Josh White: one-year interview

Upcoming: Rupert and Renfrew, Granville Street, short-term actions on costs

Vancouver GM Of Planning Josh White On The Policy Changes During His First Year. Howard Chai, Storeys, May 2025.

Some interesting things are happening soon:

• The Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan is coming to council in early June. Summary report for Phase 4 public engagement - overall response is quite positive.

• The Granville Street Plan is also coming to council in early June. Summary report for Phase 3 public engagement - public safety is a major concern.

• Short-term actions to help offset rapidly rising costs will come to council on June 18.

From the interview:

Q. Regarding the various changes to help projects become more viable, can you talk about what the consultation with the development industry has looked like? Are the changes we're seeing things that the industry has said would help them?

A. We heard a lot of feedback from the development history around the cost pressures that are underway and it's no secret to anyone that even if you just simply look at hard construction costs since COVID started, they've risen dramatically higher than normal inflation for other consumer products and that's put a lot of pressure on the viability of projects.

There's immediate short-term actions that we could take, and we're taking a suite of actions to Council on June 18th. We heard feedback around the timing of payment of things like development charges. Taking that payment later in the process as opposed to upfront can help with the cash flow of the project and financing the project, so we're proposing some programs around deferring that payment to later and managing the financial impacts of that cash flow to the city. That applies both to City of Vancouver DCLs and also Metro [Vancouver] development charges. Increased use of things like surety bonds over letters of credit again have a lot to do with freeing up capital in order to deliver housing. Timing and payment of cash CACs as well, more flexibility on tower floor plates to improve viability given some of the pressures on the efficiency of buildings for building codes and things like that and energy codes, just providing a bit more flexibility allows projects to pencil out a little bit better without really much perceivable impact in terms of our urban design.

Those are the types of changes we will be introducing right away in June, but it needs to be part of a longer-term sustained effort to make sure we're more conscious of the impact of our policies and our expectations on the viability of projects. For a long time in Vancouver, this sort of ever-increasing price of homes always bailed us out in terms of those layered costs on development, but we've hit a bit of a reckoning point in terms of hitting the upper limit on those costs and how much the price of rent can contribute to that, so we need to address the cost side of the equation and so that's what we're doing.

Josh White also talks about a longer-term effort to prioritize and simplify the enormous mass of regulations that’s built up over time.

On the regulatory simplicity front, I think a marquee effort we're trying to do is around all our city-wide development and design guidelines. The view cone work and the solar access work was part of that, but the next step in that will be dramatically simplifying that. We have over 2,200 pages of city-wide design and development guide policies here, there, and everywhere over many decades and we will be taking the first steps this summer and consolidating that work.

It's actually very difficult to even understand what our priorities are, trying to wade through that much complex and layered policy. What we need is a much clearer expression, a much simpler expression, a much more user-friendly expression of what our policies are and so consolidating that and radically simplifying that work is on the horizon very soon and that will fit into our overall approach to planning.

More

• Previously: Rupert and Renfrew (July 2024), Granville Street (February 2025), taxing land lift is an unreliable source of revenue (October 2024), a suggested list of regulatory priorities (July 2024).