Chris Goldammer on Twitter:

*How* does upzoning increase development? Let's look at NYC and think like a real estate developer: For a project to be profitable, it's necessary that one can increase size by *a lot*.

Higher FAR means that more such projects exist, and are bigger.

Source: Own analysis, lot-level probability using permits filed per lot in NYC, in 2019-2024:

1. Lot-level data from PLUTO
2. FAR from PLUTO (imperfect, but good enough for illustration in my opinion)
3. Permits from DOB+DOB Now job filings.

If you’d like to submit a comment to help counterbalance the opposition (or conversely if you’d like to voice your own opposition), it takes literally 60 seconds to submit a comment. It can be as simple as “I support this plan - we need more housing.” Just set the Subject to “Villages Planning Program.”

On Tuesday, I was speaker 6.

Hi, my name is Russil Wvong. I’m a resident of Vancouver. I don’t work in real estate or development. I’m a homeowner, but I’m also a parent who’s worried about where our kids will live. I’m here to speak in support of the Villages Plan. Allowing four- to six-storey buildings in residential neighbourhoods is a major improvement over just allowing high-rises on busy streets.

I’m happy to see that there’s a lot of people signed up to speak tonight. It makes sense to debate and decide on city-wide policies, after hearing from speakers both for and against, instead of fighting the same battle over and over again on each and every project.

I know a lot of the people participating tonight have criticized high-rises at other public hearings, and argued in favour of more human-scale development. Even if they don’t support the Villages Plan, I expect they won’t hate it as much as only building high-rises.

People sometimes ask why we need to plan for growth in the first place. Why can’t we just keep Vancouver the way it is? The problem is, as people retire from jobs here, other people need to move here to fill those jobs. They need a place to live. And as the population ages, we need more people to work in the healthcare system. When housing is scarce, prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to keep people out. The result is labour shortages and increasing strain on the healthcare system. Even if you’re an older homeowner, and you don’t need more housing yourself, that’s a cost rather than a benefit.

Land here is limited by the ocean and the mountains. As the region grows, we need to build up. But we set up city institutions back in the 1970s to limit growth and make it difficult to build new housing. So then it’s like pushing down on a balloon. People end up having to live further out, in Surrey or Langley, which means that they end up driving longer distances to get to work, and we get worse traffic. Whenever we do allow new housing in just one spot, there’s so much suppressed demand that people want to build as high as they possibly can.

In Montreal, if you walk around residential neighbourhoods, you see a lot of three- and four-storey single-lot apartment buildings, with one or two family-sized flats per floor. It feels a lot like residential neighbourhoods in Vancouver. They’re pretty quiet, and there’s lots of trees. It’s just that they’re using their limited land more effectively. In Vancouver, we have even less land than Montreal does.

As the MacPhail Report noted, the public hearing process tends to amplify the voices of people who are most fearful and opposed to new housing, because they’re the people who are most motivated to participate in the process. Council mostly hears from people who are opposed to change. But if you actually do a poll and talk to a random sample of people, what you find is that adding four- to six-storey buildings is the most popular option.

I understand that change is difficult. It’s natural to fear the unknown. At the same time, the status quo in our expensive residential neighbourhoods is also really terrible. When houses cost 2 to 4 million dollars and younger families can’t move into the neighbourhood, the result is that the population shrinks, school enrolments decline, and small businesses close down.

There’s a quote from someone describing what happens as a result.

Nolan Gray was talking about older people in extremely expensive neighborhoods that were once middle class. These older residents wonder why their children are leaving, and why they feel lonely and isolated in their retirement years. Their community has been slowly destroyed by not allowing the built environment to change.

Thank you.

• Video from the public hearing

• Reports and correspondence - so far it’s 347 in support, 1902 opposed

List of speakers:

• 10:13 Introduction by Neil Hrushowy

• 13:44 Staff presentation by Kirsten Behler

• 41:42 Questions from council to staff

• 2:01:15 Reilly Wood (support)

• 2:03:25 Annabel Kershaw (oppose)

• 2:08:55 Barry Weih (oppose)

• 2:14:26 James Madden (support)

• 2:18:22 Darren Klinck (oppose)

• 2:23:57 Russil Wvong (support)

• 2:28:07 Ruofan Wang (support)

• 2:32:46 Greg Hackman (oppose)

• 2:37:50 Danielle Lavell (support)

• 2:39:52 Taylor Curran (support)

• 2:43:56 Charles Kelly, TEAM (oppose)

• 2:49:33 Heather Hackman (oppose)

• 2:54:35 Rory Filer (oppose)

• 2:59:56 Brian Palmquist (oppose)

• 3:05:20 Marisa Thomas, Smart Density Vancouver (oppose)

• 3:20:43 Chris Thomas (oppose)

• 3:26:06 Anna Shojania (oppose)

• 3:31:35 Bruce Dawson (support)

• 3:37:32 Elaine Stevens (oppose)

• 3:42:41 Penny Noble (oppose)

• 3:47:33 Cam Sheshania (oppose)

• 3:50:11 Carol Volkart (oppose)

More

Missing Middle Housing Missing no more, Brian Palmquist, October 2022. A 2022 proposal by Bill McCreery, enthusiastically supported by Brian Palmquist, looks very similar to the Villages Plan, with six-storey buildings in residential neighbourhoods, centered on shops and services. The main difference is that the maximum height is reduced from six storeys to two storeys as you get further away from the centre. Discussion on Facebook’s #VanPoli group.

Perhaps we’re approaching some amount of consensus? David Fine: “Most critics, like me, support the very same broad concepts. We do want more density, including six storeys. We do want walkable neighbourhoods, but there are serious flaws in the way this is being implemented and those issues have been described.”

One element of the Villages Plan that people find particularly outrageous - with good reason - is that it proposes to rezone residential properties on the retail streets to C-2, which means six-storey buildings with mandatory ground-floor retail. The idea is that it’s important to make sure there’s continuous retail.

To me this is yet another example of unreasonable city micromanagement, like banning small apartment buildings in the first place, or banning Vancouver Specials more recently.

It sounds like one of the options staff will present to council is that instead of rezoning the properties on the retail streets to C-2 (six-storey with ground-floor retail), they’ll leave them as is. And then if somebody wants to rezone to C-2, they can, but if they want to build a laneway house or townhouses or whatever, they still can. That sounds more reasonable to me.

Some stuff I cut from my speaking notes, to fit into the time:

Any proposal will have both costs and benefits. In terms of benefits, the Villages Plan expands the supply of livable housing in residential neighbourhoods. It’s faster to plan and build small-scale projects like this, compared to a high-rise, helping to reduce costs. Allowing four- to six-storey buildings also means reducing the cost of land per square foot of floor space. Small builders should be able to build projects like this, not just large developers. The plan will also provide more shops and services, as well as more people to provide demand for businesses and enrolment for schools, offsetting the effect of shrinking populations in west-side neighbourhoods as housing becomes more and more expensive.

A number of homeowners submitting comments have asked for the areas allowing six-storey buildings to be expanded to include their homes. Even if you don’t need more housing yourself, there’s some benefit to having the option of selling for redevelopment.

In terms of costs, one significant cost of the plan is that if you’re a homeowner whose house is on a planned retail street, you’re no longer allowed to replace it with anything other than a six-storey building with ground-floor retail.

Instead of micromanaging allowed uses on the planned retail streets. I’d suggest adding more flexibility. If someone wants to add a laneway house or build some townhouses, why not let them?

Previously:

• Opposition to the Villages Plan

• Villages Plan staff report

• Draft Villages Plan

We hold a regular Housing Happy Hour event on the third Tuesday of each month. Our next event:

When: Tuesday July 21, 7 to 9 pm
Where: Britannia Brewing Main Street, 3835 Main Street (Main at 23rd)

This was the former location of Portland Craft.

If you’re interested, even if you’re not sure you’ll be able to make it, please email me (russilwvong@gmail.com) so that we can give the pub a rough idea of how many people are coming.

Agenda for today’s council meeting, with links to each of the staff reports.

There’s 12 rezoning applications being considered at today’s council meeting. Because they’re compliant with the city’s Official Development Plan, there’s no public hearing required. I’ve summarized them above.

Item 19 is a rezoning at Haro and Thurlow (1045 Haro) to replace a seven-storey building (and an adjacent commercial building) with two high-rise rental buildings. It’s compliant with policy, and staff are recommending approval. But there’s 87 renter households who fall under the the tenant protection policy, which is weaker than the newer Broadway Plan policy: existing renters have the right to return to a new apartment at a 20% discount from the market rate, whereas the Broadway Plan policy gives them the right to return at the current rent.

