British Columbia
A cross-sector coalition making it faster and cheaper to build homes in British Columbia.
About
The BC Innovation Coalition is a cross-sector group of practitioners from real estate, government, construction, technology, and academia, convened to address a single problem: building homes in British Columbia takes too long and costs too much. Regulatory fragmentation, permitting opacity, and disconnected data systems add months to project timelines and hundreds of thousands of dollars to project costs, before a single unit is built.
The coalition works by connecting the people who experience these barriers with the people who can remove them. We convene government and industry to surface where the process breaks down, and build shared tools that make the development process legible and predictable.
What we do
- Make the development process legible
- Developers, planners, and municipalities all navigate the same process, but rarely with the same information. We're building a shared map of BC's housing development approvals process that makes timelines, costs, decision points, and outcomes visible to everyone at the table.
The Housing Tool
Housing Process Mapping Tool
City of Victoria · 6-storey wood-frame purpose-built rental
Every professional who delivers housing in BC operates with a partial view of the process. Developers see their proforma; planners see their bylaw; lenders see their risk register. Nobody sees the whole graph, so cost gets added at the seams, and no one can name where.
The Housing Tool is an interactive map of the full development lifecycle for one well-defined building type in one jurisdiction. Every outcome carries the time it takes, what it costs, who decides, what documents it needs, which regulations govern it, and how it ripples into later phases when it goes wrong.
- 9
- phases
- 127
- decision points
- 330
- outcomes
- 21
- cascade chains
Zoning and regulatory path confirmation
Confirms which permitting path the site sits on by testing it against Victoria 2050 first, then the zoning bylaw: as-of-right, rezoning, OCP amendment, heritage, or tree protection. This is a desktop review of published bylaws by the developer or their consultant; the City confirms nothing before an application. This early read shapes the timeline and cost of everything downstream, and is revisited in more detail at the Phase 1 gate.
0.1 to 0.5 weeks
$800 to $2.5K
Developer, Development consultant
5 possible outcomes · Validated August 11, 2026
Free to use. Create an account to open the full map, or sign in if you already have one.
Members
The coalition brings together practitioners from government, development, planning, construction, and technology with direct experience in housing delivery and policy. Membership is by invitation, based on relevant expertise and a shared interest in making the process work better.
Aaron Nelson
Co-Founder
Investment Analyst
Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada
Chris Fernando
Co-Founder
Founder
Slate Strategies
Kemal Evci
Director
BC Ministry of Infrastructure
Garth Wardle
Senior Consultant
MYRA Systems
Nic Green
CEO
Parametric Properties Inc
Contact
If you work on housing delivery in British Columbia and want to contribute to the Housing Tool, correct it, or join the coalition, get in touch.
Aaron Nelson
aaronsnelson@gmail.comChris Fernando
chris@slatestrategies.ca