Ed. note: Coun. Ted Laking made these remarks at Monday’s council meeting while promoting his motion to raise the maximum building height to 35 metres. As the Star reported Wednesday, the motion was amended to read 40 metres before it was approved by council.

First, it’s important to discuss the problem this motion is trying to mitigate.

Whitehorse is facing a housing crisis.

Between 2013 and 2023, the population of Whitehorse grew by 7,959 people. That’s a rate of growth over 27 per cent.

If growth continues at this pace, we will have another 9,500 people living here by 2033.

So the question becomes: where will everyone live?

If you crunch the numbers, we need a minimum of 415 new homes in Whitehorse per year for the next decade.

Last week, the CIBC put out new statistics estimating the country needs five million new homes by 2030.

Here in the Yukon, we are outpacing our own projections.

Last February, in 2023, the Yukon Bureau of Stats issued population projections for the Yukon – estimating that our population for the territory would be 44,880 by the end of 2023.

It only took until April, two months after those estimates for the population, to hit that.

By the end of September, the Yukon’s population was over 700 people higher than the estimate we had been working off of.

This is why we are struggling to keep up with the housing crisis – we don’t have a full appreciation of how big the problem is.

That’s why I’ve brought forward a number of motions over the past year on getting more housing developed.

And that’s why I’ve brought forward this motion tonight: to get more homes built.

So we can build up.

Tall buildings can be built on a relatively small footprint, and reduce urban sprawl. Urban sprawl can be expensive for taxpayers.

Grande Prairie, for example, has 64,000 people and only takes up 133 km² whereas Leduc has 34,000 people and takes up just 42 km².

With our large area come lots of roads.

The network of roads in Whitehorse is 283 kilometres total.

With that comes costs for maintenance and snow removal, a cost that contributes to property taxes going up each year.

Sprawl also makes it very difficult and expensive to provide a reliable public transit network.

The more we push all our housing developing outside of the downtown and into the forests, it is going to increase the cost of living in our community.

I’ll close my comments off with an interesting fact from a City of Whitehorse What we heard document released last Friday.

For quick background, the City of Whitehorse retained a consultant to provide general advice and engagement support regarding changes to our zoning bylaws.

In it, they surveyed 349 residents, and when those residents were asked ‘should we allow taller buildings?’ 38 per cent strongly supported and 22 per cent supported. So a total of 60 per cent.

The consultant also did interviews with the Government of Yukon land development branch, who said: “The city should increase building heights.”

And local architects, who said: “The city should not limit height of buildings downtown. The city should allow creativity to be accepted.”