First Right of Refusal

The applicant will be required to commit to offering all eligible tenants the right of first refusal at a 20% discount off starting rents in similar units in the new development once completed. Any subsequent rent increases for returning tenants will be in line with the Residential Tenancy Act.

Additional Support for Low Income Tenants or Tenants Facing Other Barriers to Appropriate Housing

The applicant is partnering with a Tenant Relocation Coordinator to assist existing tenants with finding alternate accommodation. For low income tenants and tenants facing other barriers to housing, as defined in the TRP Policy, the applicant will be required to commit to assisting in securing a permanent, suitable affordable housing option.

The summary of public feedback says that there were 36 comments submitted, with 10 supporting and 18 opposed. I’m not sure if that means that renters in the building think the tenant protection policy is okay, or if they’re worried but haven’t submitted comments. I hope council asks staff about this.

We have a chronic and terrible shortage of housing in Vancouver, resulting in low vacancy rates, high rents, and overcrowded, insecure housing. Over the last couple of years, asking rents have been slowly deflating, but they’re still too high.

Traditionally, the city of Vancouver has approved new housing through a very slow and difficult process: “It’s easier to elect a pope than to approve a small apartment building.” This results in massive economies of scale: it doesn’t make sense to go through this process for a small project. So you get high-rises (which are very slow to plan and build) and super-expensive low-density housing (which nobody can afford), with very little in beween. In Montreal you see a lot of “plexes,” three- and four-storey single-lot apartment buildings with a single family-sized flat per floor; you don’t see them here, because they’re illegal.

When you ask Vancouverites how the city should add more housing, the most popular option is adding more four- to six-storey buildings. You see a number of single-lot apartment buildings around the city, from before the city made them illegal.

The city has been working on allowing this, in a number of areas across the city, in what they call the “Villages Plan.” It’s intended to allow more shops, services, and housing in 17 neighbourhoods. In each case, there’s a limited high-street area with shops and services, and then low-density housing around it. The idea is to allow more housing with retail on the ground floor in the high-street area, and to allow apartment buildings up to six storeys within walking distance.

The Villages Plan is part of the city’s Housing Accelerator Fund commitments. And it’s the only item on the agenda for the July 14 public hearing.

What kind of opposition is it running into? A Kerrisdale resident writes:

I am totally opposed to the entire villages plan. It will speed the destruction of residential neighborhoods just as the densification madness does. You have transformed west side streets into one way alternating traffic on a permanent basis. The only green visible will be the weeds growing in the cracks in the concrete. I will actively work to defeat in October every council member of whatever party supports this ridiculous proposal and fire the planners as well.

Part of the reason that it’s difficult for Vancouver city council to make changes is that the public hearing process amplifies the voices of groups opposing new housing. It’s self-selected, and it’s the people most fearful of change (typically long-time residents who are insulated from the madness of the housing market) who are motivated to speak to council. So that’s who council tends to hear from.

More

• “Villages” were part of the draft Vancouver Plan back in April 2022. “Low-density residential: allow townhouses and other forms of gentle density up to three storeys (‘Multiplex Area’), with more shops and services that you can walk to (‘Village’). The Village areas could include buildings up to six storeys.” More recently: draft Villages Plan, staff report for Villages Plan.

• In Pictures: The Possibilities of Vancouver’s New Villages Plan. Bryn Davidson, Sightline. Bryn Davidson describes the potential for single-lot, single-stair buildings in Vancouver's Villages Plan. Includes lots of illustrations, based on a “Four/Five” design, with four storeys of flats in the front, and five in the back.

Millennials in the Canadian housing market: An intergenerational comparison. Michael Mirdamadi and Josh Gordon, Statistics Canada, May 2026.

When housing is scarce and expensive, it’s harder for young people to move out on their own.

This graph is from 2021. The Wall Street Journal has an article reporting on US data from 2025, which is even more eye-opening:

Last year, 49% of adults under age 30 said they lived with a parent, up 12 percentage points from 2019, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking. Nearly a third of those adults were 25 or older.

Matthew Yglesias comments:

Totally dysfunctional housing situation facing young people is IMO fueling political radicalism.

But what we need is specifically radicalism about land use that will fix the problem.

Improving housing affordability continues in most Canadian major markets. Robert Hogue and Rachel Battaglia, RBC Economics, June 2026.

RBC releases a housing affordability report every quarter, comparing home ownership costs to median household pre-tax incomes.

From the latest report:

Homeownership has been improving in Canada since early 2024 — particularly for condos.

Price corrections have been sharper than other housing types, helping restore affordability back to 2019 levels in many markets. RBC’s national condo affordability measure is 35.2%, less than a ppt from Q4 2019. Some markets have even improved from pre-pandemic conditions. Toronto now sits at 36.1% (down from 38.5% in Q4 2019) and Victoria at 31.8% (versus 32.2% in Q4 2019).

Though relief has been widespread, there are still markets where condo affordability remains meaningfully elevated from pre-pandemic norms.

Tight supply and the earlier population boom have contributed to an aggressive lift in condo prices in Montreal, Quebec City and Halifax, which have yet to come down meaningfully.

There’s a graph showing condo affordability. The Vancouver metro area is back down to only slightly above 2019 levels, but still the worst in the country. Getting from above 40% down to Edmonton levels (below 20%) may not be realistic, but even Victoria is closer to 30%.

Metro Vancouver has limited land, but there’s nothing physically stopping us from building more apartments. They should be like cars: if we need more, we can build more.

RBC’s calculation of home ownership costs includes:

• Mortgage payments (principal and interest), assuming a 20% down payment, a 25-year amortization, and a five-year term with a fixed interest rate

• Property taxes

• Utilities

For condos, it doesn’t include strata fees.

Reddit thread. Someone commented:

Condos are by no means sustainable housing for a family of 3.

My response:

I’m in Vancouver, where land is particularly limited (because of the ocean and the mountains), so we’re getting a lot of apartments. I’m very interested in the question of how livable these apartments will be.

In Montreal, you see a lot of three- and four-storey apartment buildings with a single family-sized flat per floor. Family-sized flats also seem pretty common in Europe. Middle-class flats in Europe.

A big problem in Vancouver is that costs per square foot are very high, and so you get shrinkflation. To get larger apartments, we need to bring down these costs. (For example, it takes a long time to get anything approved, which is costly; speeding up approvals will reduce costs. Allowing more height will reduce the cost of land per square foot of floor space.)

Elsewhere I mentioned that I’d like to get back to 2003-2004 levels of affordability. Someone else commented:

I want houses to be $1 but it’s no possible. If you want houses to roll back to 2003-2004 levels then what’s your plan?

I’m in Vancouver. In Metro Vancouver and the GTA, there’s three levers that municipal governments have been using to increase housing prices:

• Development charges. These are up-front one-time taxes on new housing. In Metro Vancouver and the GTA, but not the rest of the country, these are extremely high (more than $100,000 per apartment in the city of Vancouver). Basically, municipalities in the Vancouver and Toronto metro areas have been ratcheting up the price of housing by maximizing the revenue they can extract from new housing. This affects existing housing as well as new housing, since they compete with each other.

• Approval processes. These are extremely slow and labour-intensive, with a level of micromanagement amounting to co-design. See Larry Beasley’s book Vancouverism for a good explanation.

• Land costs. Land in Metro Vancouver is limited by the ocean and the mountains, and therefore expensive. By restricting height and floor space, municipal governments are able to raise the cost of land per square foot of floor space.

The problem is, because municipal governments in Metro Vancouver and the GTA are relying on development charges, their incentives are exactly backwards, as pointed out by the recent MacPhail Report. When housing is expensive, they’re able to extract a lot of revenue from first-time homebuyers and from renters, in the form of development charges. When housing is less expensive (as has been happening recently), it’s a financial disaster for them.

Mario Polese compares this dependence on development charges to going through a trap door. Once you’ve gone through, it’s very hard to get back out.

For municipalities like Edmonton or Moncton which encourage housing, new housing is a good thing. Besides providing construction jobs, it generates a steady stream of future property-tax revenue.

In contrast, Vancouver’s strategy since the 1980s has basically been the same as OPEC’s: selling permission to build in limited quantities, at high prices.

