THE POWER OF WORKING ACROSS THE TABLE

“We don’t make enough things together anymore.”

By “we”, Placemark Principal Paul Fenske is referring to the people shaping British Columbia’s communities—public officials, developers, builders, and the professionals tasked with planning and delivering growth. Despite good intentions on all sides, too many projects are getting lost in a development Bermuda Triangle: frustrations multiply as delays extend, costs escalate, and trust erodes.

Placemark partners Paul Fenske and Theo Finseth recently sat down to explore three persistent questions in the development process in British Columbia:

• Why do projects take longer than expected?

• Why do costs so frequently exceed projections?

• Why does trust—essential to delivering projects on time and on budget—break down?

These are not separate issues. They stem from a common root: development is no longer approached as a shared endeavour.

In theory, public and private sectors are aligned in their objective—to create lasting value for communities. In practice, they often operate in parallel universes with little shared context.

• Developers work within tight financial frameworks shaped by competitive capital and real estate markets, construction costs, and risk exposure. Timelines are compressed, and decisions carry immediate financial consequences.

  
  

• Public sector leaders operate under political accountability, regulatory requirements, long-term planning mandates, and community expectations that extend well beyond any single project.

  
  

Both sides face legitimate constraints. When those realities are poorly understood—or left unspoken—misalignment follows, affecting timelines, costs, and ultimately trust.

“I believe everyone wants good outcomes,” says Theo. “But they’re accountable for different parts of  the process—and that’s where tension emerges.”

Why Does Everything Take So Long?

According to a recent study by the Altus Group, the average major urban infrastructure project now takes 25-30% longer to complete than it did five or six years ago. Factors such as regulatory complexity, stakeholder negotiations and technical surprises have compounded the problem, making “on time” delivery increasingly rare.

Development timelines in British Columbia have lengthened steadily despite ongoing commitments to reduce red tape and accelerate approvals. Projects move through increasingly complex layers of review—consultations, approvals, permitting, financing—each adding time and uncertainty.

Public and private partners often begin projects with fundamentally different assumptions about risk, sequencing, and timelines. Each side believes it is acting rationally within its own system, but a lack of shared understanding leads to misalignment and delays.

The result is slow decision-making, rising anxiety, and—too often—public blame-shifting which further damages trust while compounding delays and costs.

As Theo observes, ideology too often plays a role: “There’s tension between the basic economics of something, versus “well, wouldn’t it be nice to have all amenities in place before people arrive.”

“You can’t finance a commercial centre without residents,” Paul adds. “The cart can’t come before the horse without making a mess.”

Timing Is Everything

“Timing is everything,” Paul says. “Even sound decisions can fail if they’re made at the wrong time.”

One painful example: The Crumpit Neighbourhood Plan in the District of Squamish, an ongoing Placemark project where changing technical requirements and analysis were requested mid-stream by the municipality—long after very expensive field work was undertaken and reflected in public facing materials.

Each step was reasonable in isolation. Together, they extended the timeline far beyond expectations and introduced uncertainty that later drove up costs and eroded trust in the process.

Why Does It Cost So Much?

Costs climb when uncertainty is allowed to persist rather than being identified and resolved early.

Development projects accumulate pressure over time. Policy requirements evolve. Market conditions shift. Construction and financing costs rise. Community expectations change.

In another Placemark project, a late-stage change to program requirements triggered a redesign that affected the entire pro forma. The change itself was not unreasonable—but its timing made the costs unavoidable and difficult to absorb.

Theo points to recent changes  in provincial government policymaking that cascade down to municipalities without sufficient insight from those delivering projects on the ground. The result is policy ambition that outpaces financial feasibility—particularly when it comes to funding infrastructure and community benefits without undermining project viability.

Why Does Trust Break Down?

“Why is development so often framed as a zero-sum game?” Paul asks. “Why is the private sector always assumed to be  the ‘bad guy’?” The evidence of delays, escalating costs, and loss of trust is hard to avoid: cities ultimately become a museum of whatever gets built—good or bad.

Trust is slow to earn and quick to erode. It forms through consistent, transparent actions and can collapse through a single gap between words and outcomes.

Trust rarely fails all at once. It erodes incrementally: missed expectations, shifting interpretations, unspoken assumptions.

Fairwinds in Nanoose Bay is an ongoing Placemark masterplan in which the original 2015 approvals have now become stale in the minds of a few local residents, resulting in public turmoil, political hesitation and the inability of the developer to move forward with confidence and clarity.  While early discussions created a shared vision, as time progressed and the vision wasn’t implemented, the buy-in began to fade. Fast forward 10 years, and chronic opponents, aided by new residents, began to sow mistrust about what would be required going forward.

When timelines, expectations, and accountability operate on different tracks, mistrust grows. Once it does, even minor decisions become difficult to resolve.

These Are Not Separate Problems

Time, cost, and trust are often treated as distinct challenges. In reality, they are intertwined expressions of the same issue: misaligned expectations—early and often.

For while building communities is complex, requiring dozens of specialized skillsets from a range of disciplines working across sectors; it also requires a shared acknowledgement of its complexity and the need to collaborate. The breakdown of collaboration is often rooted in the insistence of each player marching to the beat of its own drum, rather than seeking a common rhythm.

What’s missing is not capability or intent. It’s shared understanding, established soon enough to matter.

What Meaningful Alignment Requires

In leading projects across BC, Placemark has seen what early alignment can achieve when it's established from the start.

In Lake Country, municipal leaders established a long-range land-use vision and infrastructure framework before inviting private proposals. Royal Bay in Colwood benefited from early agreement on what constituted a complete neighbourhood and how phasing would occur. Mission’s Silverdale area and Coquitlam’s Burke Mountain similarly illustrate the value of upfront clarity around vision, sequencing and services.

“When the foundations are clear,” Paul says, “the private sector can give form and function to those ideas.”

At its core, effective “working across the table” is not ideological. It is practical. It requires common purpose, established early enough to build trust, foster shared understanding, and guide decisions across the life of a project.

Practice Makes Perfect

Paul Fenske often returns to another guiding principle: practice makes perfect.

Consistent effort, shared learning, and institutional experience matter. Repetition builds competence and reduces costly errors. When public and private partners engage regularly—and reflect honestly on what has and hasn’t worked—processes improve, fluency grows, and outcomes stabilize.

“Development is like jazz” Fenske reflects, “full of surprises and improvisations. Playing it well requires competence, and a responsive ear to the other players to find a common music.”

It means trusting the process, staying present, collaborating actively, and believing that the best outcomes emerge from navigating uncertainty with skill and creativity.

A Way Forward

When shared understanding is established early, the dynamic changes. Public and private partners move out of silos and begin to work across a table in the spirit of collaboration. Decisions become better informed. Trade-offs become clear. Trust has a foundation.

Complexity does not disappear—but it becomes manageable and responsive to the demands of building community.

The lesson is straightforward:

Make things together again.