Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by North Vancouver resident Johnathan French.
A new study came out recently, confirming what everyone already knew: Canada pays way too much for construction.
Even adjusted for increased wages, inflation, cost of materials, etc., what it really comes down to are soft costs: planning and design work, consultant fees, contingency funds, and land acquisition. We pay way too much for these.
This is an existential problem. If we cannot get these costs under control, we will fall further and further behind the rest of the world, spending more and getting less.
This is fixable, though. There is one aspect we can sort out right now to bring construction costs down across British Columbia: we need to standardize municipal bylaws that relate to construction — building permits, electrical permits, submission requirements, fees, etc.
As it stands, BC’s municipal governments seem to be doing their utmost to make construction bylaws as fragmented and confusing as possible.
For example, if you want to install solar panels on your roof, it might be straightforward in the District of Saanich, where, in most cases, you only need a simple electrical permit. However, if you want to do the same in the District of North Vancouver, you will usually need a building permit, which requires a site plan, roof plan, exterior elevations or cross-section, structural scale, and master requirements questionnaire.
Each municipality has their own bylaws and standards of review. For solar panel installations, you can sometimes get an exception for a building permit in the District of North Vancouver, but to do so, you must first submit… a building permit. I swear, I’m not making this up.
Multiply this by 161 municipalities in BC, and it’s no wonder our soft costs for projects are so high. Every municipality has their own distinct electrical permit requirements, building permit requirements, submission requirements, fees, etc. A contractor who works in one municipality might not feel comfortable doing the same work in another just because of the different bylaws. They might be legally responsible for work that doesn’t meet code.
We need to standardize construction across BC. Why should building a house be different in Metro Vancouver versus Vancouver Island? It just doesn’t make sense.
This isn’t to say municipalities shouldn’t have autonomy over other matters, but they should not have control over construction standards. Some might argue that rural areas should have more lax bylaws, but I’d argue we’d save more money overall by having everything standardized.
If our construction bylaws were all the same, skilled workers across BC could easily work anywhere across the province. Planners could apply the same planning and design methods from project to project. Small construction firms could expand their scope to different municipalities. Costs for heat pumps and solar panel installations would decrease, and homeowners would save money.
BC is already heading in this direction with standardized, pre-approved housing designs. However, this isn’t about making carbon-copy buildings everywhere; it’s about standardizing how we build.
It’s about sprinkler installation requirements that do not vary from Vancouver to Burnaby. It’s about furnace installers not having to spend hours reading new bylaws whenever they work outside their usual municipality. It’s about supporting small businesses and building more housing.
It’s about efficiency. We don’t need 161 different municipal construction standards, and we don’t need to waste taxpayer dollars constantly updating construction bylaws for all 161 of them when we could do them all together at the provincial level.
Of course, this is just one aspect of solving this construction cost crisis. Government entities like TransLink and Metro Vancouver should also focus on hiring fewer outside consultants for construction projects. Instead, they should build up their own permanent full-time teams of planners and designers who can do this work for less money. If large enough, these teams could also assist with municipal planning work, saving even more tax dollars.
We need to pool our resources instead of leaving everything fragmented.
We should also take a hard look at public consultations and how much money they end up costing us. Do we really need to consult the public on a construction project that already meets zoning bylaws? That seems like a waste of taxpayers’ money; if we eliminated these needless consultations, we could cut down on developer fees and, therefore, housing prices.
Government-related fees should not make up over 20% of a given project’s costs. Moreover, it should not take years to get a construction project approved. If someone wants to build, they should be able to do so with minimal paperwork, and they should be able to start construction in a matter of weeks, not years.
Even assuming we wanted to keep developer fees high, we should at least ensure the process is quick and easy.
However we go about it, we need to fix this problem. We pay way too much for construction, and we need to bring our soft costs down. If we can get our soft costs closer to those in France, Spain, or Italy, we could build much more critical infrastructure: roads, rapid transit projects, wastewater treatment plants, power stations, and more. It would also be much easier to solve the housing crisis.
This should be our number one priority. If we do not bring down these soft costs, we will spend more and build less. We cannot achieve long-term success without addressing this first, and we should start by eliminating this mess of municipal construction bylaws and replacing them with standardized provincial legislation.