The federal and provincial governments (in Ontario and BC) are attempting to break this municipal addiction by putting a lot of money on the table to pay for municipal infrastructure (via the “Build Communities Strong” fund), in exchange for municipalities cutting their development charges on new housing. That’s the reason for the recent agreements between Canada and Ontario, and between Canada and BC.

How much difference can this make? Check out this pre-Covid CMHC analysis of the gap between construction costs and prices to add one more floor to an apartment building, reflecting municipal restrictions. In Montreal, there’s no gap. In the Vancouver and Toronto metro areas, there’s a giant gap. In Vancouver, it’s about a third.

So government shouldn’t charge development charges? That’s your solution?

There’s three levers.

• One is cutting development charges.

• A second is reducing the time it takes to navigate the agonizingly slow approval process. (In Edmonton, it’s possible to acquire land and deliver housing in the same calendar year. In Vancouver, a retiree spent eight years fighting city hall to build a six-storey rental building with 35 apartments.)

• A third is reducing the cost of land per square foot of floor space, by allowing more height and more floor space.

And why shouldn’t the government charge development charges?

How much time do you have?

Benjamin Dachis has been talking about this for years. August 2018: Hosing Homebuyers: Why Cities Should Not Pay For Water and Wastewater Infrastructure with Development Charges. “Municipalities should eliminate DCs for water and wastewater and instead levy full-cost user fees that cover the full cost of amortized capital (as argued by Clayton 2014). This is the pricing model that private and municipally owned utilities in the natural gas and electricity market have used for decades without relying on up-front fees.”

A more recent version, November 2024: Want to lower both housing costs and emissions? It’s time to embrace utility financing of infrastructure.

Some points:

• Costs act as a floor on prices and rents. In the longer term, if we want to keep pushing down prices, we need to figure out how to lower costs.

• It makes more sense to have municipalities pay for capital investments up front by borrowing (issuing long-term bonds) and then paying them down over time with revenue from water charges, instead of having homebuyers pay for them up front by taking on larger mortgages. Homebuyers have to pay significantly higher interest rates, since the lender’s taking on more risk.

• From the perspective of municipal governments, it’s a “leaky bucket.” They collect revenue from new housing. But this also raises the price of existing housing (since they compete with each other), and they don’t get any of that benefit - it goes to private homeowners.

• In the current financing model, water charges just pay for day-to-day operational expenses, not long-term capital expenses. Lower prices result in higher water usage. (Some municipalities, like the city of Vancouver, don’t even have universal water metering - it’s a fixed charge for all-you-can-eat.)

More

• Housing affordability improves, but RBC says relief may be running its course. Canadian Mortgage Trends, July 2026.

• Previous posts including RBC’s housing affordability graph: June 2025, June 2024, March 2023.

With BC legislation now requiring the city of Vancouver to have a city-wide Official Development Plan, and with rezonings which are consistent with the overall plan no longer going through a public hearing of indeterminate length, we’re starting to see the shift recommended by the MacPhail Report in 2021:

We recommend a stronger role for housing needs estimates and citywide official plans, which guide how entire communities are expected to grow. We also recommend reduced reliance on site-by-site public hearings and council approvals that delay homebuilding and amplify the voices of groups opposing new housing at the expense of citywide objectives and affordability.

On Twitter, David Taylor observes that at the June 2 council meeting (continued to June 9), Vancouver city council approved 14 rezoning applications, with 2,740 apartments.

To put that in perspective, in 2017 the City approved 7,131 units FOR THE ENTIRE YEAR.

The law still has to be changed for each individual project, but at least the final step (approval by city council) is now faster.

At the same time, it makes sense that when there’s broader changes, there should be extensive public debate. The Villages Plan, which rezones a number of areas to allow for six-storey apartment buildings and ground-floor retail space, has its public hearing on July 14. There’ll be a lot of speakers, with at least 70 signed up so far.

This is exactly the time to have this debate, rather than having it over and over again on each individual project.

Villages Planning Program Referral Report. It’s the only item on the agenda for the July 14 public hearing.

I’m planning to speak in support. If you’d like to submit a brief comment in support (or opposition!), it’s very quick. Just set the Subject to “Villages Planning Program.”

Vancouver’s Villages Plan is intended to allow more shops, services, and housing in 17 neighbourhoods. In each case, there’s a limited high-street area with shops and services, and then low-density housing around it. The idea is to allow more housing with retail on the ground floor in the high-street area, and to allow more housing types within walking distance.

I’m quite interested in the Villages Plan because it’s an example of making it easier to build four- to six-storey buildings, without having to go through the slow and painful spot rezoning process.

In Montreal you see a lot of three- and-four-storey single-lot apartment buildings with one family-sized apartment per floor (“plexes”). This has a number of advantages compared to high-rises:

• They’re much faster to plan and to build.

• Small builders can build them.

• With a single-lot building, you don’t need to do land assembly. Vancouver’s recent change to allow a single exterior exit stair, rather than a hotel-style layout with a long hallway, should help.

• There isn’t much “land lift” to be fought over.

• The housing supply can respond much faster to changes in demand.

Leger’s poll in December found that among Vancouverites, the most popular option for growth is four- to six-storey buildings.

Overview of the report

It’s a 358-page document, but the critical parts are the Report Summary (14 pages) and the economic analysis in Appendix K (10 pages). The Villages Plan document (80 pages), included as Appendix B, was already released in May.

• Report Summary - pages 4 to 18.

• Appendix A, pages 20 to 38: amendments to the city’s Official Development Plan. The maps in this section aren’t that useful to see what the villages will look like, because they don’t include parcels which are already designated for buildings up to six storeys in the current Official Development Plan. They only show the parcels whose designation is changing.

• Appendix B, pages 39-118: the Villages Plan. This is a document intended to be readable by the public. I couldn’t see any significant differences from the draft Villages Plan released in May.

• Appendix C, pages 119-229: amendments to the city’s zoning and development bylaw. The critical parts are the limits on maximum floor space and the taxes on west-side projects, following the city’s practice of maximizing its revenue from new housing in the form of up-front charges. The bulk of this appendix is taken up by maps of the specific parcels which are being rezoned to R3 or C-2.

• Appendix D, page 230 - amendment to the city’s sign bylaw to include the new districts.

• Appendix E, page 231 - amendment to the city’s noise-control bylaw.

• Appendix F, pages 232-254 - amendment to the city’s subdivision bylaw. More maps, removing parcels from the R1-1 maps.

• Appendix G, page 255 - amendment to the city’s parking bylaw.

• Appendix H, pages 256-324 - amendments to the city’s area plans.

• Appendix I, pages 325-345 - summary of amendments to the city’s bylaws and policies, adding the new districts. The policies include Development Contribution Expectation Policy in Areas Undergoing Community Planning, Hotel Development Policy, Secured Rental Policy, Seniors Housing Rezoning Policy, and Transit-Oriented Areas Rezoning Policy.

• Appendix J, page 346 - minor amendments to the city’s Official Development Plan.

• Appendix K, pages 347-356 - economic feasibility analysis by Coriolis, to determine what projects make economic sense.

• Appendix L, page 357 - Heather and 33rd land-use plan.

• Appendix M, page 358 - minor amendment to the city’s Official Development Plan.

Economic feasibility analysis

Prices and rents have been declining, which is good. If they stay at their current levels, what projects make economic sense to build, given the restrictions on floor space in the Villages Plan?

I went through and compared the floor space limits in Appendix C to the economic feasibility analysis in Appendix K. Unfortunately, it looks like the city’s floor space limits are carefully calibrated to ensure that most redevelopment projects will either not be feasible, or be marginal. This ensures that change will happen slowly. I can understand why the city is motivated to do this: allowing housing to be built rapidly would be difficult to manage. But given the scale of Metro Vancouver’s chronic housing shortage, it’s extremely frustrating to see.

With the restrictions in this program, the only way we’ll see significant new housing is if prices and rents rise significantly from their current levels.

The Report Summary does include the following:

A change to all existing R3 districts is proposed to increase the allowable floor space on small sites from 1.45 to 1.6 FSR to provide greater flexibility in low-rise apartment forms, including new space efficient stair (SES) options that were added to the Vancouver Building By-law in December 2025.

With this change, the R3 floor-space limits look like this, for a purpose-built rental building:

What do the minimum site areas translate into?

• 460 square metres: about 5000 square feet, or one 50 x 100 lot. Max FSR 1.6 (about three storeys).

• 613 square metres: about 6600 square feet, or two 33 x 100 lots. Max FSR 2.2 (about four storeys). Increases to 2.4 on a shallow lot (109 feet instead of 122 feet).

