Canada

The trick is they're all "guidelines" that planners will use to arbitrarily foot-drag on approvals. None of them are formally "regs" but just tools for a kangaroo court to dither.

Don’t take my word for it, see this video of deposition by Mark Richardson of Housing Now TO (an affordable housing builder):

https://mastodon.social/@Pxtl/110300343308877005

I loathe the Poilievre conservatives, but they’re right about this. First step to stopping the housing crisis is to kick some municipal government ass. Trudeau is trying to do it with carrots through the Housing Accelerator Fund, but it’s long-since time for sticks and not carrots.

He specifically calls out "guidelines which are treated like they're cast in stone". An example of such a "guideline" would be angular plane rules, which result in Toronto's wierd stepped buildings, resulting in this complaint:

"You want green buildings? Green buildings are big chonky boxes made outta wood. They're not Mayan pyramids, which is what the urban design guidelines require."

Or even vaguer height limits that seem to be complaint-based:

"$20 billion dollar intersection in Forest Hill; somebody said that should be a 7-storey and 70-unit building in 2018. How...where did that number come from? Somebody picked that number. Because it "conformed to the current planning policy for Forest Hill" and somebody adjacent to the site had a backyard swimming pool. That can't be our priority in 2023."