Laneway home dream turns into 'absurd' nightmare

A would-be laneway home builder says bureaucratic delays and demands from Vancouver city staff have pushed his costs so high that his price per square foot now rivals that of Vancouver's new luxury Trump Tower.

Prashant Pandit, 60, wants to replace the garage behind his Kitsilano home with a two-storey laneway house for his son, a university student.

Pandit says he thought the city of Vancouver encouraged the small, innovative structures as an affordable solution in a red-hot real estate market.

But he says he's been waiting for a building permit for seven months — and counting.

"I'm very frustrated" says Pandit, "I wish I never started this project."

He says the approval process has bounced from one city department to another, despite hiring a prominent Vancouver architecture firm that began consulting with the city last summer.

Pandit and his architect applied for a building permit in October 2015. At first, a city official told them the home could be slightly larger than they originally planned — six inches higher and 700-square-feet in size.

Later, another staffer told them the design had to be six inches shorter, and only 600-square feet. So they changed the design back.

Pandit says most recently, his project has been bogged down by requirements from the city's landscape development planner, who has demanded Pandit plant a "minimum six centimetre deciduous tree" and "clarify locations of nine wisteria vines, ensuring there is adequate support structure."

The email demanding those changes got lost for three months inside city departments, before finally being sent to Pandit and his architect. There was no apology for the added delay, he said

Absurd demands

Pandit showed the CBC the wisteria vines in question, withered and clinging to the wall of the garage that scheduled to be demolished.

"We didn't know whether to laugh or cry, it was completely absurd," says Pandit. 

"It seemed so bizarre, and I wasn't building the hanging gardens of Babylon here, just a laneway house."

The City of Vancouver says Pandit has been waiting five months for his building permit, not seven — and says that's a normal wait time given staff have been inundated with laneway home requests.

In a statement to CBC News, a city spokesperson says there's been "a surge of more than 500 permits issued in 2015 ... over 2,000 approved since 2009."

But the city's acting director of planning, Jane Pickering, admits, "if there are improvements we could make we would like to hear about it and we could work towards that."

• Why laneway homes are a tough sell in some cities

'Nobody coordinating'

But one of Vancouver's top architects says there are problems within the city planning department, and they're causing delays for both small and large projects.

Architect James Cheng designed the tallest building in the city, the Shangri-La tower.

Cheng says the city has been without a planning director for months, and has been lacking direction for years.

As a result, he says, "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing."

"There's a lot of new rules that come in, and there's nobody coordinating them all ... instead of having a common voice with the objective that the city wants," says Cheng.

Costs doubled

Other would-be laneway home builders are complaining on social media, upset over inconsistent rules, poor communication in the city planning department and lack of oversight since the top planner, Brian Jackson, retired last fall.

One blogger writes, "Hoops I had to jump through ... left me so frustrated I basically stopped blogging for fear of pounding my keyboard so hard as to break it."

In the end, Pandit says delays have doubled his projected costs from $250,000 to $500,000. And that means his cost per square foot is now approaching that of Vancouver's newest skyscraper.

"The cost of the Trump Tower construction is about 850 dollars a square foot, so this is 750. So that is the comparison here, it's rivaling the cost" said Pandit.

'We apologize if there has been ... angst'

Vancouver's acting director of planning has some sympathy for Pandit.

"I would say we apologize if there has been a lot of angst that we've created on his part, and thank you for building that beautiful laneway house" says Picketing. "I've seen the plans and they are beautiful."

Pandit says he's now financially committed to build his laneway home, despite the delays. But he says if he knew at the start what he knows now, he would never have applied for a building permit. 

"I wouldn't do it again. Seriously not."