• 920 square metres: about 9900 square feet, or three 33 x 100 lots. Max FSR 2.4, 2.7 on a shallow lot (about six storeys).

• 1470 square metres: about 15800 square feet, or four 33 x 122 lots. Max FSR 2.4, 2.7 on a shallow lot, or 2.7 on a corner lot with a frontage of at least 132 feet (four 33 lots).

(As an aside, these FSR limits and bonuses seem like micromanagement. When Burnaby brought in their multiplex program in 2024, they decided that floor-space limits would be redundant, given limits on height and site coverage.)

So which of these projects make sense? From the Coriolis analysis:

• Single-lot development at 1.6 FSR isn’t viable. In fact it’s not viable at 1.75 FSR.

• 100% rental apartment development at 2.7 FSR isn’t viable on the east side. It’s viable at 2.4 FSR on the west side.

What about strata? The limits look like this:

From the Coriolis analysis:

• Strata townhouse projects at 1.2 FSR and strata apartment projects at 2.0 FSR aren’t viable on the east side.

• Strata townhouse development at 1.2 FSR is likely to be viable for larger west-side assemblies, but marginal.

• Strata apartment development at 1.75 FSR is likely to be viable for larger west-side assemblies, but marginal.

• Strata apartment development at 2.0 FSR is likely to be viable for west-side assemblies, with some room to extract taxes for larger assemblies.

Mixed-use buildings with ground-floor retail

The Villages Plan includes mandatory ground-floor retail for the limited number of sites directly on the planned high streets. Is this a good idea or not?

The floor-space limits for these projects are more generous, allowing 3.5 FSR for purpose-built rental, although on the west side, it’s taken back in the form of a 20% below-market requirement:

The Coriolis analysis suggests that the limits set for mixed-use development are a better fit than for the R-3 projects. I’m not sure why.

• Mixed-use market rental is viable at 3.5 FSR on the east side.

• Mixed-use market rental is viable at 2.5 FSR on the west side.

• Mixed-use rental with 20% below-market is viable at 3.5 FSR on the west side.

• Mixed-use strata is viable at 2.5 FSR on the west side, including single-lot projects.

• Mixed-use strata is viable at 2.5 FSR on the east side for sites zoned C-1, but not sites zoned residential.

The city commissioned a retail opportunity projections report. Based on the modelling, the consultants project that there will be demand for the new retail space.

Nolan Gray (in California) is skeptical of mandatory ground-floor retail requirements. Erin Gonzalez writes: “In California we underwrite most of that retail to $0 and anticipate it’ll sit vacant just to get the residential built. Wish more cities understood.” Nolan Gray responds:

I sympathize with why planners require ground-floor retail, especially in existing walkable areas. But requiring it anywhere else is just silly, and requiring it anywhere where it will just sit empty (a) drives up costs and (b) actually harms the streetscape.

The smart alternative here is ground-floor live-work units. In my experience, they're nearly always more "live." But it can be the best of all worlds: actual street engagement, rentable floor area, and, eventually, retail frontage when it makes sense.

A couple articles on this subject:

• Mixed Up Priorities for Mixed-Use Buildings. Nolan Gray, Strong Towns, January 2018.

• What’s up with all those empty commercial storefronts in new mixed-use developments? Rachel Quednau, Strong Towns, May 2018. Observes that smaller spaces will be easier to rent out.

More

• Pressure rising to kill Vancouver’s 17 ‘villages’ plan. Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun. Reddit thread - I think it’s fair to say that Redditors are pretty vehemently opposed to Douglas Todd’s stance on housing.

Justine Underhill is a filmmaker and city council member in Falls Church, Virginia, with a background in economics. Her most recent video explains the cost of providing infrastructure in low-density neighbourhoods.

In one neighborhood, the streets aren’t paved, they’re just dirt. When it rains, it turns to mud. When it’s dry, dust coats everything. And then right next door, not even a mile away, there’s smooth asphalt, curbs, storm drains.

These two neighborhoods are in the same county, the same suburb. So why does one have paved streets while the other doesn’t? Maybe the dirt-road neighbors just can’t afford the pavement? But when we take a closer look, that neighborhood is lined with million-dollar properties. Like this custom-built Victorian estate with wraparound porches, a guest house, a pool with a waterfall, an outdoor kitchen, a fire pit, a gazebo, a treehouse. All told, it’s a $2 million property.

Clearly, they can afford to pave their roads if they wanted to. But every time they hold an HOA meeting, the total price comes back in the millions of dollars. So, they vote it down every time. It turns out when people have to pay the true cost of suburban sprawl themselves, they don’t think it’s worth it. Instead, they drive on dirt, they haul propane, they pick up their own mail.

And this is suburbia’s dirty little secret. It costs way more than anyone would ever be willing to pay for themselves. The dirt-road neighbors aren’t the ones getting short-changed. They’re the ones paying honestly. And the paved neighborhood next door isn’t because they’re wealthier. It’s just because they’re better at making someone else pick up the tab. And that someone else might be you.

She explains that low-density housing has high infrastructure costs:

A road costs roughly the same to build whether 10 families live on it or 100. Same with water pipe, sewer lines, power cables. Infrastructure cost follows land, not people.

This is why people talk about low-density suburbia being subsidized by higher-density centres. Low-density housing requires much larger costs to build and to maintain infrastructure, and it’s hard to raise property taxes enough to pay for it. So somebody else has to pay.

Urban3 creates visualizations illustrating net property-tax revenue per acre. For Minneapolis, it looks like this:

TLDR: Housing in Vancouver is maddeningly scarce and expensive. This is a fixable problem. People want to live and work here; other people want to build housing for them. The problem is, we don’t let them. We’ve set up anti-growth institutions that regulate new housing like it’s a nuclear power plant, and tax it like it’s a gold mine.

On the southeast corner of 4th and Balaclava in Kitsilano, less than 30 minutes by bus from downtown Vancouver or from UBC, there’s three old duplexes built in 1943. Twelve years ago, the owner, a retiree named Peter Miller, wanted to replace them with a six-storey rental building, with 35 apartments.

Under Vancouver’s land-use laws, what Miller wanted to do is illegal. In order to build an apartment building, you first need to go through a process called “spot rezoning,” changing the law for your one particular parcel of land. Miller spent eight years trying to convince city staff. City staff prepared a 64-page report recommending approval of the rezoning application, with more than 150 separate conditions ranging from design details (1.2c: “Provide high-quality windows with substantial mullions and deep, recessed glazing to add shadow and texture to the facades“) to edible plants (1.13e). Council held a public hearing in February 2021, receiving more than 500 letters opposing the project. The public hearing took three days, with 35 people speaking in opposition.

Ginger Gosnell-Myers summarizes: “It’s easier to elect a pope than to approve a small apartment building in the city of Vancouver.”

Meanwhile, in Edmonton, a developer observes: “We’re able to deliver housing in the same calendar year that we purchased the land.”

Housing in Edmonton is far more affordable than in Vancouver, despite high demand: Edmonton’s growing faster than Vancouver, and salaries are higher there. If Edmonton can do it, why can’t we?

A fixable problem

The problem in Metro Vancouver is that we have a mismatch between housing and jobs. People move where the jobs are. Vancouver’s a nice place to live, so a lot of people retire here. When somebody retires from a job in Vancouver, somebody else needs to move here to fill that job. Because we have an older population, we also need a lot of people to work in healthcare. And within the region, you’re going to have more people who want to live closer to the geographic centre with easy access to jobs.

Land in Metro Vancouver is limited, because of the ocean and the mountains. If you draw a circle with a 25-kilometer radius around downtown Vancouver, less than 40% of that circle is buildable land. So land in Vancouver is always going to be expensive. To add housing, we need to build up. But land in Vancouver is also extremely underused. There’s a lot of single-family houses where the land is worth way more than the building, but the city makes it illegal to build anything other than a new single-family house. So we spend a lot of time tearing down old houses and putting up new expensive houses that practically nobody can afford.

The result is, as people move to Vancouver for work, prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to push other people out. Younger people and renters are being crushed and driven out by high housing costs. The problem goes all the way to the top of the income scale - there’s people making $100,000 a year who can’t afford to stay here. It’s a bad situation even for older homeowners, who are insulated from the madness of the housing market: when younger people can’t afford to live here, the healthcare system has a hard time finding nurses and even doctors.

