Housing is not failing because of bad actors. It is failing because no one is accountable for the system. Capital Region municipalities, the CRD, the Province, and the federal government all have authority. So why is the outcome failing? Fragmentation is the issue.

Too many decision-makers, mandates, and silos, with no one responsible for cumulative outcomes. This is the defining condition of housing delivery.

Let’s be direct: the system does not function as a system.

Fragmented Decision-Making Is Delaying Housing Projects

Projects are approved in good faith, capital is committed, and risk is taken on, then the rules change mid-stream. Requirements are added. Standards shift. Interpretations change. And projects are forced into redesign.

There is no realistic way to understand all competing priorities across all levels of government in advance. It is like aiming at a goalpost that keeps moving while multiple players shift it, and only fragments of the field are visible.

Each reset burns capital: delay, redesign, financing exposure, lost momentum. This is not the exception anymore. It is the operating model.

Different authorities. Different interpretations. No coordination of outcomes. And when it fails, accountability dissolves into finger-pointing.

The result is predictable: higher costs, stalled projects, and housing that never gets built.

The Cumulative Cost of Changing Requirements

Coordination across the system has never truly existed. And yet every layer continues to add requirements as if the system is coordinated.

The real issue is cumulative impact with no system owner. Every added requirement increases cost. Every delay increases exposure. Every redesign compounds risk.

And then we act surprised at the affordability collapse.

There is one controllable lever: alignment across all levels of government. Without harmonization, certainty disappears. When certainty disappears, financing disappears. When financing disappears, supply disappears.

Even the National Building Code reflects this trajectory, growing from approx. ~450 pages in 1985 to over 1,500 today, a 230% increase driven by layered complexity, interpretation risk, and delay.

Who Is Accountable for Housing Delivery?

So here is the uncomfortable question:

If every level of government is acting within its authority, but the collective outcome is failure, who is accountable?

Three questions follow:

• Who is measuring cumulative policy impact before it breaks delivery?
• Who is responsible for alignment when objectives directly conflict?
• Who owns outcomes when viable projects never reach completion?

Not municipalities. Not regions. Not provinces. Not the federal government.

Yet housing delivery is collapsing under the weight of all of them combined.

This is not about removing protections. It is about acknowledging that the system no longer behaves like a system. The system was built in fragmentation for a different era. And it is now producing outcomes it was never designed to handle.

It is time to rebuild it for outcomes.

Leah Bell is Regional Director of UDI Capital Region at the Urban Development Institute.