Vernon committee formed to find more land for housing

Jul 16, 2025 | 2:47 PM

The City of Vernon is taking action to find more land to build housing.

At the regular council meeting Monday, June 14, the city announced that it had formed a Land Use Committee.

That committee will be taked with investigation unused or underused land, and determine if it would be a feasible site for more housing.

“It’s become important for [the City of Vernon] to locate more pieces of land for non-market housing,” Mayor Victor Cumming told Vernon Matters following Monday’s meeting.

“The expectation of these non-market housing proposals is that somehow the city will provide the land, and this particular city doesn’t own much land. So we’re going to be speaking to the federal and provincial governments about land that they own and that they could lease to us, probably on a long-term lease, and then we would make sure that non-market housing gets developed on them.”

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The mayor noted the federal government owns “quite a bit of land” within Vernon’s municipal boundary, so the committee’s main focus will be on advocating for use of those sites.

Non-market housing can cover anything from senior housing to supportive housing and to family housing.

The formation of the Land Use Committee comes after the provincial government named Vernon as one of the municipalities to have a housing target to meet. That target had yet to be set as of time of publication, as the province said it would work with the municipalities to determine the number of new units required in the specific cities.

by Liam Verster

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