It’s a similar story in Toronto, or in places like California and New York City. But it’s not true everywhere. Montreal’s bigger than Vancouver, and it has cheaper housing. Edmonton’s growing faster than Vancouver, and it has cheaper housing. In the US, there’s lots of people moving from California to Texas, even though wages are lower there, because the cost of housing is so much lower.

This is a fixable problem. We have people who want to live and work here, and we have other people who want to build housing for them, like Peter Miller. The problem is, we don’t let them.

To fix Vancouver’s housing shortage, we need to build a lot more housing, both market and non-market. We don’t have as much land as Edmonton or Texas does, so we need to build up. It’s not as if we don’t know how. Elevators exist. In Kitsilano and West Point Grey, you see a handful of high-rises that were built back in the 1970s, before the city made them illegal.

Pushing down on a balloon

Back in the 1970s, people didn’t like the West End and they didn’t like the handful of high-rises that were going up in Kitsilano, so they made them illegal, and they set up anti-growth institutions that continue to restrict housing today.

For more than a generation, the old guard of urban planners at city hall and elsewhere worked long and hard to make Vancouver what it is today. It’s like a bonsai tree: lovely, but much too small.

To paraphrase the MacPhail Report, a recent report from an expert panel headed by Joy MacPhail: we regulate new housing like it’s a nuclear power plant, and we tax it like it’s a gold mine.

Most of the residential land in the city of Vancouver is reserved for low-density housing, by law. If you want to build an apartment building, you need to notify everybody nearby, as if they’re living in the blast radius. More importantly, you need to beg the city to change the law through the spot rezoning process, which is extremely labour-intensive.

City staff must spend tremendous time and effort enforcing a massive and growing list of regulatory requirements (like edible plants), all of which are higher-priority than housing. It’s simply impossible for city hall to allow enough housing, even if they wanted to. They don’t have the manpower.

For developers, there’s giant economies of scale: it’s practically as difficult to navigate this process for a small project as for a large one.

A striking example of the restrictiveness of Vancouver’s land-use rules: the Senakw project is on a relatively small parcel of land, across the Burrard Bridge from downtown. Because it’s on Squamish reserve land, it’s not subject to the city’s zoning laws. The project is building 6000 rental apartments, 20% below-market, in the form of high-rises up to 60 storeys. The first building will be ready for occupancy in late 2025 or early 2026.

Meanwhile, if you walk five minutes north and one block west, to 1000 Cypress (in the lower left corner of the illustration), there’s a small two-storey, eight-unit rental building, built in 1972. It’s illegal to replace it with a new building of the same size: the city made apartment buildings in this area illegal. The previous owner applied to replace it with three single-detached houses, which would probably sell for about $8 million each, $6 million just for the land. That’s what the city’s laws allow you to build.

Zoning restrictions are like pushing down on a balloon. The people who want to live there don’t disappear, they get pushed somewhere else.

There's no free lunch

As the MacPhail Report points out, the city's incentives are backwards. Because housing is so scarce and expensive, they're able to extract a lot of revenue as part of the spot rezoning process, allowing them to keep property taxes low. Their incentive is to keep the zoning as restrictive as possible, so that the value of the land is discounted. And then when they change the zoning for the land to something less unreasonable, they take 70-80% of the “uplift” in value. They’re taking away your ability to build more housing on your land, and selling it back to you.

To quote the MacPhail Report:

Community Amenity Charges are negotiated in exchange for rezoning property to accommodate more homes. As a result, local governments that proactively increase zoned capacity or update zoning codes to better reflect anticipated growth and community priorities (as outlined in regional growth strategies and official community plans) lose that revenue opportunity. Indeed, local governments can generate CAC revenue by keeping zoning below levels that make redevelopment possible, and selling additional “air rights” through the zoning powers they have been delegated. Consequently, the additional costs, time, and uncertainty associated with the rezoning process—including their negative impacts on housing supply—persist.

How much revenue are we talking about? Over the 10 years from 2011 to 2020, the city of Vancouver collected $2.5 billion in cash and in-kind benefits from supposedly-voluntary Community Amenity Charges. For scale, $250 million per year was about one-sixth of the city’s operating budget.

The problem is, costs act as a floor on prices and rents. There’s no free lunch. By aiming to maximize their revenue, municipal governments are ratcheting up the floor on prices and rents. Whenever prices and rents drop below that floor, homebuilding halts until prices and rents rise again.

This affects prices and rents for existing housing as well as new housing, since they compete with each other. When new housing is scarce and expensive, existing housing will also be scarce and expensive, just as when there’s a shortage of new cars, old cars are expensive.

To be fair, it’s not just municipal development charges that are raising costs. Labour and materials are also much more expensive since Covid. In theory, municipalities could lower their development charges to counter these headwinds. But this is extremely difficult, because they’re counting on that money!

The road ahead

Since the 1970s, we've had an ambivalent attitude towards growth. Orwell talks about "Little Englanders." Similarly there seem to be a lot of "Little Vancouverites" who are politically active, who want Vancouver to stay the same and who don't want it to grow. The result is that Vancouver has become more and more exclusive and expensive.

People move where the jobs are. We need people to run the healthcare system, for example. Tech employers want to expand. And so on. Problem is, because of Vancouver's ambivalent attitude towards growth, we're reluctant to build enough housing. So we end up with a mismatch between jobs and housing. And then prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to keep people out.

If you have a lot of money, or if you moved here and bought a place 20 years ago, Vancouver’s a great place to live. Otherwise, even if you did everything right - you went to university and got good grades, you got a high-paying job - it’s going to be very hard to stay in Vancouver. This is why Vancouver is sometimes described as a “playground for the rich.”

Given the scarcity and cost of housing, it’s not surprising that a lot of first-time homebuyers are getting help from parents. (It’s like the return of the landed gentry: you can buy a property here if your parents have a property.) According to a survey in June, 40% of first-time homebuyers in BC needed help from family.

We basically have two choices.

• We can keep Vancouver small, expensive, and exclusive, like the Arbutus Club, with high prices and rents keeping people out. Because we have a lot of high-paying jobs that need to be filled (like emergency-room nurses), this is a cost rather than a benefit.

• Or we can be larger, with a wider range of people and incomes: more like Montreal than like Shaughnessy.

Because municipal incentives are backwards, municipal governments will not fix this on their own. We’ll need intervention by higher levels of government.

Peter Miller’s rezoning application was approved at the public hearing in February 2021, after an eight-year battle. Unfortunately, he died in July 2022 at the age of 85, a couple months after getting the development permit (an entirely separate process), before construction could start. The three old duplexes are still there.

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• I’d recommend that anyone interested in housing take the time to read through the MacPhail Report.

• The “Bonsai Vancouver” metaphor is by Harmon Moon.

• Video by Oh the Urbanity!: Edmonton is leading on housing reform.

• Mario Polese has a very illuminating comparison of Montreal and Toronto.

• A surprisingly gripping paper: Unwanted Housing, by Michael Manville and Paavo Monkkonen. In California and in Metro Vancouver, our municipal institutions treat new housing as an unwanted and undesirable land use.

• David Schleicher’s paper Stuck!: The Law and Economics of Residential Stagnation provides more context. “Before the 1970s, land-use restrictions (zoning laws, subdivision regulations, historic preservation, and so on) limited access to some towns or communities, usually rich suburbs. They did not, however, cap housing construction in entire metropolitan regions. Builders could always construct new housing, either in downtowns or on the urban fringe. Something dramatic happened to land-use regulation in coastal metropolitan regions like San Francisco, New York, and Boston in the 1970s and 1980s: it became much, much stricter.”

• Summary of major changes from the BC NDP to make more housing legal by right, particularly multiplexes and transit-oriented development: impatience is a virtue. The path of least resistance on replacing municipal development charges.

• What about non-market housing? It’ll help, but we need much more market housing to meet the scale of the shortage.

• The 4th and Balaclava public hearing: agenda, with referral report, public comments, and video. Comments by Christine Boyle, WeLoveKits (which fought the rezoning application for two years), and the Upper Kitsilano Residents Association (which was also opposed).

Stephen Rouse on LinkedIn, April 2026:

Growth doesn’t pay for growth in Metro Vancouver. It pays for everything.

Development charges on new housing far exceed the initial infrastructure costs to set them up. Metro Van’s own study shows apartments need roughly one-fifth the infrastructure per unit that single-family homes do — yet they pay relatively the most.

The gap widens even more when you strip out regional charges.

Vancouver is supposedly one of the most progressive cities in the country. And yet, new multi-million dollar SFHs have their infrastructure subsidized by everyone else, while new apartments pay six times the cost per unit.

