Study
| EST. READ TIME 3 MIN.District of North Vancouver, Vancouver lead the Lower Mainland in red tape for new residential development
New Homes and Red Tape: Residential Land-Use Regulation in BC’s Lower Mainland
As an increasing number of Canadians move to major cities, housing prices have continued to rise. Understanding how public policy affects the supply of new homes is critical. Following several major studies in the United States on this topic, the Fraser Institute’s survey of housing developers and homebuilders collects data about how residential land-use regulation affects the supply of new housing. The data collected reflect the experiences and opinions of industry professionals across Canada. New Homes and Red Tape: Residential Land-Use Regulation in BC’s Lower Mainland is the first in a series tallying the data to represent industry professionals’ experiences and opinions of how residential development is regulated in cities across Canada. This report presents survey results for cities in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.
Estimates of typical project approval timelines in Lower Mainland cities range from 5 months in Pitt Meadows and 8.5 months in New Westminster to 16.1 months in the District of North Vancouver and 17.7 months in West Vancouver, where timelines are also rated the most uncertain. Vancouver, of the 18 cities with sufficient survey responses, has the third-longest approval timelines (15.1 months); and of the 16 cities ranked for uncertainty, Vancouver ranks third from the bottom.
Reported compliance costs and fees add up to a low of $14,357 per home built in Abbotsford and a high of $40,000 per home in the District of North Vancouver. Analysis of national data shows no evidence that these differences systematically reflect higher infrastructure costs of accommodating low density growth. Instead, the data suggest that intensifying cities—those building up instead of out—often have regulatory frameworks that are costly to navigate.
The survey reports that zoning bylaws need to be changed to accommodate more than 80% of new residential development in eight of 19 cities. Estimates of rezoning’s effect on approval timelines range from 2.8 additional months in Port Coquitlam to 13 in the District of North Vancouver.
Council and community opposition to residential development is perceived as strongest in cities where the value of dwellings is highest, raising questions about the causes and consequences of local resistance to new housing. The strongest opposition is reported in the District of North Vancouver, with Vancouver and the City of North Vancouver tied for second. This opposition is typically not perceived as a significant deterrent to building in Surrey, Coquitlam, and Burnaby.
The index of residential land-use regulation tallies the results of five key components of regulation’s impact—approval timelines, timeline uncertainty, regulatory costs and fees, rezoning prevalence, and impact from local council and community groups—in 10 cities that generated sufficient survey responses.
This index ranks Abbotsford as the least regulated and the District of North Vancouver as the most. Vancouver, the Lower Mainland’s core, comes in above average in all categories except for the frequency of rezoning and is the second most regulated city ranked overall.
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Kenneth P. Green
Senior Fellow, Fraser InstituteKenneth P. Green is a Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of over 800 essays and articles on public policy,published by think tanks, major newspapers, and technical and trade journals in North America. Mr. Green holds a doctoral degree in environmental science and engineering from UCLA, a master’s degree in molecular genetics from San Diego State University, and a bachelors degree in general biology from UCLA.Mr. Green’s policy analysis has centered on evaluating the pros and cons of government management of environmental, health, and safety risk. More often than not, his research has shown that governments are poor managers of risk, promulgating policies that often do more harm than good both socially and individually, are wasteful of limited regulatory resources, often benefit special interests (in government and industry) at the expense of the general public, and are almost universally violative of individual rights and personal autonomy. Mr. Green has also focused on government’s misuse of probabilistic risk models in the defining and regulating of EHS risks, ranging from air pollution to chemical exposure, to climate change, and most recently, to biological threats such as COVID-19.Mr. Green's longer publications include two supplementary text books on environmental science issues, numerous studies of environment, health, and safety policies and regulations across North America, as well as a broad range of derivative articles and opinion columns. Mr. Green has appeared frequently in major media and has testified before legislative bodies in both the United States and Canada.… Read more -
Ian Herzog
Ian Herzog was an Economist at the Fraser Institute from 2014-2016. He holds an M.A. in Economics from the Universityof Toronto and a B.Sc. from the University of Guelph. He is currently pursuing PhD studies at the University of Toronto.… Read more -
Josef Filipowicz
Senior Fellow (On Leave)
Josef Filipowicz, Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute, is an independent urban and regional policy specialist, and former analyst at theCanada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the Fraser Institute’s Centre for Municipal Studies. He holds an M.A. in Political Science from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Bachelor of Urban and Regional Planning from Ryerson University. He conducts research and produces reports on land-use regulations, housing affordability, property taxation, and municipal finance. He also comments frequently (in English and French) on policy issues in these fields, notably through radio and television interviews, panel discussions, public presentations, and blogs and op-eds. His work has been featured in numerous news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Maclean’s, Detroit News, and Financial Post.… Read more