BILD REPORT
Great city building requires
Bryan Tuckey is president and CEO of the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD) and can be found on Twitter (twitter.com/bildgta), Facebook (facebook.com/bildgta), Youtube (youtube.com/bildgta) and BILD’s official blog (bildblogs.ca).
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magine a world in which everyone has a similar vision of what it takes to build a great city. That’s the vision of the home building and land development industry. The industry faces many hurdles in executing great city plans but believes it will take the power of alignment to get Toronto and GTA to the next level. That means aligning all of the stakeholders involved: politicians and senior civil servants at both the municipal and provincial level, the industry, new-home buyers and the public.
We are all in this together and we should all be part of the solution 010 NEW CONDO GUIDE APRIL 12 - 26, 2014
// BY BRYAN TUCKEY
SHARED VISION As you can imagine, the GTA was a different place 40 years ago and today all of our partners must share a common vision of policies, values and outcomes to ensure that our industry can continue to build quality, complete communities for up to 100,000 people and 50,000 jobs that come to this vibrant region every year. Recently, BILD and the Ontario Home Builders’ Association submitted two papers to the province on the Development Charges and Land Use Planning and Appeals consultations that offer up some very worthy solutions to make the development process more efficient. Among our solutions, we believe that there is a lack of fair and consistent application of provincial planning policy through municipal planning documents across Ontario. It’s difficult to set a course for that new vision of building complete communities when many zoning bylaws around the GTA date back to the 1980s and 1990s, with some even from the 1950s. The lands most affected by outdated planning policies are often in downtown areas and transit corridors. Both areas are earmarked in the provincial Growth Plan, Places to Grow, to be the focus of intensification. The problem is that landowners must apply to rezone the land at a costly price in order to build there. The province must do more to encourage municipalities to update zoning bylaws to reflect the intent of Places to Grow by pre-zoning and pre-designating lands, streamlining the process of building approval so that municipalities can create a city that lives up to the goal of the provincial plan’s vision. If municipalities updated their zoning bylaws as they refreshed their Official Plans (OPs), they would reduce unnecessary processing delays, which would save new-home buyers a lot of money and help them achieve their dreams of home ownership. Best of all, this shift in priorities doesn’t have to cost taxpayers a penny. It’s simply a change in using the public resources that are already in place. Legally, Official Plans must be updated every five years and zoning bylaws within three years of an OP update. The province must take on greater responsibility to ensure municipalities are meeting this legislative requirement. This will lead to more certainty, fewer building delays and fewer appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board. We are all in this together and we should all be part of the solution. The industry, the consumer and government partners must work collaboratively for solutions and with integrity. It is time to imagine the city region in 40 years and make that vision happen. That’s alignment. Together with our partners in government, BILD will continue to work toward building safe, quality, complete communities that new-home buyers can afford to purchase. Why do we care so much? Because we live here, too.