That’s not just unfair. It’s bad economics.

If you strip out regional charges:

The Institute for Progress is a pro-growth US think-tank. Last week they released a Transit Abundance Playbook, a set of 15 ideas in the form of short essays, written by people like Alon Levy and Brian Potter.

Of course the challenges faced by major projects in Metro Vancouver, like the Broadway Subway and the future UBC subway, aren’t going to be exactly the same as those faced by US projects. But as a layperson, it’s still fascinating to read about some of the key factors determining the success or failure of a major transit project.

Will Poff-Webster summarizes:

1. Eric Goldwyn - Reform federal grants to include early, small, milestone-based grants to reduce project risks.

2. Steph Pollack - Cut procedural requirements, fund early right-of-way spending, require accelerated state and local permitting, and loosen procurement rules.

3. Rohan Aras and Alex Armlovich - Cap federal cost-sharing and encourage joint procurement to reduce bus overcustomization.

4. Brian Potter - Cut redundant subway cross-passages to bring our fire safety standards in line with Europe’s.

5. Anthony Potts - Allow and encourage agencies to do procurement based on the best value, not just the lowest cost.

6. Alon Levy - Require itemized bidding in procurement to increase transparency and reduce mid-stream change orders.

7. Anonymous - Adopt Italy’s “Conference of Services” model to empower a single decision-maker to ensure permitting disputes are resolved up front.

8. Lizzie Speed and Bennett Capozzi - Create a repository for federal transit reports and project data, along with an AI-based system for querying it.

9. Jamey Tesler - Give transit projects the same delegated permitting authorities that states have over highways and roads.

10. Hayden Clarkin - Exempt voter-approved transit projects from costly and redundant permitting to deliver projects the voters asked for.

11. Aidan Mackenzie - Allow transit agencies to buy land and prepare for construction while permitting occurs.

12. Paul Lewis - Reduce dependence on expensive consultants by encouraging more capacity within transit agencies.

13. Andrew Miller - Enable transit automation by spelling out worker protections explicitly instead of requiring a veto-prone process.

14. Jackson Moore-Otto - Streamline access to federal loans to create an alternative funding model for transit projects.

15. Philip Plotch - Provide confidential ways for agencies to share lessons learned with each other.

Naturally each essay includes a summary up front.

Stop Paying More for Less Transit. Introduction by Will Poff-Webster and Arnab Datta.

Reform Funding to Encourage Early Transit Planning, by Eric Goldwyn.

Current federal grant programs for transit capital projects disincentivize good planning practices and place large financial risks on agencies. As a result, projects receive federal funding without resolving obvious constructability challenges, such as utility conflicts, and some agencies expend hundreds of millions of dollars on planning and design without ever winning a federal grant. A more iterative approach with phased payments and milestones, similar to the Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor Identification and Development Program (Corridor ID), would enable agencies to work with federal partners to iterate on their projects and share financial risk during project development, allowing the federal government to shape projects early and ensure on-budget delivery.

Focus Capital Investment Grants on Improved Project Delivery, by Stephanie Pollack.

The largest and most expensive transit capital projects in the US often receive at least part of their funding from the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Grants (CIG) program. Although CIG provides invaluable funding and oversight, the program’s structure has become extremely rigid, interfering with a project sponsor’s ability to adopt proven methods for delivering transit capital projects on time, on budget, and at a reasonable price.

To ensure CIG selects projects that can be built and put into revenue service expeditiously and cost-effectively, substantial changes need to be made throughout the CIG process. These include: (1) de-proceduralizing requirements to streamline project delivery and promote innovation; (2) encouraging and funding early investments in right-of-way and early works projects; (3) requiring a commitment to accelerated local and state permitting timelines before a Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA) is signed; and (4) loosening rigid procurement approaches to ensure best value in the selection and use of delivery teams. These changes will set projects up for success well before full construction begins.

Reduce Needless Bus Customization, by Rohan Aras and Alex Armlovich.

US transit agencies pay from $500,000 to over $1 million for each transit bus they procure, while our international peers regularly pay under $400,000 for comparable vehicles. At the root of this problem is the structure of federal cost sharing. Agencies receive an uncapped 80–85% reimbursement for bus purchases, a bad incentive that has encouraged excessive customization and hindered scale economies. We propose a three-pronged solution: cap the federal cost share, address the over-customization habit directly, and jump-start scale economies for bus manufacturing.

Eliminate Redundant Subway Cross-Passages, by Brian Potter.

US subway construction follows the NFPA 130 fire safety standard, which mandates cross-passages — side tunnels that connect adjacent train tunnels — every 800 feet. This spacing is significantly closer together than European cross-passage spacing requirements, adding to construction costs without measurably improving safety. NFPA 130 requirements should be changed to align more closely with European cross-passage spacing requirements, or agencies and jurisdictions should modify these standards themselves when adopting NFPA 130 or requiring compliance.

We Should Know How Much Transit Components Cost, by Alon Levy.

Contracts for large, complex infrastructure projects such as urban rail lines are often lump-sum, obscuring the true cost of work and enabling cost inflation as the project inevitably evolves. Bidders should instead be required to itemize costs in project bids, estimating labor costs by job, material costs by commodity, and systems cost by individual manufactured product. Under the supervision of a new unit within the US Department of Transportation (USDOT), transit agencies should establish a reference point for costs by publishing the expected cost of each component used for transit projects. Publicly itemized costs will reduce conflict over change orders by pricing in each change, whether it is due to market conditions, unexpected delays resulting from geology affecting underground construction, or any other reason. This provides both transit agencies and bidders with greater certainty, reducing costs by an average of 15-20%.

Get the Best Value in Transit Procurement, by Anthony Potts.

State and local procurement rules govern how federally funded transit contracts are awarded, and they overwhelmingly favor selection of the lowest-priced rather than the best-value bidder. Despite evidence against low-bid selection, many states and localities mandate the lowest-bid method, and even states with more flexibility still require most of a bidder’s score to be based on their initial bid amount. Common misconceptions about the low-bid method, including its supposed cost-effectiveness or ability to limit corruption, entrench its use. On the contrary, low-bid selection is linked to higher infrastructure costs, contributes to chronic cost overruns and delays, and is more vulnerable to bidder manipulation. These risks are greatest for high-complexity projects like transit construction, where technical mistakes can derail performance.

Best-value selection is an evidence-based alternative shown to result in more cost-effective projects. This method selects contractors on the basis of technical merit, experience, and lifecycle costs in addition to factors such as bid price. Federal intervention can accelerate state and local authorization and use of best-value selection by (1) conditioning major infrastructure grants on the use of best-value selection; (2) tailoring federal-grant scoring to incentivize the development of best-value expertise; (3) establishing clear guidance on appropriate cost and non-cost weights for selecting bids; and (4) charging federal agencies to develop guidance to assist implementation of best-value selection. These reforms would modernize transit procurement processes in line with low-cost models in other countries and curb waste.

Use AI to Improve Transit Planning, by Lizzie Speed and Bennett Capozzi.

Empowering agency staff and moving more planning functions in-house is a demonstrated strategy for reducing transit project costs. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) should follow the lead of other federal agencies and develop a centralized data repository of past planning reports and an AI-backed platform to let transit agency staff access project insights. These investments would cut duplicative data wrangling, build in-house transit agency expertise, enable teams to manage their own projects, and help agencies anticipate cost drivers. Growing transit agency capacity will improve returns on FTA-funded transit construction projects by allowing more iterative learning between one project and the next.

Transit Projects Need a Single Decision-Maker.

A major driver of high transit costs is the power imbalance between the transit agency building the project and the third parties that have to give their approval for the project to advance. New transit construction must navigate potential vetoes from other government agencies that need to issue permits, utilities that need to agree to move or reconfigure their infrastructure, and many other affected asset owners. In the US, negotiations with these third parties are handled on an individual, ad hoc basis. This leads to value extraction that can verge on extortion — the transit agency must negotiate with each third party for their approval, often by acquiescing to third-party demands to cover extraneous costs or expand project scope to address a pet issue.

Cost-effective global peers offer an alternative: a state-led conference of all parties that identifies conflicts during an early and time-limited comment period, mitigates issues, and empowers the state government to adjudicate tradeoffs without prolonged litigation. This creates transparency and coordination, ensuring all third parties have input but preventing any one actor from withholding approval and extorting the project behind closed doors. The time-bound process ensures delay cannot be used as a tactic to gain leverage over a project. This fair and transparent process rebalances the power dynamic between the infrastructure delivery agency and the affected third parties, addressing project impacts while removing opportunities for delay and extortion.

