"Because it's being proposed by a non-profit housing provider, it will be prioritized in the internal review process."
That's Saanich Mayor Dean Murdock, describing why a 13-unit townhouse development on Feltham Road in Gordon Head was expected to move faster through the district's approval process than a typical rezoning application. He said it in the summer of 2024. The project, Habitat for Humanity Victoria's Ferguson Place, finally got its green light this week, in a story the Times Colonist ran on September 23, 2026. Do the math and the fast lane still took roughly two years.
That gap between the promise of priority processing and the reality of a two-year timeline is worth sitting with if you're watching Gordon Head for new housing supply. It tells you something the zoning maps and council agendas won't: even the projects built to move quickly in Saanich still move on a multi-year clock, and the neighborhood's new townhome stock is showing up as a series of individual approvals rather than a coordinated policy wave.
What actually happened on Feltham Road
Habitat for Humanity Victoria bought a 16,000-square-foot lot at 1864 Feltham Road in 2023 with plans to build its largest project to date. The organization submitted its first proposal to Saanich council in June 2024, then resubmitted a revised version later that year. The plan changed shape along the way. Interim CEO Krista Bekkema told Saanich News the team decided the original layout didn't leave enough green space for families, so they adjusted unit sizes to make room for it. The design that emerged is 13 stacked townhomes, six three-bedroom units, three two-bedroom units, and four one-bedroom units, on a $7 million budget.
This isn't open-market inventory. Habitat sells its homes to qualifying partner families through affordable mortgages rather than listing them on MLS. To qualify, a household needs income under $120,000 and has to contribute 500 hours of community service as part of the partnership. CHEK News reported in 2024 that more than 32,000 people were on BC's subsidized housing waitlist at the time, with over 1,000 of those applicants in Victoria and roughly 300 of them families waiting specifically for income-tied housing. Habitat's own project page cites a Saanich housing needs report identifying a shortfall of more than 4,000 homes across the district. Ferguson Place addresses a sliver of that gap, thirteen homes against a four-thousand-home shortfall, and it's not the kind of supply a buyer or investor can shop for.
A second project, same neighborhood, same year
Ferguson Place wasn't the only small-scale multi-unit project moving through Saanich's process in Gordon Head this year. In March 2026, the Times Colonist reported that council endorsed a separate 12-unit townhouse project in the heart of the same neighborhood. That approval landed months before Ferguson Place's final green light, even though Ferguson Place had been in the queue since 2024 and carried an explicit prioritization commitment from the district.
The lesson isn't that non-profit projects are slower than market-rate ones. There's too little public detail on the 12-unit project's own application history to make that comparison fairly. The lesson is that Gordon Head is currently absorbing new small-scale housing project by project, not through a single systemic rezoning event that delivers supply on a predictable schedule. If you're trying to time a purchase or an investment around new townhome inventory in this neighborhood, there isn't a calendar to check. There's a patchwork of individual council decisions, each with its own history.
Why the timing matters more than usual right now
Here's the part that makes this worth tracking rather than filing away as neighborhood trivia. Greater Victoria's housing market moved in August 2026 in a way that made category-level supply unusually consequential.
The Victoria Real Estate Board reported 591 properties sold across the region in August 2026, up 12.6 percent from August 2025 and the strongest August the board had seen in five years. Sales of single-family homes rose 15.3 percent year over year, to 309 sold, and condo sales rose 15.1 percent, to 175 units. That's a broad jump in activity across both major categories.
Prices didn't move in the same direction as sales, and they didn't move together across categories. In the Victoria Core, the benchmark value for a single-family home was $1,301,800 in August 2026, down from $1,317,200 a year earlier. The benchmark value for a condominium in the same area rose slightly over the same period, to $553,600 from $548,900. Townhouse values, tracked separately in the board's own Home Price Index, ran counter to both, up roughly 1.3 percent year over year as of August 2026 even as detached prices softened.
Put plainly, townhomes are the one benchmark category still gaining ground while sales volume climbs and detached prices ease. That's the backdrop Ferguson Place and the 12-unit Gordon Head project are landing into. When a category is thin, rising, and getting more transaction activity at the same time, each individual project that finally clears approval has an outsized effect on what's actually available to buy or, in Habitat's case, to qualify for. Thirteen income-restricted units and twelve market-rate units arriving in the same neighborhood within the same year is a meaningful addition to a segment where supply has been the binding constraint, even if neither project shows up as a listing a typical buyer can bid on.
What this means if you're watching Gordon Head
If you're comparing Gordon Head against other pockets of Saanich East for a move-up purchase, a downsizing plan, or a small investment, the practical takeaway is to stop expecting a policy announcement to signal when new townhome supply will show up. Watch specific applications instead. Saanich's own development application pages track projects by neighborhood, and both projects discussed here moved through public hearings and council votes that are matters of record. A buyer with a longer time horizon, someone planning a purchase eighteen months out rather than this quarter, benefits from knowing that even prioritized non-profit housing took about two years from first submission to shovels, and that a comparable market-rate townhouse project cleared council months earlier without the same public priority framing.
For someone weighing a purchase in the here and now, the more immediate fact is the one the VREB numbers show directly. Townhouse values held up in August 2026 while detached prices eased and sales activity rose across both categories. That's not a reason to rush a decision. It's a reason to treat any completed, market-ready townhome in this specific part of Saanich East as a scarcer commodity than the sales headlines alone would suggest, and to price your own expectations accordingly rather than benchmarking against a single average.
Builders and small-scale developers reading the Ferguson Place timeline should take a different lesson from it. A non-profit applicant with an explicit council commitment to expedited review still needed a design revision and roughly two years to reach approval. That's useful groundwork for anyone underwriting a project timeline in this district, whether the goal is a fast-tracked affordable partnership or a standard market-rate application working through the ordinary queue.
Gordon Head isn't short on housing conversation right now. It's short on a predictable rhythm for when that conversation turns into finished homes. Two separate projects, twenty-five total units between them, cleared Saanich council within the same year through two different paths, and neither path moved as quickly as its own backers expected.
If you're weighing a purchase, a sale, or an investment in Gordon Head or elsewhere in Saanich East and want a read on how a specific project or listing fits into what's actually available right now, FarupScott Group can walk through the current pipeline with you before you make a decision that depends on supply someone else is still waiting on approval to build.
