Permits Online 2.0: How Winnipeg Builds Homes Faster
How the City of Winnipeg updated its permitting and licensing infrastructure, and how I contributed to making it work. 9,716 NET NEW UNITS, 2 YEARS 1,046 AFFORDABLE UNITS PERMITTED 1,040DOWNTOWN UNITS, 2025 50+PERMIT TYPES ONLINE Ways Permits Online 2.0 Fixed the System A Crisis That Spans Continents and Cul-de-sacs Housing is a global issue. In most cities, the problem is not a shortage of homes; it is that homes are not evenly distributed. Canada is no different, and Winnipeg, a fast-growing, increasingly international city, is feeling it acutely. So the City is doing something about it. In December 2023, Winnipeg partnered with the federal government through the Housing Accelerator Fund, a $4 billion national programme launched to speed up housing supply by funding exactly the kind of reforms cities like Winnipeg need: faster permitting, zoning changes, and digital upgrades. Winnipeg secured $122.4 million over four years, paid in four instalments of roughly $30.6 million each, tied to one condition: actually hit the targets. No milestone, no money. Of course, Winnipeg pulled it off. The reforms targeted four root causes: Slow permit approvals Manual or outdated processes Restrictive zoning rules Limited digital infrastructure The one I want to zoom in on is permitting and licensing, unglamorous, but consequential. No contractor picks up a tool without a licence. No home gets built without a permit. The efficiency of that approval process directly determines how fast housing gets built. Winnipeg has been digitising this for years through Permits Online, the public-facing portal, and AMANDA, the backend system used by City staff. What the Housing Accelerator Fund changed was the pace and scale of execution. THE PROBLEM Six Printed Copies. Months of Waiting. To understand what Permits Online 2.0 changed, you first need to understand what it replaced. To build in Winnipeg, you needed two approvals: a Development Permit, confirming the project fits the location, and a Building Permit, confirming the structure is safe. The bottleneck? You could not apply for the Building Permit until the Development Permit was fully approved. Sequential. Gate-locked. For most construction projects, that meant weeks or months of waiting before a single shovel hit the ground. On top of that, applications had to arrive as six printed copies, physically routed across departments. Then came email, which was real progress; files moved in seconds instead of being carried down a hallway. But it brought two drawbacks. First, there was no unified format: some people sent PDFs, others sent PNG images, and architects sent CAD and BIM files like DWG, DXF, and DWF, so staff had to wrestle each submission open and re-key the data by hand. Second, you still had no visibility into where your file sat in the queue. Backlogs piled up. The city kept growing, and a system that nobody designed to be slow became slow through layers of institutional sediment accumulated at those bottlenecks. THE FIX Three Ways the System Was Fixed The Permits Online upgrade worked through three distinct, reinforcing mechanisms. Each one targets a different layer of the system, and together they contributed to the housing outcomes Winnipeg went on to report. MECHANISM 01 Lower Submissoion Friction The City started moving permit submissions online in April 2024, one category at a time. Residential permits went digital by June 2024; commercial permits followed by December. By June 2025, the portal had been rebuilt from scratch as a cloud-based web app hosted on Microsoft Azure, mobile-first and fully accessible. By April 2026, roughly 50 permit types were end-to-end online. The result? Fewer abandoned applications, less manual data entry, and far fewer “just checking on my file” calls. The portal also went beyond housing permits. Tradespeople can now sit licensing exams and pay renewal fees directly inside Permits Online, no forms, no cheques, no trip downtown. Same system, fewer barriers, more homes built. MECHANISM 02 Fewer Handoffs, Shorter Path Remember that sequential, gate-locked process in which the Building Permit could not proceed until the Development Permit was fully approved? That bottleneck is gone. As of October 2025, both permits run concurrently, are reviewed in parallel, not in a queue. Development applications moved fully online in November 2025, shareable instantly across departments instead of being physically routed, and the queueing problem that plagued the old system was substantially resolved. One structural change. Massive downstream effect. MECHANISM 03 Better Operational Visibility The AMANDA backend now processes all applications electronically and feeds live data directly into Permits Online’s public portal. The City publishes the time to completeness and to decision for building, development, and occupancy permits, updated weekly via linked Open Data tables. Does this speed up an individual approval? Not directly. But it creates accountability, sharpens triage, and builds the kind of feedback loop that compounds into real improvement over time. THE OUTCOMES When Good Permitting Follows, Housing Follows Winnipeg did not just meet its Housing Accelerator Fund targets. It exceeded them, every single time. The numbers below are official figures from the City and CMHC, and they tell a clean story: fix the process, and the homes follow. CITY OF WINNIPEG – HAF RESULTS Housing Outcomes at a Glance – City of Winnipeg & CMHC, Dec 2025 4,307PERMITTED UNITS, YEAR 1 HAF Target: 3,733 +15.4% above target 9,716NET NEW UNITS, 2 YEARS HAF Target: 8,521 +14% above target 1,046AFFORDABLE UNITS, 2 YEARS Min. 3-yr target: 931 Surpassed before Year 3 1,040DOWNTOWN UNITS, 2025 No specific target 15-year high in Winnipeg 1,008UNITS WITH PERMITS ISSUED HAF grant projects: 10 First-round HAF grants 590AFFORDABLE IN HAF GRANTS Incl. 274 rent-geared Rent-geared-to-income HOUSING ACCELERATOR FUND, WINNIPEG HAF Permitted-Unit Progress These results reflect the full HAF package: Permits Online 2.0 was the engine, but zoning reform, land assembly, and housing incentives were all part of the same push. And because every instalment of the $122.4 million agreement was tied to verified, reported progress, Winnipeg had to earn each tranche by actually hitting its targets. No delivery, no money. The digital permitting improvements were a direct part of making that happen. MY CONTRIBUTION AGILE BUSINESS ANALYST · CITY OF WINNIPEG · INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY I joined