Let Agencies Do Their Own Environmental Review, by Jamey Tesler.

The comprehensive environmental review process required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is a common pain point for transit agencies, contributing to project delays and cost escalations. Categorical Exclusions (CEs), which streamline environmental review for categories of activities based on demonstrated evidence that the type of project will not “significantly affect the quality of the human environment,” can reduce infrastructure project costs, shorten permitting timelines, minimize uncertainty, and help projects avoid litigation risk.

However, CEs are implemented inconsistently across transportation modes and federal agencies. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) requires transit project proponents to submit burdensome documentation to obtain pre-approval for a CE. By contrast, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has streamlined the CE process through the use of programmatic agreements (PAs) that delegate the authority to self-certify CEs to state departments of transportation (DOTs). To improve transit project outcomes and mitigate a major cause of cost overruns and project delays, Congress should authorize the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to enter into PAs with transit agencies.

Fast-Track Democratically Approved Transit Projects, by Hayden Clarkin.

When voters approve transit projects by ballot initiative, their vote is meant to be decisive: the public has decided a new transit project is worth building. But procedural requirements such as environmental review can add years of delay and massive additional costs after transit has been approved by voters.

Laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and its state-level equivalents were designed to protect the environment by mandating procedures that make potential environmental consequences known before the government acts. But procedural requirements are not always the best tool for that job. Democratically approved transit projects already fulfill NEPA’s core goals — environmental protection, public involvement, and agency evaluation — without the need for reviews that add risk and cost. Because ballot measures engage the public in considering trade-offs, and delaying pollution-reducing transit infrastructure is itself an environmental harm, further procedure is redundant. Congress should exempt democratically approved transit projects from NEPA, or limit NEPA alternatives analysis when voters have chosen a transit route. Doing so would accelerate transit project delivery so both citizens and the environment — can benefit from these projects in years rather than decades.

Let Transit Agencies Buy Land, by Aidan Mackenzie.

Under current federal regulations, transit agencies cannot buy land, prepare construction sites, move utility lines, enter into the engineering process, or conduct any other preliminary construction activities for transit projects until the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) completes a full review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Barring transit agencies from acquiring land and preparing for construction until after NEPA review — which averages 5.7 years for transit projects — raises the price of land and adds years to project timelines. This prohibition on “early works” also distorts transit planning by preventing early technical development and incentivizing planners to choose suboptimal project routes to avoid land acquisition and minimize utility relocation.

There are two ways to cut this red tape: either Congress should update the statute to allow early works before or during NEPA review, or FTA should take administrative action and update its NEPA regulations to allow the same.

Close America’s Transit Automation Gap, by Andrew Miller. In Metro Vancouver, we’ve had fully automated SkyTrain since 1986.

Section 13(c) of the Federal Transit Act conditions federal funding on a certification of labor protection from the Department of Labor. Originally enacted in 1964 to protect workers during the transition from private to public ownership of mass transit, the provision now blocks the modernization of transit operations: no legacy US heavy-rail system has automated its operations to permit trains to run without onboard crew. In contrast, countries like France and Canada, each with robust labor protections, automate without conflict.

Transit automation can drastically reduce operating costs and improve service, but the open-ended 13(c) certification process provides labor with an effective veto on such changes. Congress should reform this process and unlock automation by enumerating worker protections in statute, shifting the framework from preserving staffing models to protecting individual workers.

Put Transit Staff in Charge of Their Own Projects, by Paul Lewis. Sam Holland’s recent Better Columbia article suggests that TransLink continues to have the in-house capacity to build major projects.

Excessive use of consultants to manage large capital projects is a significant cost driver in transit project delivery. Over the past 40 years, public agencies have outsourced a large share of their core work to consultants. Design, engineering, project management, and oversight functions that were once handled in-house at transit agencies are now farmed out to private companies. These consultants don’t just assist with designing tunnels or engineering. Increasingly, they manage the entire project: scheduling, budgeting, risk analysis, and even day-to-day decision-making. The result is a system in which public agencies pay significant markups for private expertise while losing the capacity to oversee projects themselves. Costs grow, timelines expand, and every project becomes more dependent on consultants than the last.

Loans Can Stabilize Transit Funding, by Jackson Moore-Otto.

Most federal support for US transit and rail capital projects comes in the form of discretionary grants, which warp incentives and drive up project costs. By contrast, predictable multi-year funding is the norm in peer countries, and its reliability has enabled them to build in-house expertise and deliver projects at speeds and costs unmatched in the United States. To achieve more of these benefits in the US, Congress should enhance existing loan programs, streamline their application processes, and expand underwriting capacity. These improvements would create a stable and predictable source of support for transit project sponsors at minimal cost to the federal government. By initially targeting rail electrification and other underbuilt, positive-return investments, programmatic loan finance will help build institutional capacity that can sustain a pipeline for future projects.

Share the Truth about Transit Project Failures, by Philip Plotch.

Transit agencies do not adequately document the lessons they learn from managing large projects because of perceived reputational, funding, and legal risks. Without this knowledge sharing, agencies repeat costly mistakes, leading to delays, cost overruns, and public distrust. This piece proposes a three-part solution: (1) the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) should create a confidential repository where anonymized lessons from agencies and contractors are collected and analyzed; (2) FTA regional offices should reinvigorate their work convening in-person exchanges so transit agency peers can candidly share their challenges; and (3) FTA should add peer review to its oversight program, turning the current compliance process into two-way learning that spreads best practices across the industry.

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Gary Winslett, Veto Points Facilitate Hostage Taking.

When the LA Metro wanted to extend the D Line in 2024, they asked the City of Beverly Hills to allow them to do this construction at night from Thanksgiving to New Years; no local businesses objected to this. The city however refused to give the Metro the necessary work permits for them to be able to do that until they agreed to also build a police kiosk for the city. This was policy extortion, plain and simple, and it added millions to the Metro expansion’s costs both through delays and through forcing additional unnecessary spending on the kiosk.

The details change from one example to the next, but this is a recurring problem in American transit policy. We create too many veto points and then someone decides to use that veto point to effectively extort some sort of policy ransom that narrowly benefits them but makes building that transit slower and more costly than it needs to be.

The Institute for Progress never uses the word ‘hostage’ in their transit policy playbook, but there are SO MANY hostage situations in their playbook that I felt like I was watching The Negotiator while I was reading it.

At almost every stage of a transit project, someone has informal leverage to extract value by threatening delay, and they use it (!), and we have no mechanism for resolving that threat quickly and on a firm deadline.

Andrew Miller, The Wrong Kind of Careful.

I want to say what the Playbook is too polite to make plain, and name the root of the problem. What is holding back American transit? The Introduction states that “there is no single cause”. On the contrary, I think that there is, and that we can see that cause at work behind almost every individual contribution. Knowing the enemy is vital to fixing the problems holding back American transit: not only its construction, but its operation too.

That enemy’s name is defensive proceduralism.

The key word here is defensive. Let’s define proceduralism as the tendency to establish rules in advance for how to scope, design, and deliver a project, and for what kind of input the project will accept, from whom, and how. This is a good thing, allowing everyone involved to know the game being played and how to play it. Italy’s experience demonstrates the value of proceduralism. The country enjoys very low per-mile transit construction costs today because, to combat corruption, it relies heavily on open procedure: published price lists, an anti-corruption authority, bids scored on merit, and internal state capacity such that civil servants are able to run a project themselves. These measures aim to prevent corrupt practices, and have the helpful downstream effect of keeping costs low.

So Italy has proceduralism. What is the USA’s problem, then? Not the presence of rules, but their aim. In Italy, the rules aim to deliver projects on time and on budget. In the USA, the rules aim to stave off lawsuits or blame. That is the American disease, and once you look for it, you will find it behind nearly every contribution in the collection.

Sean Galbraith on BlueSky, last month:

Today at the Committee of Adjustment I was very happy to get approval for this great 4 storey, 16 unit apartment building on Gerrard near Norwood. Absolutely smooth sailing. All 2 bedrooms and has 1 level of underground parking.

What was particularly notable is the support we got from the community, with like a dozen letters of support and this amazing in person presentation from a directly abutting neighbour. It is a must watch.

We first spoke with staff about this project back in 2023 I think (it went dormant then), and at that time it would have required at least a rezoning and site plan application. Now? Only minor variances, not even site plan. Huge savings in time, effort and money.

