Vancouver’s top planner says it’s time to scrap the city’s slow and extractive approach to development.
In the 10 months since joining the City of Vancouver, Josh White has been busy implementing an agenda that includes consolidating policy guidance and overcoming what he calls “institutional inertia.”
Speaking to an Urban Development Institute audience Thursday, White said his goals are to streamline approvals and support business through a “radically simpler” policy and regulatory framework based on “clear priorities” and an “ethos of partnership” with stakeholders.
Today’s planning system is essentially about negotiation with a heavy process and policy focus, said the city’s general manager of planning, urban design and sustainability.
White said sites are “under-zoned” and developers must “negotiate up” their density through public benefits.
“It’s heavily process-focused and it’s designed to be extractive, and I think that has a characteristic of being fundamentally slower,” said White, who previously served as Calgary’s director of city and regional planning, and co-chief planner.
But he said Vancouver is now shifting toward a more efficient model of “standardization,” reflected in municipal goals like 3-3-3-1. White said the city is making progress on smaller permits, but more change is needed to compress timelines for complex applications.
“The fastest rezoning that you can do is one that you don’t have to do at all,” said White, who holds a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from Queen's University, and began his career in the private sector.
“It’s where we can pre-zone more of the city and move straight to development permit. Yes, that means we’ll do more through the development permit, but the net effect of that will be a pretty dramatic efficiency in where we are going with our approval system.”
White said he’s also looking at implementing concurrent processes, such as the zoning and development permit processes running alongside each other.
Whereas city-building has been concentrated in certain areas through the Vancouver Plan, Broadway Plan and other frameworks, White said his long-term vision is a far more distributed growth model.
“If we care about outcomes like housing and delivering more hotels and opportunities for business throughout the city, this distributed growth model is really, really crucial,” he said.
White acknowledged acute cost pressures on developers, noting that cost and price have converged in a challenging way, affecting project viability.
White cited past eras when considerable wealth flowed into B.C.’s housing sector, prices were ever-rising and the city added a lot of expectation on applicants.
“We all tended to put up with it because the ever-increasing price bailed us out,” he said.
“But now, we’re not in that situation anymore. The music has stopped, and so we need to reckon with and confront the layering of that policy, the layering of that cost, and act on it.”
White said his team will introduce more flexibility regarding tower floor plates; adjust the timing of payments to mitigate upfront cost obligations; and allow surety bonds instead of letters of credit as a form of security to unlock capital for more productive uses.
The planning chief also said his team is rescinding and consolidating 1,800 pages of redundant, conflicting policy. Policy guidelines “say the same thing about pedestrian orientation in eight different ways in eight different documents,” resulting in unnecessary complexity and confusion.
“Just think about 1,800 pages stacked,” he said. “It might qualify as a tower in Vancouver.”
