The last time Burnaby experienced the type of growth in construction projects currently underway, you’d have to go back to before the worldwide recession at the end of the last decade.
City hall is on pace to break its record for the annual total construction value of projects for 2015.
According to city staff, building permit values by the end of year are expected to be in the $800 to $900 million dollar range.
The record for building permit values is $792 million, set in 2008, prior to the big recession.
The numbers were presented at a recent council meeting.
And from the mayor’s perspective, with a number of development projects still in the works, he doesn’t expect the growth to slow down anytime soon.
“We’re booming,” Mayor Derek Corrigan told the NOW. “The desire to live in the centre of the region in a place like Burnaby is very, very high.”
He argued Vancouver is built up and that for people looking for rapid transit-oriented highrise developments, Burnaby is the “best game in town.”
But with that growth comes the challenges of meeting the demands to process the permit applications.
Corrigan acknowledged the issue, adding that time is money for developers. However, he said the city is trying to balance the hiring of additional staff to meet the demand and keep the planning department self-funded.
Council recently approved permit fee increases in some areas to hire additional staff to process applications.
“We try to push the work through on our end as quickly as we can,” Corrigan said, adding he also wants to ensure all the small and single-family developers are getting service too.
Coun. Sav Dhaliwal suggested, given the steady increase in building permits, it was time to look at overall staff levels to address turnaround times.
“I think we need to respond to that as we take on more business,” he said.
In 2014, the city handed out $698 million in building permits, while in 2013, 2012 and 2011 issuing $674 million, $514 million $615 million in permits respectively.
On the flip side, it appears getting your hands on industrial space is getting harder in Burnaby.
According to a report by Avison Young, a commercial real estate services firm, the industrial vacancy rate in Burnaby has dropped to 2.8 per cent in the third quarter of 2015 from four per cent 12 months earlier.
The company noted an acute shortage of industrial buildings for sale and a very limited and expensive supply of industrial land on which to develop new product have limited sales activity and helped push vacancy down in the city.
The rates are the lowest since the run-up to the U.S. recession between 2005 and 2007.
