City of Vancouver planners working at home adding to housing delays: former staff

City of Vancouver planners working from home contributing to housing approval delays, suggests former staff

Vancouver City Hall (Wangkun Jia/Shutterstock)

A proposed strategy to slow the process of reviewing new rezoning applications submitted to the City of Vancouver is raising some eyebrows, with the development industry warning it could exacerbate housing affordability issues.

This week, Vancouver City Council will deliberate and decide on the planning department’s proposal to implement temporary policies that allow City staff to select which applications to prioritize for review, based on new set criteria.

The municipal government is inundated with a backlog of applications, with City staff self-reporting an increase in processing times, and applicants suggesting there has been a considerable drop in service levels and response times to their inquiries.

City staff state the current application volume and types of rezonings have overloaded City staff’s operating capacity, resulting in “slower processing times, delayed response times, staff burnout, and customer frustrations.” They believe the spike in volume is a temporary trend due to the June 2022-approved Broadway Plan, and a surge in revised proposals due to fluctuating economic and financial market conditions, such as the recent rise in the number of condominium proposals pivoting to market rental housing.

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Earlier this month when City Council made its initial review of the proposed slowdown strategy, City planners suggested implementing new short-term measures over the next nine months of prioritizing the review of proposals that are compliant with existing policies, and creating a wait list for new policy enquiry applications — the step before a formal rezoning application submission — until City Council establishes its priorities and goals.

For medium-term measures through the next 18 months, applications with secured construction financing would be prioritized, along with implementing some initial capacity and efficiency improvements such as adding more City staff to process and review the proposals.

Over the longer term, beyond 18 months, City staff will work with City Council on changing policies, such as pre-zoning to reduce the need for rezoning applications in some cases, and implement the Vancouver Plan.

Generally, the types of projects that would be prioritized for review would be affordable housing, including secured rental projects with at least 20% of the floor space for below-market units, social housing, supportive housing, and co-operative housing. Job space projects — such as office, hotels, retail, and industrial — would also be prioritized.

“It takes too long [for reviews] in Vancouver. You’ll get no argument from me. And there is a current backlog extending from what was previously already too long,” said Vancouver chief planner Theresa O’Donnell.

“Our policies are in the way, we need to reduce and eliminate as many as possible, and that work is underway with my department now. It has been a key focus of mine since I got here. We cannot continue to do business the way we’ve been doing business.”

In Summer 2021, after it was discovered that City staff had put about 70 pre-application enquiries in a state of limbo for the reason of being non-compliant with City policies, including thousands of potential rental homes, the previous City Council created a path forward for such proposal intakes to be ultimately considered by elected officials. This discovery also coincided with a change of the planning department’s leadership, with O’Donnell taking on the head position.

According to City staff, since October 2021 when the Policy Enquiry process was launched, a total of 46 proposals going through the pre-zoning stream have been received by the City. Only 11 proposals have proceeded into the next application stages for further review, with these proposals representing a combined total of about 4,000 homes and 124,000 sq ft of job space. City staff note 65% of the overall Policy Enquiry submissions fell short of minimum criteria.

As of earlier this month, City staff are processing 100 rezoning applications and 120 rezoning enquiries, which collectively represent the potential for 8.8 million sq ft of job space (retail, service, industrial, and office) and about 36,000 homes, including 23,000 market rental homes, 4,100 below-market rental homes, 3,700 social housing units, and 4,800 condominiums.

O’Donnell says she wants to get to the bottom of why it takes many proponents about two years to come back with a formal application after an enquiry.

But there have been some suggestions that the problems are at least partially “self-inflicted” by the municipal government.

This includes the suggestion that semi-remote work policies for City staff, seemingly a legacy of the pandemic, are a factor in the operational organization of the planning department.

When queried by ABC councillor Mike Klassen, O’Donnell shared her team is required to be in the office at least two days per week, particularly City planners in zoning and the development process. She adds that development planners, including herself, are in the office almost everyday.

Michael Mortensen, a prominent local urban planner who runs his own consultancy firm, and a former City of Vancouver urban planner, suggested this semi-remote work policy is problematic for the nature of the type of collaborative work that City planners should be exercising.

“I think this is a big culture challenge for the city. I think people do need to come back to work definitely more than two days a week,” Mortensen told City Council during the meeting, when asked by ABC councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung.

He recalled that during his time with the municipal government in the 2000s, applicants could walk into the planning department’s reception area and ask for a face-to-face discussion about a particular problem in their proposal. Unlike today, he adds, the City Hall offices for planners were not spread over many different locations, as their workplaces were previously more concentrated and co-located.

