A bold initiative and much…

A bold initiative and much needed. As a builder and developer in the GTA for over 25 years, we are not seeing development approval process accelerating, rather becoming more and more cumbersome and slowing down due to the pre-application requirements and lack of decision making or clear direction when it comes to matters such as design, engineering (site servicing and infrastructure), and too much control and decision making placed in the hands of commenting agencies and staff, that lead to what I call death by a thousand commenters, or comments ad nauseum.

Our experience has been very frustrating, especially given that different municipalities have different requirements, and even within their own departments, they don't follow the same application requirements, processes, timelines and have little accountability or incentive to accelerate development applications.

To truly make development affordable, the government needs to reduce red tape, reduce the scope of commenting agencies and staff on developments, and the burden of development charges on new development not just for rental or affordable units. It must be done in such way, so that municipalities cannot circumvent the new regulations by other means.

Our soft costs proportionate to hard costs has gone through the roof and it’s not just a matter how much we are being charged, but what it’s costing to get large developments off the ground and through the approvals process, which takes years. As an example, one of our projects, which has a significant affordable component, along with market units has been going through 4 years of approvals. I think municipalities and the province are talking the right talk of reducing red tape, but I truly believe that with their burgeoning development and planning approval processes and requirements they truly don’t understand what red tape looks like. Throwing money or more staff to planning departments isn't the solution, as it only serves to fund and increase the red tape.

So how do you cut something that you don’t know needs to be cut? It’s about taking a step back and letting builders to do what they do best, and make decisions on their developments, standardizing and reducing application requirements, implementing mandatory timelines, reducing the over burgeoning urban design guidelines which try to apply a shoe box mentality to development whereby all developments must conform to some arbitrary and nonsensically strict requirements and guidelines.

Municipalities have overregulated the industry to death through out-of-control zoning, urban design, design review panels, engineering, code, etc… requirements. It shouldn’t be that the CN’s of this world hold hostage developments that benefit communities for years. It shouldn’t be that some new urban designer holds an application because they don’t like the number of public benches in the landscape plan or that the floor plate is larger than their urban design guidelines, or some arbitrary parking ratio that no one wants in some ridiculous by-law created by people that don’t even understand the market or development. The system needs to change to make housing more affordable, and to allow builders to get approvals in a timely manner and at a reasonable cost.