Vancouver chief planner signals big reforms for flexible development | Daily Hive

City of Vancouver's chief urban planner signals major reforms for more flexible building development

Tower construction crane in downtown Vancouver. (Shutterstock)

As he approaches a full year in his role as the City of Vancouver’s general manager of planning, urban design and sustainability and director of planning, Josh White remains committed to making further inroads into shifting municipal guidelines and regulations over permitting building development toward prioritizing outcomes rather than process.

With the support of elected officials, he is looking to champion a multi-faceted approach that will fundamentally shift the municipal government’s planning regime to become more predictable and simple.

This includes rolling out far more standardized policies.

In an interview with Daily Hive Urbanized this week prior to his address to the Urban Development Institute today, White says work is well underway to consolidate the City’s planning policy documents — whittling down 1,800 pages perhaps into only about 100 pages.

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“We have a lot of repetition, a lot of redundancy, and a lot of conflict actually between those policies. So they sit here there and everywhere frankly, it’s a massive array of policies that we’ve amassed over decades that we can pretty dramatically simplify,” he said, noting that this includes consolidating different general design guidelines found in various different plans.

Some of this consolidation work began with his predecessors, but he is looking to take other big steps.

New concurrent rezoning and development permit processes

White is looking to shift building development applications into an overlapping concurrent process.

Currently, under the City’s regulations, the rezoning application (if required), development permit application, and building permit application are processed, reviewed, and approved sequentially in three separate steps in this same order.

Moving forward, the municipal government will more proactively conduct City-initiated pre-zoning, moving away from the current common practice of the time-intensive process of spot rezoning on a case-to-case basis.

Moreover, under a concurrent process, much of the rezoning and development permit application processes will have overlapping timelines, with a target to enable the rezoning, development permit, and building permit steps to be completed within one year. In recent years, the rezoning application process alone can take up to several years, especially for larger projects.

Going concurrently is not possible at the moment, and for proponents, there is too much complexity and cost risk in how the processes are currently set up. Applicants are concerned about investing in a development permit application only to have the rezoning denied.

But with the provincial government requiring the City to largely transition from a negotiation-based community amenity contributions (CACs) process to the provincially legislated Amenity Cost Charges (ACCs) system, which is deemed to be fairer and offers a high degree of predictability, the rezoning step will no longer be about extracting a public benefit. The transition to ACCs is expected to begin in 2026.

The predictable formula for ACCs would be developed based on an identified need for community amenities and infrastructure, but there would still be some room for negotiation, particularly for larger development sites. This identified need would also largely move away from the current practice of following the public amenity prescriptions of area plans, instead moving toward city-wide practices and standards.

vancouver new building application timeline

City of Vancouver

Another area of simplification is also removing some of the complex requirements that are typically presented in the rezoning application. Instead, the detailed design work will be left to the “more appropriate” step of the development permit application, White told Daily Hive Urbanized. Instead, rezoning will only be about the basic parameters of the uses, density, and the form of development.

While a concurrent process is new to Vancouver, White emphasizes that this new approach does not exactly reinvent the wheel, as it is already practiced and a proven method in other cities, including in Calgary, where he previously spearheaded similar reforms as the chief urban planner.

Changing the rezoning enquiry process

Some developers may opt to pursue the rezoning enquiry process ahead of submitting a formal rezoning application for consideration.

However, White says that this rezoning enquiry process has increasingly and unintentionally resembled a second onerous rezoning application process.

Starting in Spring 2025, instead of a standard application-like process for the rezoning enquiry, the City is planning to change this process to simply a phone call or a workshop with City staff to work out some of the issues.

“We bring many people to the table, understand the design principle issues that might arise, and from an infrastructure and amenity point of view. That opportunity to set up the project with kind of a custom timeline, creating mutual expectations around when we want to hit certain milestones and a far more collaborative approach, so that we can set up that process for success,” he told Daily Hive Urbanized.

Currently, this enquiry step is a checkbox process that lacks nuance and does not allow for dialogue, despite the complexities of some projects. The intent is to provide productive feedback at the very beginning of the development planning process in a highly efficient and more timely way. So far, they have tested a handful of workshop-style enquiries, and they were very well received.

More flexible tower floor plate sizes

White told Daily Hive Urbanized that new floor plate size guidelines will be introduced this week — taking immediate effect. As a guideline rather than a regulation, the change falls under his discretion as the City’s chief urban planner.

Greater floor plate size allowances will enable an increase of 3% to 5% of improved efficiency or an additional residential unit per floor.

During rezoning, moving forward, the City will be more flexible with the minimum building street frontage, maximum building height, number of towers per block, base podium height and depth, upper storey step-backs, and required yards. But they will continue to be firm on the required distance for tower separation to ensure improved livability and sunlight access.

