The City of Calgary’s administration permits department was busting its buttons with pride last week, announcing it had processed a record number of residential building permits, due in part to better procedures and processes at city hall. Insomuch as it’s the department’s job to process residential building permits, the fact it’s a record has everything to do with Calgary home builders satisfying a huge demand, brought on, no doubt, by 96,000 people moving to the Calgary Metropolitan Area over the last two years, according to Statistics Canada. However, congratulations to the permit department. Before residential building permits are approved for builders, the land the homes are built on requires a series of permits and the process is anything but better, a high-ranking executive in the land development industry told Western Standard in an exclusive interview. (We are withholding the name of the executive who has concerns about potential reprisals from the city.) We’ll call him Peter. “The permitting process is not getting better, although on some level there might be some micro improvements, but as a whole it has not and if you talk to people in the industry, it’s getting worse,” says Peter. Land developers take a lot of shots from the public, claiming they have politicians and staff at city hall in their pockets, but that’s far from true. Yes, developers donate to political campaigns, as do hundreds of other companies and industries that don’t have to deal with, and be dealt with, by city hall as much as do land developers. From the time a developer buys land for future subdivisions, years will go by and permits pile up before the developer sees a return on its investments of millions of dollars. The first permit required is for an outline of land use. “If we’re starting from raw land, it’s many years, from five to 10 years, but if a developer has land use approval, we start preparing engineering drawings which show all the pipes, the roads, all the technical stuff and put together a phase in a community and they all have to go through an approval process,” says Peter. “It’s a multi-step process from preliminary approval to final approval and that takes nine months to a year.” The steps include organizing schedules to install shallow utilities. “Say we've got all the roads in, now we’ve got to get power in there, we have to get natural gas in there, that’s sort of a city thing but more of an Enmax thing and those guys are trying to improve things,” says Peter. “We used to have an issue with the supply of contractors that Enmax used to put in the shallow utilities, the power, the street lights and the natural gas, but starting this year, they’ve allowed the developers to engage directly with these contractors, so now we have kind of control of the contractors.” Once the shallow utilities have been completed, approved and permitted, the developer sells plots of land to the builders, who must purchase a determined number of lots, set by the developer, in each new community. “Then they can apply for and get building permits and builders can start building with those permits if available,” says Peter. “They go down to the city and they apply for a building permit for each particular lot and then they start building their homes." “That is how you get a building permit in a nutshell. There are very many steps, lots of detail, a lot of conditions from the city to be met and it’s just more and more things now compared to what it was.” “It's a lot of work and, you know when things go well, we make a decent buck but there’s a lot of risk, a lot of costs, extra costs now and those costs get passed on so everything gets more expensive.” “We’re spending between two and two-and-a-half million dollars, just to get our land use approved.” He said the more stringent processes and the shortage of housing seen today started almost two decades ago. “This incredibly difficult regulatory process all started in about 2010 with the election of Mayor Nenshi and his group with Druh Farrell and others and they started restricting supply and allowing administration to kind of run amok,” said Peter. “It’s gotten a bit better and there’s a little bit more oversight from council, but it’s not great.” “This next election is going to be interesting if we get in a group at city hall who are claiming they’re going to go in and start cleaning house (because) I would say there’s still not improvement downtown."
The City of Calgary’s administration permits department was busting its buttons with pride last week, announcing it had processed a record number of residential building permits, due in part to better procedures and processes at city hall. Insomuch as it’s the department’s job to process residential building permits, the fact it’s a record has everything to do with Calgary home builders satisfying a huge demand, brought on, no doubt, by 96,000 people moving to the Calgary Metropolitan Area over the last two years, according to Statistics Canada. However, congratulations to the permit department. Before residential building permits are approved for builders, the land the homes are built on requires a series of permits and the process is anything but better, a high-ranking executive in the land development industry told Western Standard in an exclusive interview. (We are withholding the name of the executive who has concerns about potential reprisals from the city.) We’ll call him Peter. “The permitting process is not getting better, although on some level there might be some micro improvements, but as a whole it has not and if you talk to people in the industry, it’s getting worse,” says Peter. Land developers take a lot of shots from the public, claiming they have politicians and staff at city hall in their pockets, but that’s far from true. Yes, developers donate to political campaigns, as do hundreds of other companies and industries that don’t have to deal with, and be dealt with, by city hall as much as do land developers. From the time a developer buys land for future subdivisions, years will go by and permits pile up before the developer sees a return on its investments of millions of dollars. The first permit required is for an outline of land use. “If we’re starting from raw land, it’s many years, from five to 10 years, but if a developer has land use approval, we start preparing engineering drawings which show all the pipes, the roads, all the technical stuff and put together a phase in a community and they all have to go through an approval process,” says Peter. “It’s a multi-step process from preliminary approval to final approval and that takes nine months to a year.” The steps include organizing schedules to install shallow utilities. “Say we've got all the roads in, now we’ve got to get power in there, we have to get natural gas in there, that’s sort of a city thing but more of an Enmax thing and those guys are trying to improve things,” says Peter. “We used to have an issue with the supply of contractors that Enmax used to put in the shallow utilities, the power, the street lights and the natural gas, but starting this year, they’ve allowed the developers to engage directly with these contractors, so now we have kind of control of the contractors.” Once the shallow utilities have been completed, approved and permitted, the developer sells plots of land to the builders, who must purchase a determined number of lots, set by the developer, in each new community. “Then they can apply for and get building permits and builders can start building with those permits if available,” says Peter. “They go down to the city and they apply for a building permit for each particular lot and then they start building their homes." “That is how you get a building permit in a nutshell. There are very many steps, lots of detail, a lot of conditions from the city to be met and it’s just more and more things now compared to what it was.” “It's a lot of work and, you know when things go well, we make a decent buck but there’s a lot of risk, a lot of costs, extra costs now and those costs get passed on so everything gets more expensive.” “We’re spending between two and two-and-a-half million dollars, just to get our land use approved.” He said the more stringent processes and the shortage of housing seen today started almost two decades ago. “This incredibly difficult regulatory process all started in about 2010 with the election of Mayor Nenshi and his group with Druh Farrell and others and they started restricting supply and allowing administration to kind of run amok,” said Peter. “It’s gotten a bit better and there’s a little bit more oversight from council, but it’s not great.” “This next election is going to be interesting if we get in a group at city hall who are claiming they’re going to go in and start cleaning house (because) I would say there’s still not improvement downtown."
