B.C. to streamline housing development application processes

The B.C. government has announced plans to streamline housing development permitting processes, with the hopes of accelerating approvals and construction leading to more homes across the province.

The province says the new Permitting Strategy for Housing will “create a single, coordinated approach to housing-related permits and authorization,” eliminating the need to submit various applications to multiple ministries.

“While the single application window is being established over the coming months, permit and authorization decisions will be expedited through a cross-ministry team focused solely on processing housing permits,” a B.C. government release reads.

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Currently, the province says homebuilding authorizations in B.C. can require multiple applications to multiple ministries, many of which may have processes of their own.

The strategy will prioritize housing that is “most urgently” needed, including projects that are Indigenous-led. Municipalities and communities with the greatest housing supply issues and lowest vacancy rates will also see priority when it comes to authorizations and approvals.

Forty-two staff are being hired to ensure the projects get the various approvals they need.

The province says there are around 20,000 permits backlogged in the approval process — about 1,000 of those are for housing. Premier David Eby says his government is working to whittle down the process from a couple of years to a few months, but that will take time.

“We’re expediting permits through the current system at the same time as we reform it because in the housing crisis there is no time to wait,” Eby said.

Minister of Water, Land, and Resource Stewardship Nathan Cullen will be heading the overall provincial permit overhaul.

“The time, which costs the money, so the developers and then on down to the people who are looking to rent or own homes in British Columbia. We have to do both things at once — we have a task force that we have created across ministries to address all the different permits into one place,” he said.

“Too often applications come in, they don’t know really who is reviewing it, which team is reviewing it, how long it’s going to take, and part of the work that Minister Cullen is leading is addressing the backlog we have now, working on the system that we have now, but also working with our ministry to rethink what that system could look like,” Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon added.

Experts question outcome

Although John Stovell, chair of the Urban Development Institute, says it’s a good plan, he is concerned about how it will all play-out.

“The objective of trying to get the province out of the way and helping to expedite delivery of new housing is a good one. [But] we are concerned about how this will actually unfold,” Stovell said.

Stovell says that if applications face challenges and are held-up, he’s not convinced that having more staff members will solve the problem.

“An application will get held up not just because of processing, but because there’s some conflict between different rules within one ministry, or multiple ministries, or there’s an overreach on the legislation, or there’s a lack of consistent interpretation,” he explained.

“The negative consequences could be just yet another set of people that it has to go through and it might not speed up [the process] in fact, it might even slow it down.”

Tsur Somerville, with the University of British Columbia Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate, says many of the permitting slowdowns happen at the municipal, not provincial, level and this announcement doesn’t address that.

“Because it’s just the province, it’s only going to govern developments that are not in permit issuing jurisdictions. Where are all of our affordability problems? In permit issuing jurisdictions,” Somerville explained.

“At least 90 per cent of the problem is at the municipal level, where town planning is is in fact regulated. And the province has done what they can here or, we hope, with their own regulations,” Stovell added.

But Somerville says there could be value in the province setting the tone for municipalities when it comes to speeding up permitting.

“In of itself, it is not going to have any kind of major effect that way. But I think as a statement of policy, it’s a really important one to make, and I think it makes it easier for the province to then yell at the municipalities because, ‘hey, we’ve done it, why can’t you do it?’ Somerville explained.

“I think anything that streamlines the permitting process while still making sure that the things we need to be concerned about in terms of safety in terms of impact are being addressed. Anything in that space is more favorable, and I think anything creating the framework of getting rid of reasons to say no, and looking for reasons can make things happen and having that be the mindset is really, really important,” Somerville said.

Stovell says it will ultimately come down to the details of if the province is actually able to bring about the change.

“The devil will be in the details. Will the province actually be able to use this idea of a one window to actually shorten timelines and get housing approved, where they are holding it up?” Stovell said.

This is just the latest in a series of housing-related measures announced by Eby since he took over as premier last year.

“Every British Columbian deserves a safe and affordable place to call home. Unfortunately, this simply wasn’t a priority for more than a decade,” Eby said Monday. “As we turn things around and start to build record levels of housing, we are taking action today to remove obstacles to constructing new homes that families desperately need.”

Meanwhile, Kahlon maintains that housing is the NDP government’s top priority.

“We are working with municipalities to get more housing built faster. At the same time, we recognize that as a province we have work to do to speed up our approvals. This new permitting approach is an important step in providing the homes people need,” he said.

With files from Martin MacMahon and Emily Marsten