Getting a housing project – either rental or condo – through the City of Vancouver’s permitting process has become increasingly cumbersome, leaving some construction timelines to double or triple, says Jon Stovell, president and CEO of Reliance Properties.
Reliance has developed several residential buildings in Vancouver, including affordable suites and micro-lofts in the downtown core, but Stovell says the availability of affordable housing in Vancouver is being hampered by red tape.
Five to 10 years ago, says Stovell, it took about six months to get a development permit for a new housing build; today it takes closer to 1.5 years. Rezoning properties is likewise bogged down in bureaucracy. It now takes 17 weeks – along with a 50- to 60-page report and thousands of dollars in costs and fees – to get a two-page response to move forward with rezoning, he says. That’s compared with the three to five weeks – and substantially less cost and work – it used to take around half a decade ago.
While it might be hard to feel sympathy for development companies that continue to generate profits from Metro Vancouver’s booming housing market, there is a trickle-down effect to the stymied development process, and it’s hitting low- and middle-income residents and small businesses hardest.
Timelines for office building permits – such as putting in a new boardroom or a kitchen – have gone up by about 400 per cent in the past few years, Stovell says.
“It’s a constant area of activity … and sometimes small business really suffers as a result of not being able to get their business open in a timely fashion.”
At the residential level, too little housing stock on the market and a huge amount of demand is one reason why it has become very expensive to live in Vancouver.
“There are so many areas and neighbourhoods … where we’re just not using the land base properly,” says Anne McMullin, president of the Urban Development Institute, a non-profit association of the development industry and related professions (Stovell is chair of their board of directors). McMullin says it comes down to looking at areas that can be rezoned to allow for new homes and greater density.
A limited residential land base in Metro Vancouver means that the “demand is high, the supply is low, the prices go up,” says McMullin. “In the last five years, condo prices have gone from about $500 to $700 a square foot to about $1,500 a square foot.”
The city’s tendency to focus on developing one area at a time is also problematic, she adds, as developments such as those found in the Cambie corridor plan are putting new housing on the market, but there isn’t enough equivalent competition from developments in other areas to lower prices.
“The limited amount of new rental or sale product in the marketplace means that all project launches these days effectively happen without any direct competitors,” says Richard Wittstock, principal at Domus Homes homebuilding company. “If municipalities are concerned about affordability, it should be their primary goal to oversupply the marketplace … [to] push prices down.”
The City of Vancouver launched a housing affordability task force in 2012 and a housing Vancouver strategy in 2016, and released the Vancouver housing and homelessness strategy reset report in 2017, to address concerns raised by the development community and residents. They also added two members to their corporate management team: Gil Kelly was announced as the new chief planner and general manager of planning, urban design, and sustainability in August of last year, and Kaye Krishna was appointed general manager of the newly created development services, buildings and licensing department last June.
One of Krishna’s top priorities is addressing development permit wait times, she says, admitting that the city’s development permit times “have gone up over the years.”
Krishna says she’s been working closely with stakeholders and city staff to create new policies and guidelines to meet the city’s goal of speeding up the production of housing and that the city’s housing strategy reset is scheduled to come forward as a formal document by the end of 2017.
The City of Vancouver received 8,300 permit applications in 2016 – the second highest volume of permit applications to date. Managing that flow will be key to getting more units online and available to residents.
“There’s no doubt that the city is busy,” says Michael Geller, an architect, planner, real estate consultant and property developer. “But, the fact is, there are thousands of units held up in that [City of Vancouver development] process.”
