Badly needed rental housing bogged down at Vernon city hall
They say silence is golden.
When it comes to getting new housing built in Vernon, that rings very true as city staff stay silent on just when they’re going to look at new applications, which adds to the cost of things like rental housing.
“For the longest time we weren’t even able to get a response to phone call messages or emails,” Jay Gillman, principal with BlueCrow Architecture Inc., told iNFOnews.ca. “If you have to wait a year - in our current market, things don’t get cheaper in a year.”
There’s some key steps in the development process that keep moving things forward. One of the biggest is to have city staff actually review proposals, give feedback and refer them to other approving agencies.
Projects that used to get responses in a month or two are now stuck in limbo.
“Even (if we had) that transparency up front: ‘Hey, we’re not going to look at your proposal for seven months or six months. The time lines are ticking by. We’re down to four months before we look at it,’” Gillman said. “But you can’t get that straight answer. ‘We’ll get to it when we get to it’ is the sort of answer you get, which sounds sort of flippant and kind of pisses me off.”
To rub salt in the wound is his current effort with the developer of a 49-unit rental apartment building in the 3900 block of 32 Avenue near downtown Vernon.
It’s proposed by Tectona Developments out of Vancouver, a company that is currently building a triplex in Vernon after taking a year just to get a building permit. It also has lots of experience building in Vancouver.
“Housing issues are everywhere,” company president Worapol Taksinrote told iNFOnews. “I love the City of Vernon. We would rather be in a city where the infrastructure is concentrated into one location, where there is transportation as well, rather than go to the suburbs and use industrial land or agricultural land for residential.”
Not only does the city need rentals but affordable rentals, so he’s doing what he can to provide that.
The 49-unit project is intended to have at least five affordable apartments – meaning 30% of the median rental income for Vernon residents – with 15% accessible and 20% more energy efficiency than building standards require.
Taksinrote freely admits he's in business and needs to make money.
“As a developer, we try to eliminate risk,” he said. “One of the risks is unpredictability, not only from the construction costs but also from the permitting time lines.
“I work with a number of municipalities. We work with the City of Vancouver. We get updated. We know where we are, where we are getting to and what the time line looks like. We know who the person is that we need to contact and we get a response in a day or two."
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That’s not the case in Vernon.
Taksinrote first met with Gillman in August 2022 to talk about what could be built on the site. In October of that year, they sat down with the city for a pre-application meeting.
Based on the city’s input they worked on the detailed designs and in August of 2023, submitted applications for rezoning, a development permit and a variance permit, asking for a few fewer parking stalls since the building is for renters and is close to transit and shops.
Then the silence hit, despite Gillman leaving phone and email messages every three to four weeks asking for updates.
He finally got an email from the city on Jan. 15 saying the file was being re-assigned because Matt Faucher, the planner handling it, now has to work on adjusting the city to new provincial housing regulations.
“From their perspective, the city says they’re understaffed and the new provincial legislation has diverted a whole bunch of their staff to try to get ready for that, but it sucks for people who are actually trying to do this and have been trying for awhile,” Gilman said.
He was working with another builder who had to wait for more than a year to get a development permit.
“That should be a one-month process and, with variances, maybe you’ve got to go through council,” Gillman said. “This shouldn’t be, hey, this will sit here for five months or half a year before the city will look at it.
“If that’s how it is, the city should be finding a way to be more efficient. Whether that means hiring people who aren’t registered planners or have those qualifications to do the draft work then the planner checks it, I don’t know what that looks like.”
The delays add to financing, construction and other costs for the builders.
“For every month that it takes the city to process an application, that adds to that rent they have to recoup at some point,” Gillman said. “So, if you’re trying to do affordable rental units, you can’t necessarily absorb that by increasing the rental rate.”
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The delays are also disruptive to businesses like BlueCrow.
“From a logistics point of view, it can create interesting bottlenecks in a small office like mine,” Gillman said. “For me trying to plan how my workload is – you do a couple of months’ worth of work then you have to plan for the next year-and-a-half to two years before you actually finish that work.
“Then a few of them get through and you’re scrambling. You can’t just say, great, we’ll sit and wait until you’re ready to move forward because you’ve got to keep staff working and projects coming in.”
The City of Vernon planning department didn’t respond to a request for an interview by publication time.
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