B.C. housing innovators striving for faster, cheaper homes — and happier residents

From B.C.-made prefabricated mass timber components to regional policies that promote social well-being, homegrown innovations are contributing to faster, more affordable and ‘happier’ housing. This is Part 3 of Postmedia’s How Canada Wins series.

B.C. has long had some of Canada’s worst housing challenges.

The province is home to only about 14 per cent of Canada’s population, yet it has three of the country’s four most expensive rental markets. While the affordability and availability of housing has recently become a major issue nationally, the situation has long been a crisis in much of B.C.

It makes sense, then, that British Columbians are producing innovative approaches to approving, designing and building housing.

Building better

While many of Canada’s biggest industries have improved productivity over the years as technology advances, the construction sector is an outlier.

“This is particularly alarming given the urgent need to build more homes in the country, with productivity in construction now lower than it was 30 years ago,” the National Bank report says. “It’s especially troubling when considering the significant funds governments plan to allocate to housing development.”

The lagging productivity of Canadian construction has long been a source of frustration for Peter Moonen, national sustainability manager with the Canadian Wood Council. He believes prefabricated timber components can help B.C. and Canada build more quickly, sustainably, and cost-effectively.

“The issue is: how do we get more square footage from every hour of labour worked per worker. That’s productivity. And you’re not going to be able to do that by saying hammer harder, or run faster, or lift more,” Moonen said.

Part of the answer is moving away from so many homes being individually designed and then hand-built on site and towards more of a “factory” model, he said.

Moonen points to a new facility in the West Kootenay, where a fourth-generation family business called Kalesnikoff, which started as a forestry company in 1939, is producing modular mass timber components for housing.

Kalesnikoff’s 80,000-square-foot assembly plant was built last year in Castlegar.

“It’s a ton of excitement,” said Kalesnikoff’s senior sales manager Devin Harding. “We need more housing, built better, built more quickly. And that’s what this facility was really based around. … The technology here is cutting edge, we use a lot of robotics and things like that to help produce more efficiently.”

This kind of modular manufacturing is between 30 and 50 per cent faster than traditional residential construction methods, Kalesnikoff says, and 10 to 20 per cent cheaper.

“This allows construction to take place on site a lot more efficiently and a lot faster, reducing demands on an already strained labour market, allowing us to get more housing and construction projects completed more quickly for the communities that need them,” said Harding.

Kalesnikoff’s products are being used in an apartment building under construction in east Vancouver. The development is a first-of-its-kind partnership between the municipal governments of Vancouver and Vienna, Austria.

In 2018, the two cities signed an agreement to share information on building affordable, sustainable and energy-efficient housing, which has led to two sister projects: a 108-unit building in Vienna (called Vancouver House) and the seven-storey building now under construction near Trout Lake in east Vancouver (called Vienna House).

Vienna House will provide 123 affordable rental homes for seniors, singles, families and people with disabilities. Using prefabricated mass-timber construction for faster building and less waste, Vienna House broke ground last year and is expected to complete construction this year on time and on budget.

Even before the trade war with the U.S. made Canadians want to shop closer to home, Rocky Sethi was championing the benefits of homegrown wood. Sethi, managing director of Richmond-based developer Stryke Group and the former chief operating officer of Adera Development, has helped deliver hundreds of homes using mass timber, a term that describes engineered wood products, such as laminated beams.

“I’m a big believer — and this is well before the tariffs and everything else — that B.C. is uniquely positioned to have a closed loop for housing,” Sethi said. “We can harvest our own resources, we can manufacture our own materials, utilize regional materials, create regional jobs, and incentivize regional investment to address a regional housing crisis.”

Designing happier

Happy City, the 2013 book by Vancouver author Charles Montgomery, was published in a dozen languages and influenced conversations around the globe on how urban environments influence happiness. Since then, the people who design cities have been paying more attention to this area.

Last year, Port Moody implemented incentives and design guidelines to promote “social well-being” in multi-unit residential developments. To create these guidelines, described as the first of their kind in B.C., the city enlisted the urban design consulting firm Happy Cities, which was co-founded by Montgomery.

Port Moody has been rapidly transforming in recent years, from mostly single detached houses into a more dense and varied community, said Happy Cities’ senior housing specialist, Madeleine Hebert. This has prompted the city’s leaders to explore how higher-density housing can be designed to promote residents mental, physical and social health.

