Altus Group recently prepared a report for the Building Industry and Land Development Association, or BILD, which you can download the report from the link below:
https://bildgta.ca/advocacy/reports
According to Altus, the report is intended to “undertake a study of several factors that may be contributing to housing affordability issues in major housing markets across the Greater Toronto Area, such as municipal approval processes, resulting timelines for approvals, and government charges levied by municipalities.”
Which is exactly what the report does—after veering off into a seemingly unrelated analysis of population statistics in the early part—finding that development approvals take longer than they might due to a number of factors affecting the duration and complexity of the municipal approval process, which the report uses to estimate additional costs associated with approval delays. The report assesses each municipality in the GTA and ranks them for approval efficiency.
The report is interesting and I recommend anyone in the multi-unit residential sector read it, even if it is published by an organization which has an interest in streamlining development approvals. But I suppose so, too, do “home buyers”, who would like to pay less for new housing or at any rate see more of it built.