Accelerate housing construction? According to the province of Gelderland, it doesn't start on the building site, but much earlier. The often-struggling wheels within area development, licensing and cooperation between municipalities, corporations and market parties can run much smoother.
With two new instruments - type approval for industrially built housing and invitation planning - the province wants to get housing projects off the ground faster. In some cases, permitting for factory-built housing can even be reduced from eight weeks to one day.
For project developers and builders, this is music to their ears. Especially in the preliminary phase of projects, years are often lost due to lengthy planning, varying municipal requirements and complex permit procedures. Gelderland thinks it has found the answer.
Permit in one day
The main focus of the project is rapid type approval for industrially built homes. Within a pilot of the Green Metropolitan Region of Arnhem-Nijmegen, work is being done with factory-built homes. These homes are extensively certified in advance, so that not every home in every municipality has to be technically reassessed.
"You can compare it to a car," says Jack van Hoof, project leader Industrial Fastlane at the Green Arnhem-Nijmegen Metropolitan Region. "A car with type approval can go anywhere on the road without being re-inspected. With homes, however, that still happens again in every project. While houses that come from a factory are often produced according to exactly the same processes."
Type approval involves checking in advance that a housing type meets all the technical requirements. Not only is the design considered, but also the production processes, quality assurance and on-site installation. Random checks are then carried out to ensure that the builder continues to work to the same standards.
The result is that municipalities no longer have to technically vet every application. According to Van Hoof, this could eliminate much of the current permit process. Provided municipalities have confidence in the system and legislation is adjusted, a permit process that now takes eight weeks can be reduced to an administrative action of one day.
The real profit lies before the permit
Yet according to both the province and the market parties involved, the greatest acceleration lies not in the granting of permits, but in the phase prior to that. "The biggest time gains are at the very front end of the process, at the start of area development," says Van Hoof. "That's where invitation planning and the Fastlane reinforce each other."
According to the province, it is precisely in this phase that major time gains can be made. Many projects get stuck because parties are not involved until late in the process or because requirements keep changing during the process.
Invitation planning is therefore also the second pillar of the Gelderland approach. The aim of this approach is to shift the focus from detailed regulations to clear frameworks. Within these frameworks, government, developers, corporations and other parties can jointly develop their plans.
Commissioner Dirk Vreugdenhil sees a fundamental change in this with current practice. "At the beginning of an area development you want to determine the rules of the game together. That provides clear frameworks for all parties involved from the start. In this way you avoid having to return to details later and you can move faster to realization. At the same time, this way you really build from the values and interests of the area."
The technology exists, now the culture change is needed
An important role in the success of this project lies with the market parties involved. Van Wijnen is one of them. Yet according to Rens Rikken, deputy director of project development at the construction company, the cultural change has now become more important than technological innovation. "The key to success is no longer in that factory. That factory works. It's about people learning to work with frameworks instead of rules."
Van Wijnen is the first party working within the pilot with a type approval for its Fijn Wonen concept. This involves the fully digital design and largely automated production of homes.
According to Rikken, this creates a fundamentally different way of developing. The time required for design, engineering and preparation is greatly reduced because many components are thought out in advance. "What has not been thought out cannot be certified. But what has been thought up, you can apply tremendously quickly and adapt within the set frameworks."
No uniformity
"That does not mean, by the way, that all homes will look alike," Rikken adds with emphasis. In doing so, he addresses a common criticism of industrial housing: that it would lead to uniformity. Both Van Wijnen and the Green Metropolitan Area do not recognize that image.
"That is a persistent prejudice," says Van Hoof. "There are now an awful lot of concepts available with great variation in appearance, materials and housing types." According to Rikken, the extensive automation actually makes many design variations possible. "Within one certified system, you can make millions of combinations."
The crux, according to Rikken, does lie in thinking within those possibilities. "If you want to fully utilize the advantages of industrial building, then not the factory should adapt to the urban development plan, but the urban development plan should take into account the principles of industrial building."
From rules to trust
And therein lies immediately an important starting point of the Gelderland approach: trust. According to Van Hoof, industrial building concepts are still too often made impossible by very specific architectural or urban planning requirements.
He cites examples of mandatory facade leaps, deviating roof heights or other urban planning requirements that may seem logical individually, but collectively make an industrial concept unworkable. "You have to set workable frameworks at the front and then see together how to realize the best solution within those frameworks."
Rikken, too, sees the crux of the problem there. "The key to success is in showing that people need frameworks and not rules." According to both interviewees, this requires a culture change among all parties involved: municipalities, corporations, developers and builders.
Why the prefab factories are not running at full steam
The fact that industrial housing has a future does not mean that the sector is running smoothly and that money is poured in. On the contrary, several factory-built home builders ran into financial problems or went bankrupt in recent years.
According to Rikken, the cause is not production technology or capacity. In fact, Van Wijnen could do even better: "Our factory has capacity for about four thousand homes a year. We are currently producing about eleven hundred. In a country with a housing shortage, you would expect such a factory to be fully stocked."
Van Hoof sees the problem mainly in the long development and permitting processes. "Small innovative builders often fall over because they cannot bear the costs of long preliminary processes. If you have to wait years before a project actually starts, you need huge financial reserves."
Forerunner of national policy
The Gelderland pilot may be a forerunner, but it is not entirely an isolated case. The ministry is currently working on amendments to building regulations that may make homes with type approval subject to disclosure requirements only for the technical part. This could eliminate a significant part of the current permit procedures nationwide.
The Arnhem-Nijmegen region has an advantage here that makes such a test pond possible. Sixteen of the seventeen municipalities are served by the same environmental service, making it relatively easy to introduce agreements region-wide. According to Van Hoof, formal agreements are now being worked on by which all municipalities will accept the type approval.
More than a permit
Anyone looking at the Gelderland approach ultimately sees a broader ambition than just faster permit issuance. The province is trying to organize the entire housing chain differently: from area development and urban planning frameworks to design, licensing and production.
As Delegate Vreugdenhil summarizes, "The homes of tomorrow will come from the factory. They are high-quality homes. With type approval, the next project can be accelerated and we bring pace to housing construction."
That ultimately makes this pilot more than an experiment with permits or factory housing. In fact, the province is testing whether Dutch housing is ready to work differently. The technology seems ready for upscaling; the main question is whether administrators, municipalities and market parties are.
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