The city’s new policies provide incentives for developers — such as relaxations on parking minimums — to design projects in a way that promotes social connection, such as mid-rise buildings with well-designed, shared courtyards.

As Canadian cities and suburbs densify, this kind of design helps make “a good political case for density,” said Hebert, who is based in Parksville. “Because when people see these buildings, they’re like: ‘Wow, these are really great places. I can see myself aging here, I can see myself raising a family there.’”

“It is a good thing to do politically. We’re building this density, but we’re building really good density, and we’re developing social well-being while we’re doing it.”

Rob Turnbull has also spent a lot of time thinking about how to foster connection in urban life, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the painful effects of isolation. In his 12 years as CEO of the Vancouver-based charity Streetohome Foundation, Turnbull has largely worked on supportive housing and preventing homelessness, but more recently he has started promoting a housing concept he believes could benefit a wide range of people.

It’s a shared housing model Turnbull calls “chosen family pods,” where tenants live with a group of their choosing, which could include friends, relatives, colleagues or classmates. Each member of the pod would have a private, lockable bedroom, and the group would share kitchens, living areas and, in some cases, bathrooms.

This kind of housing won’t appeal to everyone, Turnbull says, but if it’s available as an option, it could offer a sense of belonging, safety and social support, as well as greater affordability. Turnbull estimates that a room in a shared pod could cost 40 per cent less than a typical one-bedroom apartment.

For-profit developers are interested in building this kind of housing, Turnbull says, but many cities have “archaic” rules standing in the way, such as bylaws limiting the number of unrelated people who can share a home.

Turnbull has been making his case to municipal officials in B.C., including a recent meeting with Vancouver councillors. But he hopes to meet this year with provincial leaders “to figure out how the province can drive some of this, because we can’t do it on a municipality-by-municipality basis.”

B.C. could benefit from similar legislation, Turnbull said, although he would like to see it apply to tenants other than seniors.

“We should also focus on these other populations that are missing the boat,” he said. This could include lower-income workers, recent immigrants, post-secondary students, youth aging out of foster care, and people leaving supportive housing.

“It’s a missing choice in the housing continuum. You have independent housing, and you have supportive, but there’s nothing in between.”

Permitting faster

Before any home can be built, it must get municipal permits. This is generally invisible to the public, but it’s crucial. And, homebuilders say, it can be painfully slow and difficult, needlessly adding time — and therefore expense — to the homebuilding process.

As recently as five years ago, the homebuilding process in B.C.’s most populous city was surprisingly archaic. If you passed by the city of Vancouver’s permitting office at 10th and Cambie on a weekday morning, it was a common sight to see a line of employees from architecture firms sitting on the sidewalk, holding rolled-up architectural drawings, waiting for the office to open.

Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, jokingly called this decidedly old-school process as Vancouver’s “hipster, artisan, analog permitting.”

It took a global pandemic to drag Vancouver’s permitting process into the modern age, and plans can now be submitted digitally. Now, Vancouver is digitizing further, exploring the use of artificial intelligence in the process.

Permitting process improvements yield few photo opportunities, said Yan, who is also a director of the Planning Institute of B.C. These systems are “not sexy, but critical,” he said, and the recent progress with AI represents their most significant modernization since the widespread adoption of computers in the 1990s.

Yan said the governments of Canada and B.C. deserve credit for spending on this behind-the-scenes technology. At a time when the B.C. government is setting housing targets for cities and mandating density, smaller municipalities with fewer resources could struggle to keep up, Yan said, and that’s where these technological advances can make a huge difference.

B.C.’s seventh most-populous city, Kelowna, has led the way in making permitting faster. Kelowna staff started working with Microsoft in 2022 to develop a “chatbot” that uses artificial intelligence and can receive building applications, check them for compliance, and even issue permits.

The AI service launched in the fall of 2023, and Kelowna staff believe it may be the first of its kind in the country, if not the continent.

“Now there’s thousands of lots in Kelowna where you can choose a pre-approved infill housing design and have a very quick city permitting process, a quick building permit process … and you’re into construction in three weeks,” he said. “To do the multi-unit housing in three weeks with the fast-track design is amazing.”

Over the past 12 months, Kelowna had a 189 per cent increase in permit applications compared to the previous year, Smith said.

Now with rising vacancy, Smith believes the city may see “a knock-down effect on rents where you’ll see affordability work itself back in,” he said.

“The rental affordability and vacancy rate story in Kelowna is going to be a very interesting one,” Smith said. “We’re pretty excited to see what the next 18 months look like.”