“I do think we’ve lost that public service,” said Mortensen. “We’ve lost that, it is impeding problem solving, and I think even just face-to-face interaction with teams, planning and engineering… it requires co-location and people working together.”

He says City staff used to have access to a cafe where they could meet casually, and problems would then “serendipitously” be resolved. Instead, he says, they have now “become fragmented spatially.”

“I think COVID’s over and it’s time to get back to more team-based work,” continued Mortensen.

Mortensen also suggested he has consistently experienced major challenges with successfully reaching City planners by phone and email, never mind arranging face-to-face meetings. A number of other builders and developers have also told Daily Hive Urbanized they are experiencing similar communication issues with City staff.

Such challenges with timely and adequate communication can delay the progression of building designs towards an application-ready stage, with the applicants’ contracted architects, urban planners, and other consultants forced to remain in an unproductive holding pattern.

Klassen shared he has heard that some applicants are taking weeks for a response from City staff. O’Donnell, in reaction to the comments, said these applicants should then talk to her directly, as they should not have to wait more than a few days.

When it comes to the planning department’s current proposal of prioritizing rezoning applications for review, Mortensen likened such a strategy to be a City-wide version of City staff’s previous proposal of adding a “Pace of Change” policy to the Broadway Plan, which was rejected by City Council in March 2023.

The proposed “Pace of Change” policy was also strongly opposed by BC Minister of Housing Ravi Kahlon. Such slowdown policies go directly against the provincial government’s forthcoming annual housing approval quotas for cities such as Vancouver through the Housing Supply Act.

“I too oppose the approval of this slowdown proposal,” said Mortensen. “It’s a little echo of the Pace of Change policy that was rejected by City Council only weeks ago for the Broadway Corridor… I think it’s kind of backwards. We need to prioritize more forward-facing ways to deal with the rezoning backlog by eliminating unnecessary rezoning processes by simplifying and shortening the existing rezonings. The City needs a huge house cleaning of its policies to reset policies.”

Mortensen suggested rezoning applications should not be required for areas under recently created land use policies, including the area plans of the Cambie Corridor Plan and the Broadway Plan, and the Secured Rental Policy of allowing up to six-storey, mixed-use rental housing buildings along arterial roads. Such area plans and policies already include site-specific prescriptions on attributes such as height, density, and use, which makes the rezoning application process largely redundant — except for City staff’s desire to use the rezoning application process to negotiate for public benefits, including community amenity contributions (CACs).

There is now immense rezoning demand within the area of the Broadway Plan not only because of the densification prescribed by the area plan and the future subway, but also the pent-up demand from the temporary moratorium on most kinds of rezonings between 2018 and 2022, as part of the planning process for the area plan.

Mortensen also took issue with City staff’s proposed slowdown strategy of prioritizing applications with secured funding as a medium-term measure. He says financing for projects, including grants from the provincial and federal governments, typically require applicants to reach the more advanced stages of municipal permitting.

Jon Stovell, the president and CEO of Reliance Properties, suggested City staff “should not be trying to pick winners and losers amongst applications, [as] this is not their expertise or role.”

“This is a report about how to prioritize applications, not a report about how to prioritize procedures and policies, and it’s going to lead to less approvals of housing over time. We should be talking about prioritizing housing and getting processes out of the way. A lot of the backlog that staff has described is self-inflicted by supposed collective actions of City staff and past City Councils,” said Stovell.

Joe Carreira, the vice-president of development for Conwest, told City Council the proposed slowdown strategy could result in “some good projects being left behind.”

As for getting applications across the rezoning finish line, this year to date, City staff have noticeably presented fewer rezoning applications to City Council for consideration in public hearings. O’Donnell said there was a “slow ramp up due to a number of different factors,” which likely include the previous onboarding process of the newly elected City Council earlier this year. But she says for the forthcoming public hearings scheduled for June, July and throughout this Fall, City Council can expect seven or eight rezoning application items per agenda.

When asked by Kirby-Yung whether more hours could be added for City Council’s public hearings, which currently typically start at 6 pm and cutoff at about 10 pm, City manager Paul Mochrie suggested these types of meetings could possibly start in the afternoon instead to provide more time to get through proposal presentations, questions to the applicant and City staff, public speakers, debate, and decision.

During the meeting, it was also revealed that the actual implementation of the Vancouver Plan into an official community plan for the City will not be considered until towards the end of City Council’s term. O’Donnell said this is due to both necessary policy work by her planning team and required legislative changes to the Vancouver Charter by the provincial government. While the previous City Council approved the framework of the Vancouver Plan in July 2022, it has yet to be made into a legal document.

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