Can't wait to do more projects like this. More homes for more people in more places.

Design by ITHD and Modern Building Group are the builders. Thanks to them for having me as part of the team.

More

• Facebook thread

• Urban Toronto database - 2151 Gerrard Street East

• Committee of Adjustment agenda for May 6

• A city’s tool to solve minor housing issues is overwhelmed. John Lorinc, Globe and Mail, on the Committee of Adjustment process.

• 397 Pharmacy Avenue - a six-storey project rejected by the Scarborough Committee of Adjustment.

Via Alex Armlovich.

In Metro Vancouver and the GTA, there’s two major barriers to new housing:

• The approval bottleneck. Getting approval to build new housing is slow and difficult, and delays increase the cost of new housing.

• The cost bottleneck. Even if something is legal to build, when costs are too high it won’t get built. Declining prices, in combination with high development charges in Metro Vancouver and the GTA, have been pushing more and more projects underwater.

High development charges are primarily a problem in Metro Vancouver and the GTA. Mario Polèse describes the municipal decision to tax new housing heavily as a “fiscal trap door”: once you go through, it’s very hard to get out.

The 2025 federal budget included $12 billion over 10 years for a Build Communities Strong fund, to fund municipal infrastructure. The conditions on the fund:

To access funds, provinces and territories must agree to cost-match federal funding and to substantially reduce development charges and not levy other taxes that hinder the housing supply.

In March, the federal and Ontario governments announced that they’d reached an agreement to cut development charges significantly (the headline was “in half”). Federal, Ontario governments to spend $8.8-billion to cut municipal development charges.

Last Thursday, the federal and BC governments announced a similar agreement. The press release from the federal government:

Through the federal government’s new Build Communities Strong Fund, we will invest:

• Nearly $1.6 billion over 10 years – matched by British Columbia for a total of up to $3.2 billion – to lower development charges for multi-unit housing by up to 50% in priority communities, saving up to $40,000 per unit, and expand housing-enabling infrastructure such as water systems, wastewater systems, and local roads.

• More than $600 million over three years – matched by British Columbia for a total of up to $1.2 billion – to modernise and expand health infrastructure such as hospitals, emergency rooms, urgent care centres, and other critical facilities so more British Columbians can get faster health care when they need it.

• Up to $50 million over five years to support community infrastructure projects in coastal communities, with priority to projects in Terrace and Prince Rupert.

To further accelerate homebuilding in British Columbia, the Government of Canada has introduced legislation that would provide a one-time transfer of $284 million to British Columbia to reduce barriers to new construction.

Plus:

Through the Canada Public Transit Fund, the federal government will invest $2.5 billion over 10 years to build new transit projects – such as the Surrey-Langley Sky Train extension project that is currently underway – and increase service access and frequency in high-traffic areas. This funding is in addition to the $852 million previously announced by the federal government to support TransLink and BC Transit.

Canada and British Columbia are also partnering to build new infrastructure for the community of Tumbler Ridge, including a new secondary school and renovations to the local health centre. The federal government and the provincial government will each provide $100 million for construction, which is expected to begin as early as this summer – starting with the removal of the existing school.

I expect negotiations with municipal governments will be the responsibility of the BC government. As Machiavelli says, the three elements of diplomacy (and also intergovernmental relations in Canad) are persuasion, compromise, and pressure. The BC government now has $3.2 billion (about $320 million per year) that it can offer as part of a compromise - but persuasion and pressure will also be important.

In the city of Vancouver, I think it’d be very helpful to use federal and provincial funding to upgrade sewer capacity near the Nanaimo and 29th Avenue stations. In a 2021 article, Frances Bula noted that lack of sewer capacity is a major constraint on building more housing there.

An article from shortly after the Ontario agreement was announced: Vancouver mayor calls for federal-provincial deal to reduce developer fees. Jami Makan, Business in Vancouver, April 2, reporting on a press conference with Ken Sim.

“We need a firm commitment from [B.C. Housing Minister Christine Boyle] that the B.C. government will match federal funding, and we need a firm commitment that these funds will actually be used to allow municipalities to drop these development charges.”

Sim said he wants to know if the province will bring new infrastructure funding to the table and match the federal government dollar for dollar as Ontario did. He expressed a concern that the province could redirect any federal infrastructure funds elsewhere.

Development charges are necessary but can also act as a roadblock to housing delivery, Sim said.

To keep projects moving forward, he said the city has reduced its development charges by 20 per cent and has voiced concerns to the Metro Vancouver Regional District, which is taking a different tack and hiking its own set of fees by triple-digit percentages.

“Unfortunately at Metro, they’ve taken up that slack,” Sim said.

The point was echoed by Deputy Mayor Sarah Kirby-Yung, who said at the press conference “it’s not helpful … to have that [20 per cent] reduction eaten up by Metro.”

In fact Metro Vancouver has reversed course recently, voting to roll back their 2026 increase and returning DCCs to 2025 levels.

Converting market condos to non-market housing

The Canada-BC agreement also includes a plan to buy unsold market condos and convert them to non-market housing:

The federal and provincial governments also agreed to launch the new Canada-British Columbia Partnership on Condo Conversion. Together, through Build Canada Homes and BC Housing, we will leverage innovative financing tools to convert more than 2,200 vacant condo units in priority growth areas into affordable homes.

Judging by online comments, people hate this - they think of it as a developer bailout. An example Reddit thread.

To me it seems like a BC initiative to acquire market housing at fire-sale prices and turn it into non-market housing. (The Ontario agreement in March didn't include anything like this, which is what makes me think it's coming from the BC side; that said, I don't have any inside information.)

From a political perspective, the controversy makes me think that this plan would have benefited from a trial balloon, to see how much heat it would get; and the lack of a trial balloon makes me think that neither the BC nor the federal government anticipated its unpopularity.

It may take a while to work out the details. My initial thought was that they’d be used for below-market rental housing. But the reference to “innovative financing tools” makes me think of BC’s Attainable Homeownership Initiative, intended to scale up the Heather Lands model of home ownership at a 40% discount.

More

• Ottawa, B.C. to spend $3.2-billion to cut homebuilding fees. Rachelle Younglai, Globe and Mail.

• Local governments in B.C. can tap into $5-billion housing and infrastructure fund. Katie DeRosa and Emily Fagan, CBC News.

• Carney and Eby announce $3.2B developer subsidy; plan to buy unsold B.C. condos. Graeme Wood, Business in Vancouver.

• Critics slam government plan to ‘bail out’ sagging condo sector in B.C. Katie DeRosa, CBC News.

@jasonc_nc on Twitter:

Had a real life “why building code matters” moment with our son in Stockholm.

Coming back from some exploring, a door was open to the interior courtyard at our building and we could hear kids playing. As we walked out there was an elevated patio area where three young ones were practicing riding their bikes.

Just down from that was another enclosed patio, and down from there the main full courtyard at grade with play areas, trees, covered bike storage, bbqs etc.

Explained how parents can watch their kids from the balconies inside the courtyard and we talked about how quiet it was in the courtyard despite being in the center of the city. Was funny watching it click for him how different this place feels simply because of the form of the buildings and the resulting experience they allow.

Anyway: legalize single stair buildings, right sized residential elevators, and the middle building code.

What does he mean by “middle building code”?

One of the most effective things I believe states can do is amend model building codes to build a pattern book of sorts that right sizes code to building scale - I.e. a “middle building code”.

Single stair is a first example “pattern”. We need more of those to build the library and compound the value of each. Right-sized elevators is an obvious next one.

Our midrise construction costs are out of control vs peer countries, and it’s a direct outcome of ICC code. In many cases simply adding an amended version of certain EU options as acceptable alternatives would be sufficient.

All this of course has to be nested within zoning reforms to lever meaningful results. A small midrise residential building, for rent or for sale, that cannot be easily approved on a small parcel because of other restrictions never gets built, whatever building code changes occur.

You have to make the levers more effective by these things being done in concert, by each group being laser focused on “their” thing.

More

• Middle-class flats in Europe

• Matthew Yglesias: In praise of courtyard apartments

• Victoria’s official community plan reduces front setbacks and moves open space towards the rear of each lot, to allow for future perimeter blocks.

• BC updated its building code to allow single-stair apartment buildings up to six storeys in September 2024.

• The city of Vancouver has its own building code. Vancouver legalized single exterior exit stairs in December 2025.

Residents for Responsible Free Little Library Growth on Facebook. Via Aaron Chapman.