A construction crane sits at the site of an office tower under construction as downtown condos and the north shore mountains are seen in the distance, in Vancouver, on Jan. 9, 2021.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
When the previous Vancouver city council heard there were thousands of potential new homes held up in planning-department limbo because the projects didn’t meet every city guideline or policy requirement, they voted to bend some rules to get things going.
At that time, in the summer of 2021, council members from every party and then-mayor Kennedy Stewart were anxious to see creative new proposals for rental housing, Indigenous housing or “green” housing projects that would help alleviate Vancouver’s desperate shortage of homes – even if it meant going against a rule about shadows or height or trees or some other regulation in what could be a 40-year-old area plan.
A little more than a year later, frustrated housing developers in the city say almost all of those projects are still stalled because council’s desire to hasten new home building appears to have been overtaken by city planners’ desire not to allow any one-off dispensations to the rules.
There is an increasingly noticeable tug-of-war between developers, who say the city’s complex rules and byzantine operating system are stifling housing construction, and planners who say that developers can’t be exempted from the rules even if there is a crisis.
Members of the development community say there isn’t a single project of the 40 proposals put forward under the council’s policy-enquiry process, called PEP, that has been given a clear signal to proceed. Many proponents say that while some have seen applications rejected outright, others are being allowed to proceed only after more planning work is done for some unspecified area around their property.
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The city says it has tentatively accepted about 14 proposals; however, developers say the majority of applications are being rejected with little reason given. And, even among the accepted projects, builders face a new time-consuming planning process.
“When PEP was first constructed, it was to look at projects that didn’t have policy support at the city but were providing a significant public benefit. But we’re largely in the same place we were before,” said Raymond Louie, a former Vision Vancouver city councillor who is now chief operating officer at Coromandel Properties.
His company has had its application for a 300-unit rental project with almost 60 below-market units rejected. It was told the planned development, near the 29th Avenue SkyTrain station, requires a “station-area planning program” first, along with a comprehensive study on what new services, such as sewer lines, might be needed.
City planners also turned down another Coromandel project that would create almost 1,550 apartments, 280 of them at below-market rents, in the southeast corner of the city because that area also needs a new plan before anything else, Mr. Louie has been told.
At Clark and Hastings, Onni Developments has received what appeared to be a more encouraging response.
Onni’s proposal for two towers with hundreds of apartments, along with a building around the corner that would be exclusively social housing, was accepted as a new proposal that could be considered.
It went to council and got a preliminary approval to proceed this past July.
But, in the latest communication this month from city planners, Onni was told there would need to be an “enhanced rezoning” process and also a “policy-review process of the sub-area” at that intersection.
“There seems to be a different spirit than what I thought the PEP was,” said Duncan Wlodarczak, chief of staff at Onni. “I thought it was up to council to decide. But it appears the planning department has just added a whole new level of process.”
And Stepan Vdovine, the director of business development at Amacon Developments, said a couple of the company’s projects are on hold because of the uncertainty over the new process, which he says has turned what was supposed to be a green-light system into something that “feels like a major bureaucratic detour and a delay tactic.”
Mr. Vdovine, who was the president of Vision Vancouver for years and knows the city bureaucracy well, said the original intent of the new process does not seem to have helped expedite building approvals. The complications are coming at a time when the construction industry is already slowing because of other challenges, including high interest rates, high construction costs and threats of a recession.
Many in the development community say the city council that was newly installed in November will need to send a clear signal to staff soon if they want anything to change.
That’s something newbie councillor Mike Klassen, who has already heard an earful from various builders on the topic, said he is going to be pursuing.
“I think our council is going to indicate we would like some allowance for more risk. We’re saying, ‘Let’s take a look at them and maybe give a get-out-of-jail-free card.’”
One person who will be challenging that approach is the city’s head planner, Theresa O’Donnell.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Ms. O’Donnell argued a strong case for not giving permission to one-off approvals for a building here or a building there.
Instead, if a good proposal comes in for an individual site but it doesn’t fit with current guidelines, her department then looks at how to develop new guidelines for the whole area around it so that multiple sites and builders can benefit from the new rules and a lot more housing can eventually be built.
“If we take an extra six months and do multiple blocks of the Downtown Eastside, I’ve now opened the possibility for dozens of new projects” instead of only unlocking two, Ms. O’Donnell said. “They have to wait a little bit longer but I free up more property.”
Builders have said that, while that’s a potentially good idea, the department is so short-staffed and there are so many mini area-plan projects in the works that it could take years to get around to doing all the adjustments.
Ms. O’Donnell doesn’t see that long to-do list as a problem. She said that it will force the development community into competing to present the best case for why the area around their project, rather than another one, should get attention from her department.
“Now it’s a competition of ideas. We’re not seeing the downside from a community point of view.”
She also queries whether all the developers are ready to build. “Go ask them that.” So many projects that already have permits and approvals are not proceeding as it is, she said.