A new study released by the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD) takes aim at the delays and extra costs placed on home-renovation and infill housing builds by red tape at the City of Toronto.

Released on September 20 and prepared by Altus Group Economic Consulting, the City of Toronto Committee of Adjustment Benchmarking Study finds that inefficiencies within the City of Toronto’s Committee of Adjustment (COA) processes add between $21,000 and $58,000 annually to the cost of renovations and infill building projects.

The study further showed that in order to meet the city’s goal of building 285,000 homes by 2031, the entire system must be overhauled.

“Toronto is a rapidly growing city, and the building of infill homes and renewal of existing housing stock add much-needed housing supply for current and future residents,” said Justin Sherwood, BILD’s Senior Vice President. “With the city recently adopting various zoning reforms such as four units per lot as of right, and looking to make additional changes in the near future, the need for a more efficient process that reduces strain on city resources has never been greater.”

BILD retained Altus Group to look at the City of Toronto’s COA timelines for decisions on minor variances, as part of a broader examination of the factors contributing to housing affordability challenges. The Altus study reinforces the city’s own findings, through a study with KPMG, that process improvements and data transparency would support approval timelines and efficiency.

The Altus study looked at the timelines for minor variance applications for the period between 2015 and 2022, using data from the City of Toronto’s Open Data Catalog. It found that the volumes of applications to Toronto’s COA and TLAB processes have doubled over the last decade, resulting in lengthy delays. These delays can add between 8% and 14% annually in additional construction-related costs, amounting to between $9 per square foot to $19 per square foot annually, or approximately $21,000 to $58,000.

The study also found that the total average decision timelines for typical COA applications, regardless of district, were 95 days across the entirety of the eight-year study period. That is 65 days longer than the 30-day service standard required by the province’s Planning Act and 32 days longer than the city’s own 63-day service standard target.

The report provides six recommendations for action by the province and the city to successfully improve decision timelines for minor variances. Most notably, it recommends delegating authority for minor variances to staff and fixing the underlying zoning issues that are creating increasing volumes of applications.

It also recommends the city make cross appointments to COA panels so that panel members do not necessarily live in the districts they represent, that zoning by-laws be available online to improve the quality of applications submitted to the city – and therefore speed up approvals, that the city improve its data transparency and reporting, and that parties to an appeal be monitored to cut down on out-of-scope discussions.

“Renovators in Toronto have long been advocating for improvements to the COA process,” said Peter Di Scola, Chair of BILD’s Renovator Executive Committee. “The current process sees an approval rate of between 93% and 95% for applications through the COA process, meaning it would be far more efficient for the city to update zoning bylaws to permit the most common types of COA applications.”

BILD represents more than 1,200 companies across the building, residential and non-residential land development and professional renovation industries in the Greater Toronto Area.

Its full report can be downloaded here.