duncan Manor will come from BC Housing.
As of May, 2023, it was estimated that the new facility would cost approximately $38 million, but construction costs have skyrocketed since then, so it’s unknown at this stage how much the project will cost when complete.
Brietzke said 50 per cent of the units in the new building will have rents that are no more than 30 per cent of the tenants’ income; 30 per cent of the units will be have affordable market rents, which is typically about 10 per cent below market rents; and 20 per cent of the units will have deep-subsidy rents targeted for people receiving income assistance.
The fact that parking at the new Duncan Manor will consist of just 28 spaces dedicated to tenants in an underground parking lot raised some concerns at the council table, but Kyle Young, Duncan’s director of planning and sustainability, said the city retained a parking engineer who looked at the parking requirements of the current Duncan Manor and determined that 28 spaces would be sufficient.
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“Many of the residents there don’t drive and don’t have vehicles,” he said.
Young also pointed out that there was no public hearing on the project before the development permit was considered by council because, in December, the province prohibited local governments from holding public hearings for zoning bylaw amendments that are intended to facilitate housing developments, and that are consistent with the community’s official community plan, in order to streamline approval processes for housing.
Coun. Tom Duncan said he likes the plans for the new facility.
“I know some of the units that are currently in the Duncan Manor don’t even have private washrooms, and that’s a thing of the past,” he said.
“I think more subsidized housing has been needed here for quite a while.”