Housing
Twenty homes are proposed. Zoning is only one step.
Denman Community Housing Society describes Denman Green as a proposed 20-unit project, including five units for seniors, at 1151 Northwest Road, with construction funding being sought. This is the operator’s published status checked on 10 September 2026, not an independent inspection or a promised completion date.
Pepper Lane was real. Its original site was lost.
The original eight-unit seniors proposal was at 3730 Denman Road, pursued by the Denman Community Land Trust Association. The 2016 ALC decision, file 54694 identifies the address and proposal and grants conditional approval for ALR exclusion. Pepper Lane’s housing agreement was Bylaw 239; Denman Green’s is Bylaw 243.
A joint update published by the former Denman Housing Association reports that the land intended for Pepper Lane was lost and that at least five seniors units would instead be reserved within Denman Green’s twenty. Those five are included in the twenty, not additional homes.
The Trust’s January 2026 staff report still lists Denman Green’s twenty and Pepper Lane’s eight as not built as of 2025. That is a dated planning inventory, not proof of two active funded projects. Our previous headline added the figures into a current 28-home pipeline without explaining the lost site. That was misleading.
The two housing organizations merged in August 2024 to form Denman Community Housing Society. Its other current proposal is the Works Yard at 3661 Piercy Road, with a land donation conditional on rezoning and subdivision. It is a separate proposal, not evidence that the original Pepper Lane project has been built.
First, what this is not
This is not a story about a bylaw being refused. It would be an easier story if it were.
The rezoning succeeded. Denman Island Land Use Bylaw No. 186 now carries a zone called Affordable Rental Housing — R4(1), and its site-specific rules say plainly: “the maximum number of affordable dwelling units per lot is 20”. Before that, the same land was zoned Commercial and permitted one dwelling.
So the local trust committee did the thing it is asked to do. The question this page is about is what happened next, which is nothing.
Seven years, in the Trust’s own minutes
- 7 November 2019
- Bylaws 235 and 236 given first reading for the Denman Housing Association’s proposal (resolutions DE-2019-086 and DE-2019-087). Nothing further about either bylaw appears anywhere in the archive. They simply stop.
- 6 August 2020
- The proposal is described: increase density on 29 hectares zoned Forestry, currently permitting one house, “to a maximum of 25 dwellings … with 20 of the dwellings designated as affordable rental housing”.
- 8 September 2020
- The committee will not proceed “until the applicant has secured source water approval from Island Health”. Simon Palmer, for the Denman Housing Association, is minuted emphasising “the need for affordable rental housing on Denman Island and the length of time this application has been in process”. That was five years before the count of unbuilt homes quoted at the top of this page.
- 19 January 2021
- The draft housing agreement is amended, raising the eligible household income threshold from 120% to 160% of the rural low-income cut-off.
- 16 March 2021
- “Denman Green is making a new application for 20 units.” The project restarts.
- January–March 2022
- Bylaws 241 and 242 change the land “From: Commercial-C To: Affordable Rental Housing-R4(1)”.
- February 2023
- Bylaw 242 is consolidated into the Land Use Bylaw. The twenty homes are legally permitted.
- As of 2025
- None built.
The water, and a sum anyone can check
Every version of this project has been conditioned on water. The zone’s own rule, R4(1) regulation 10, requires the applicant to “provide proof of a water license that permits the withdrawal of the licensed amount of groundwater”.
British Columbia publishes every water licence it grants. There is one current licence on the Denman Green parcel:
| Licence | Status | Quantity | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| 504677 | Current | 8,430 litres/day | Commercial Enterprise |
A standard cited for a neighbouring affordable-housing zone is 1,200 litres per day per dwelling. Applying that figure to this proposal is an illustrative comparison, not proof of the legal or engineering requirement for Denman Green:
20 homes × 1,200 litres/day = 24,000 litres a day at that benchmark
Licensed on the land: 8,430 litres a day
This comparison does not mean the licence allows only seven homes.
The recorded purpose is Commercial Enterprise. That label and a daily quantity alone do not establish the approved supply arrangements for the proposed homes. The complete licence conditions, project approvals and water-system design need to be read together.
We are not saying water is the reason nothing is built. The record also shows financing described as “community donations and a commercial mortgage”, an outstanding sewage treatment confirmation, and a proposed rainwater cistern system. A comparison against the groundwater quantity alone does not assess total supply, actual demand, seasonal storage or which constraint is binding.
What “affordable” actually means here
The zoning does not say. The Land Use Bylaw defines an affordable housing dwelling unit as one “secured by a housing agreement, and is available to persons with a low income as defined by housing agreement” — a pointer, not a standard. The number lives in a third document, Housing Agreement Bylaw No. 243:
- Rent is capped. It “must not exceed 30% of the gross monthly Household income” of the tenant, excluding utilities.
- Income is tested against BC Housing’s Housing Income Limits for the Comox Valley Planning Area.
- You have to belong here. A qualified occupant is 19 or older and either has lived on Denman for a year, or has commuted to the island for at least 20 hours of work a week for a year, or is among “Indigenous peoples whose ancestry relates to those First Nations having territorial claims to Denman Island”.
- There is no limit on how many people may live in a unit. The limit is floor area — 140 square metres.
A correction of ours
Until this week our sister site denmanisland.co reported that this parcel permitted one home. That was wrong. Our rule table read the base zone, where the bylaw’s own site-specific table permits twenty — a difference of a factor of twenty on the single parcel where it matters most. It is fixed, and it is recorded here because a site that reports other people’s errors is obliged to report its own.
A second one, smaller: the Islands Trust’s files give this property’s address as “1151 Kirk Road”. There is no such address; the parcel is 1151 Northwest Road, and none of the three parcels in the application is on Kirk Road. We have left the Trust’s wording as written and flagged the disagreement, because rewriting a public body’s record to match what we think it meant is not our job.
What we still don’t know
- What became of Bylaws 235 and 236 after November 2019. They are on a freedom-of-information request.
- Whether the 1,200 litres/day/dwelling standard applies to this zone, or only to the neighbouring one where it was recited.
- Whether rainwater capture counts toward the water requirement, and for how much.
- Whether licence 504677’s commercial purpose bars residential use.
- Whether financing ever closed.
If you know the answer to any of these, or you are involved in either project, we would like to hear from you and we will publish a correction as prominently as the claim.
Sources
- Denman Island LTC agenda, 20 January 2026 — the count of unbuilt units.
- Denman Island Land Use Bylaw No. 186 (consolidated) — the R4 zone and the R4(1) site-specific rules.
- Denman Island Housing Agreement Bylaw No. 243 — rent cap, income test, eligibility.
- Denman Island LTC minutes: 7 Nov 2019, 6 Aug 2020, 8 Sep 2020, 19 Jan 2021, 2 Mar 2021, 16 Mar 2021, 13 Jan 2022, 22 Mar 2022.
- BC water rights licences (WLS_WATER_RIGHTS_LICENCES_SV), BC Data Catalogue, Open Government Licence — British Columbia.