How Kelowna is showing the nation how to speed up new home construction
It's been a decade since the City of Kelowna overhauled its building permit system to make it faster, and just a few days since it launched it’s chatbot for the same reason.
Both of these efforts are leading the country in innovative ways to cut red tape in order to get shovels in the ground faster.
This comes at a time when the provincial government is urging municipalities to get more homes built faster, and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is saying the pace of construction needs to double across the country over the next few years if housing is going to have any chance of ever becoming affordable for most people again.
In 2013, Mo Bayat, the city’s development services director, volunteered the city to become Canada’s “alpha client” for the International Accreditation Service and he’s still trying to get the message out that cities can speed up the issuing of building permits.
“If you come to City Hall today and you want to convert your basement into a secondary suite, if your application is complete, within two days we can issue the building permit,” Bayat told iNFOnews.ca. “We improved our services so much that for a house, only 10 working days. That is second to none.”
For multi-family projects, once all the approvals are in place and the application is complete, building permits can be issued in four to six weeks.
The accreditation process was gruelling.
“(The International Accreditation Service) come and turn every rod in your process, policies and procedures,” Bayat said. “They look at how are you going to make their standards from many aspects and then they give you corrective actions to fix your policies and procedures in order to create efficiencies, quality assurance programs, quality management control programs and so forth.”
The evaluation process is only the first step. Getting the changes made was the next challenge.
“Frankly, those corrections are time consuming,” Bayat said. “That means we required a change in management to get the staff to buy in because you are changing the direction as you go.
“Human beings tend to stick to the status quo but no, we kept changing things and that was the hardest part. Now the staff are proud of that. They’ve bought in and it works fine.”
The accreditation is for two years, which means the department is repeatedly re-evaluated to make sure it continues to be as efficient as possible.
After 10 years, Kelowna is still the only city in Canada with the accreditation. Las Vegas and Philadelphia are the only two American cities listed on the service’s website as meeting that standard.
Bayat’s department also started testing the city’s new AI chatbot this week.
READ MORE: Kelowna chat bot will get building permits approved in minutes, not weeks
It’s called KAI and identifies itself as the city’s “virtual assistant in training (beta version).”
The city has not yet announced that the chatbot is live since it wants customer feedback first.
It allows users to type in their address, determine what is allowed in their zone and lead them through the application process.
“If any of you have used city bylaws before, you have to go into that 300-page PDF document, you have to fish around between five or six different sections, even to get permission to build a single-family house,” Ryan Smith, head of the city’s planning department, told a Chamber of Commerce lunch last month.
“The idea is that the chatbot will guide you through your journey and help you get the permits you need to do the construction you want without having to know what pages of the bylaw apply. If you want to build a daycare, you can say: ‘I want to build a daycare. What do I need to know for that?’ and it will pull the information out for you. We’ve been training it and testing it.”
It went live on Oct. 3.
READ MORE: Speed up housing builds by getting the province out of the 'roads': Kelowna planner
Developers probably won't need the help of the chatbot because they are experts at navigating the system, Smith pointed out.
Instead, it’s expected to help the average person to, for example, build a carriage house. The easier it is to do that the sooner more housing gets built, Smith said.
With provincial funding assistance, and support from UBC Okanagan, the technology is not proprietary to the City of Kelowna so once the bugs are worked out it will be available to other cities across the country.
Go here to check out KAI the chatbot.
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