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The Missing Middle Initiative has struck again with a revealing fact-based look at how Ontario municipalities are generating their claims to have sped up development approvals by 80 and 90 percent, in some cases. Spoiler alert: it’s not by actually processing approvals faster. Highlights:
- Some Ontario municipalities have reported an 80% to 90 % improvement in application review times, but this claim is a measurement illusion. It results from implementing workarounds in response to provincial policy requiring application refunds rather than from substantive changes.
- The workarounds include creating a pre-application consultation process (PAC) that allows for review work to be done without days being counted, increasing report requirements to lengthen the PAC process, and increasing the use of rejections.
- None of the workarounds provides applicants with lower risks or costs that would increase housing supply.
- The workarounds that municipalities are using make it impossible to track the effects of tangible improvements.
- The efficiency claims do more to degrade, rather than inspire, confidence in the development review process and the planning profession charged with managing it by failing to provide the public with a consistent measuring stick to measure municipal timelines.
- With the province reversing course on its refund policy, municipalities no longer need to use their alternative timeline accounting methodology.