Port Moody social wellbeing design guidelines
Shared spaces can be designed to nurture social connection, trust, and belonging for diverse residents. (Happy Cities)
How can policy create happier, healthier multi-unit homes?
Multi-unit housing is becoming increasingly common in cities across B.C., with direction from the Province to speed up development and offer more housing choices.
As cities increase housing supply, it is crucial that to also make sure that new housing equally supports resident health, happiness, and inclusion.
To address this challenge, the City of Port Moody hired Happy Cities to create a set of Social Wellbeing Design Guidelines for new multi-unit housing developments. The Guidelines use incentives (such as floor area exclusions) to encourage housing developers to include social features and shared spaces in multi-unit housing of all scales.
Port Moody becomes one of the first municipalities in B.C. to implement incentives and design guidelines for multi-unit housing that specifically support social wellbeing for residents. The policy is designed to work with Port Moody’s existing sustainability guidelines, showing how solutions to address social connection and sustainability can work together to create stronger, more resilient communities.
In 2025, Happy Cities worked with Port Moody again to update the document and develop additional guidelines for family- and age-friendly homes. This update included incentives and best practices for home layouts, sizes, interior design features, storage, and balconies. Council passed the updated document in February 2026.
How does the policy work?
This incentive-based policy offers detailed design guidelines and criteria for supporting social connection and wellbeing through six different design opportunities:
Site layout and use
Prominent entrances and active transitions
Purposeful parking
Social circulation
Shared amenity spaces
Family- and age-friendly homes
The guidelines also offer considerations for best practices in social programming and policy after a building is complete.
Why use an incentive-based approach?
Many municipalities place strict limits on building density and height—regardless of the purpose and context of new homes. As a result, extra social space often takes away the number of homes that fit in a building, which generate revenue. In most cases, fewer homes per lot leads to a higher cost per home, which ultimately impacts the end users: residents.
Without a flexible approach, designers have to make difficult decisions between providing more homes versus critical social space. Amid both an affordability crisis and a growing loneliness epidemic, housing providers shouldn’t have to choose one or the other.
With an incentive-based approach, developers who want to provide extra social space are eligible to receive various incentives in exchange, such as reduced parking requirements, or exclusion of the social space from the overall floor area calculation. These mechanisms ultimately reduce the cost of adding social features and amenities, by splitting the cost over more homes.
The power of practical, shared spaces
Port Moody’s Social Wellbeing Design Guidelines offer detailed design criteria to nurture social connection and wellbeing in homes and shared spaces. Crucially, they cover larger-scale amenities—like courtyards or lounges—as well as the functional spaces that people pass through every day.
Our years of research find that these design strategies are highly effective at boosting social connection: People interact far more often in hallways, elevators, lobbies, and even shared laundry than in amenity rooms or rooftops. When homes integrate social features in these practical spaces, it multiples the opportunities for neighbours to interact and build relationships.
Dive deeper
The Port Moody Social Wellbeing Design Guidelines are featured in a series of inspiring policy case studies, published in 2024 as part of the Building Social Connections project.
