Vancouver is behind on new housing targets assigned by the B.C. government, new data presented to the city council shows.
A staff report presented to the council on Tuesday revealed 1,607 net new units were built in the city between Oct. 1, 2023 and the end of March this year. The city’s target for the first year of the five-year target period is 5,202.
Vancouver was one of 10 cities placed on the first round of the province’s so-called “naughty list” in September. The province said it expects the city to add 28,900 new units over the five-year horizon.
Despite the slow start, Coun. Lisa Dominato said she was confident Vancouver was on track to exceed the five-year target.
“This is a snapshot, it’s only six months,” she said. “We do have a lot in the pipeline.”
Vancouver currently has 8,000 units under construction with another 14,000 approved, and 4,000 under review and is considering 4,000 low-density applications, and expects to have 31,000 units built within five years.
She added that the city is doing what it can in focusing on speeding up permit times, but that municipal governments are limited in what they can do alone.
“It is a collaborative effort when we deal with housing. We deal with the zoning, land regulation,” she said. “But we do need the provincial and federal governments to contribute and play a role, particularly where we want to have deeper affordability.”
Ron Rapp, CEO of the Homebuilders Association of Vancouver, said that while it was “disappointing” Vancouver was behind on the target, the city was less than 1,000 units behind if the figure in the report was adjusted for the fact it only covered six months.
More importantly, he said, the units coming online now have been in the pipeline for years, while the targets were only implemented last year. “Most if not all would represent permits and approvals issued some time ago under the previous status quo and pretty much none of these units would have stemmed from any of the recent efforts, and the process in the City of Vancouver has been notoriously slow over the last number of years.”
Even so, he said the city will face challenges hitting the targets due to a variety of factors outside its control including interest rates, construction costs, labour shortages and a slowdown in the overall market.
Architect and planner Michael Geller said cities face the irony that for years credit and financing were cheap but zoning and permitting were barriers, only to see the cost of building surge as those barriers begin to ease.
“The reality is that both the combination of higher interest costs and higher construction costs are conspiring to make it virtually impossible for most municipalities to see the number of applications and approve the number of applications,” he said.
Geller said one key move municipalities could make to speed up construction would be to ease or eliminate the development cost charges and community amenity contributions they require for new builds.
“In many instances (they) now will make projects completely unviable to proceed,” he said.
B.C. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon said he remained concerned that a variety of municipalities are falling behind on their provincial housing targets.
“We know they are not going to be able to solve the entire housing crisis in six months or in a year,” Kahlon said. “But it is vitally important that they are taking this seriously, they are taking measures to cut red tape, they are doing whatever they can to unlock housing opportunities.”
Kahlon said one step Vancouver could take to speed the process up would be to align its small-scale multi-unit regulations with the province’s own recently released site standards.
“I know council passed a motion to direct staff to come back with that information, but that single policy will help them get back on track to meet their targets,” he said.