Your local city hall might have little control over the influx of foreign capital or other macro market forces undermining local housing affordability, but it does have a lot of control over one of the key factors that could help increase that affordability.
Efficiency of development permit approval falls under municipal control, and it needs improvement in Metro Vancouver.
As recent Business in Vancouver news stories have documented, property developers and real estate marketers have pointed to slow municipal permit approval times as a major culprit in stalling delivery of more housing inventory into the market.
For example, in “Metro Vancouver seniors facing a severe rental squeeze” (Business in Vancouver issue 1440; June 6-12), a representative of the company building a seniors’ complex in Vancouver pointed to municipal delays in processing development permits as the main reason few developers are building seniors’ rentals in a province where only 500 privately built independent-living spaces for seniors have been added to the market in the past year.
According to a 2016 NAIOP study, rezoning and development approval for the two-storey office building used in the commercial real estate development association’s survey would now take 210 days in the city of Surrey compared with 90 in 2014 and more than 330 days in the city of Burnaby compared with 150 in 2014. In Vancouver, it would take roughly 180 days. That’s a marked improvement over the 270 days it would have taken in 2014, but development permit approval in all three major Metro Vancouver municipalities still takes too long in a marketplace starved for housing options.
Supply constrained by bureaucratic inertia provides some developers with a de facto monopoly on price and supply.
That might be good for builders and property sellers, but it’s bad for buyers and worse for urban areas that are struggling to retain the human resources talent that is the lifeblood of local businesses and economies.