City of Vancouver

Currently, the City’s conventional practice limits tower floor plate sizes to about 6,500 sq. ft.

“Our urban success, even our identity as a city and as a built environment, is very linked to the ideas of density, but balanced against tower form intensification openness to the sky,” he said.

“So as we consider how we want to adjudicate these standards and practices over time, we still need to be very focused on maintaining and even enhancing these aspects of what has made urban living in Vancouver successful. But we can do that without being solely fixated on a singular number.”

While 6,500 sq. ft. will continue to be the starting point, development sites with a larger street frontage will generally be given larger floor plate size allowances of about 7,200 sq. ft, but the degree of flexibility also depends on whether the development site is a mid-block location or an intersection corner location.

“In terms of corner sites, you don’t have as many of the same tower separate issues on one side, so there’s just more ability. You’re not impacting a neighbouring development site on a corner site as much as you were if you are on a mid-block site,” White told Daily Hive Urbanized.

“You can shift the massing over to one side, for instance, and in order to achieve a larger larger floor plate, that’s a perfect example of how a site condition should drive the outcome.”

For taller towers of over 45 storeys, the City will enable larger floor plate sizes of about 8,000 sq. ft.

He says taller buildings need larger floor plates by necessity for reasons such as an additional number of elevators, spaces for utilities, and seismic structural design codes, along with the consideration of enabling more optimal floor plan layouts, especially for residential uses.

For example, he notes, Vancouver’s tallest building of Living Shangri-La has tower floor plate sizes of 11,000 sq. ft. If this project were forced to limit their floor plate sizes to 6,500 sq. ft, it would never have been built.

“We should focus on the design we care about and the efficiency of the tower, not so much to sticking as close as we can to 6,500 sq. ft.,” he said.

“We should be driven more by principles and not a number.”

Development fee payment deferrals and expanding Surety Bonds

Improved flexibility offered by the City will also come from changes to when developers are required to pay their development cost levies (DCLs), development cost charges (DCCs), and cash-based payments to fulfill their community amenity contributions (CACs) obligations.

White says the municipal government will offer deferrals to better align the payment timelines with revenue realization, which is a consideration to account for the growing economic uncertainty, especially with the forthcoming impacts of the United States tariffs on Canadian goods.

“Today, we require a lot of those payments up front and that has a material impact on the cash flow of development,” he said.

Currently, he says, the City is in the process of designing the regulations for such deferrals — including the type of projects that would be eligible — and to minimize the short-term impacts on the municipal government’s cash flow.

For the City, its cash flow impacts would naturally be greater for larger development projects, as opposed to a smaller development like a multiplex.

As for cash payment CAC deferrals, the threshold for eligibility will be lowered.

In addition to expanding deferrals, White is looking to greatly grow the use of Surety Bonds, which could potentially unlock tens of millions of dollars for more productive uses.

Surety Bonds are “basically like an insurance type policy,” he says. “They free up a whole bunch of capital, and the City is still secured. There’s maybe a different process to collect than a letter of credit, but it’s still secured and it has the benefit to the developer of not having to tie up all that cash and capital in a letter of credit. That’s been an ask from the industry.”

Currently, the City uses Surety Bonds in a very limited way, but they are now looking to lower the threshold to provide more opportunities for this method to be held as a form of security against an amendment a developer is obligated to, such as providing an amenity to the City, for example. This will be an alternative to requiring a 100% cash letter of credit against such obligations in case the developer does not deliver. White is aiming to bring forward the proposed deferral and Surety Bond changes to Vancouver City Council in Spring 2025.

Surety Bonds are another concept that is new to Vancouver, but it is not a groundbreaking change, as it is already very commonly used in jurisdictions in Alberta and Ontario, he says. It is increasingly being adopted in Metro Vancouver.

In January 2025, Surrey City Council approved the expansion of its Surety Bond pilot program, which was first launched in 2016. This expansion increases the number of eligible development projects using Surety Bonds from 30 to a new limit of 50.

According to the City of Surrey, its use of Surety Bonds enhances the liquidity of developers, allowing them to reinvest in projects. The pilot project’s limit is being increased as they have reached the previous maximum of 30 projects. To be eligible, Surrey requires a minimum A+ rating and a securities amount ranging from $3 million to $15 million.

“The expansion of the Surety Bond Pilot Program is a significant milestone for our community,” said Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke in a statement.

“This enhanced capacity not only empowers developers with additional resources to drive their projects forward but also ensures that we are fostering the infrastructure improvements necessary for our growing city. As we embrace this innovative financing tool, we are taking a substantial step toward building a more resilient and prosperous future for all our residents.”

For White, these various changes are all part of a new “partnership mentality” he is introducing to the City’s planning mantra, and to create a relationship with developers that is based more on a “healthy tension” than one that is based on “acrimony or bureaucratic churn.”

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