According to findings from a Municipal Benchmarking Study from the Canadian Home Builders' Association (CHBA) released in early March, the City of Edmonton is approving building applications over eight times faster than the nation's most populous city, Toronto.
The study looked at 23 municipalities from across Canada to compare how much municipal fees are charged on a new residential development, timelines for development application processes, and what features are in place to help applicants navigate the development application process. In turn, the study examined how these factors shape housing affordability and availability for young families in those communities.
Those that scored well tended to have better housing affordability and availability, while the opposite was true for municipalities with low scores. After tallying up average timelines and municipal fees, Edmonton ranked first and Toronto (one of the most unaffordable markets in the country) ranked 21st out of 23.
Since then, cities across Canada have been awarded millions in bonus funding through the Housing Accelerator Fund for achieving goals largely intended to increase housing supply by improving things like approval timelines and municipal fees. The funding went to cities that met goals and housing targets on time in the first year of the program and proposed additional initiatives to accelerate housing.
For their efforts, Edmonton was awarded a substantial $17,484,000, while Toronto did not qualify for the potentially millions in bonus funding.
To get an understanding of how Edmonton — which also ranked #1 on CHBA's 2022 benchmarking study — is able to approve new housing so efficiently, we spoke to the City's Branch Manager of Development Services and BILD Edmonton Metro.
Simplifying The Planning Framework
"There's two ways of looking at it, either Edmonton is really good at [efficient approvals], or the rest of the country has become bad at it," CEO of BILD Edmonton Metro Kalen Anderson tells STOREYS.
In 2024, Edmonton was approving development proposals in three months, on average, while Toronto was taking roughly 25 months. And as Anderson points out, time is money when it comes to building homes.
"Every day that a project is delayed is a carrying cost on that home, and that carrying cost gets passed on to homebuyers," she says. To mitigate costs and maintain the consistent delivery of housing units, the City of Edmonton has been making concerted efforts to simplify the process as of late.
Over the last five years, for example, they've undertaken a complete overhaul of their planning framework, that is, policy and guidelines that inform what can be built where. Most notably, Edmonton crafted a new City Plan and consolidated around 200 District Plans (what Toronto calls Secondary Plans) that were created in the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s into just 15 updated District Plans that better reflect the direction the city is headed in.
"Over the years, whether it's through Council motion or administration-driven activities, more and more guidelines, more and more regulations, more and more policies continue to add on to that framework," Branch Manager of Development Services at the City of Edmonton Travis Pawlyk tells STOREYS. "So we've had a concerted effort to streamline all the policies and regulations that we take into account when we look at development approvals."
On top of that, the City rewrote their zoning bylaw and land use bylaw to both reduce zones and land uses within Edmonton by half in early-2024. "So right there, we're tackling the permit timelines by reducing the number of permits that are required overall in the system," says Pawlyk.
(Un)restrictive Zoning
With the District Plan count reduced to a mere 15 and the number of zones in the City cut in half, the application and review process is made more efficient for both developers and city staff.
More than that, the zoning bylaw overhaul included councillors approving as-of-right development of three-storey multiplexes up to eight units in any residential area citywide in October 2023, alongside a number of other as-of-right permissions including higher density building types along transit corridors and town centres — a move Anderson calls "a really big deal."
Toronto councillors voted to allow multiplexes as-of-right citywide up to a lesser four units in May of that same year, and the City has also voted to allow townhouses and six-storey residential buildings up to 60 units on major streets and legalize garden suites, though the latter has received a decent amount of pushback from community members.
The city is headed in the right direction, but for years Toronto has been notorious for its restrictive zoning rules and 'yellowbelt' which limit the development of most housing types beyond a single-family home, and the city has a serious NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) problem where community members push back on development proposals that they see as changing the character of their neighbourhoods.
In the fall, a study from Toronto-based urban planning firm Smart Density found that current planning policy is severely underutilizing development land near higher-order transit. Hypothetically, the study found, Toronto has the potential to accommodate a whopping 7.6 million new homes and 12 million new residents near transit “without compromising quality of life.”
Not only does restrictive zoning slow the delivery of new housing supply, it limits the number of sites in the city that can be developed with high-density, mid- and high-rise residential buildings without submitting a zoning bylaw amendment, adding time and costs for a greater number of developers hoping to intensify under-utilized land.
Leaning Into Automation And AI
Between the most recent CHBA benchmarking study and the previous 2022 version, Edmonton's approval timelines have fallen from 10 to three months — an improvement BILD's Anderson largely attributes to the City's adoption of AI technology.
For example, development review started utilizing AI in January 2024 to approve single-detached or semi-detached homes in greenfield areas (a Small Scale Flex Residential zoned area), a process which involves automated risk analysis to determine which applications require inspections.
Automation has also been used to cut back timelines for business licensing, for example. "Last year we looked at our business licensing system, which is tied to all of your development permits and your building permits to open your business," says Pawlyk. "We reduced that time by 30% last year through removing and automating some of the processes within it."
While Toronto hasn't made the jump to approving more minor development applications using AI, the City has been putting forth a concerted effort to reduce application timelines through the creation of the Development Review division, launched in early 2024, which, in part, is looking to utilize tech to shrink wait times.
In an interview with the head of the division Valesa Faria early last month, for example, Faria shared with STOREYS that they would be implementing some new technology tools, one tool being the File Circulation Tool, an internal workflow tool for staff that tracks comments across the various disciplines to ensure they are meeting their timelines more efficiently, and to easily identify conflicting comments and resolve them quicker.
"A Barn Raising Culture"
On the streamlining and planning policy front, Toronto is on the right track but still has a ways to go. So for now, Edmonton maintains its bragging rights as one of the most attractive places to build homes in Canada, not only for its quick approval times, but for having relatively low municipal fees as well.
For Anderson, Edmonton's success approving and building developments at the fastest rate in the country is also a reflection of the City's culture.
"We have a bit of a barn raising culture here, and we try to help ourselves, help our neighbours, and work through things together in in a manner that might be more akin to small town thinking, but we're a large metro area of 1.6 million," she says. "From planning policy, through to the regulatory reform, leaning into technology, and focusing on our culture, those are the things that separate Edmonton from the rest of the pack. And I don't see any reason why all Canadian cities can't follow in those footsteps."
At the same time, she says Edmonton, along with the rest for Canada, could be doing more.
"Edmonton can always be doing better, and I think that's one of the cool things about our culture, is that we're always trying to do better," says Anderson "I would say it, a developer would say it, the mayor would say it, the senior administrators would say it. We're all on the same page that Edmonton can keep doing better. But I think the challenge for other Canadian communities is that they have to do way better."