Alain Bertaud on Vancouver

Land is scarce, and we use it inefficiently

A circle with radius 25 km around downtown Vancouver: only 39% is buildable land

Alain Bertaud visited Vancouver in September 2023, hosted by Sam Sullivan. He gave a talk at the Roundhouse Community Centre, and he also spoke to planners at the city of Vancouver and to city council.

In his talk, he noted that in a 25 km circle around downtown Vancouver, only 39% of the land is buildable - the rest is ocean and mountains.

Alain Bertaud: Zoning plans are wasting scarce land supply. Op-ed in the Vancouver Sun.

Is Vancouver unaffordable because of high construction prices? No. Vancouver’s construction costs are only 22 per cent of the price of a typical house, while land costs represent 78 per cent. Winnipeg land costs are only 26 per cent. In a healthy market, land should be around 30 per cent of the total property value.

Vancouver land is expensive in part because of its topography. But when land is scarce, it has to be used with great economy.

Zoning plans define for every lot what are the permitted uses and every detail of what can be built. Despite Vancouver’s lack of land, its zoning rules oblige land-users to consume more land than they would otherwise choose to. Regulations establish minimum lot sizes and not maximum ones, minimum setbacks, maximum building heights, etc. Zoning rules set arbitrary land consumption without considering household income and land prices.

Increasingly, urbanists recommend abandoning rigid zoning regulations. Households are capable of making trade-offs between these dwelling features; there is no reason for a legislator to make this trade-off through regulations.

Relaxing zoning regulations is a real political and economic challenge. But the impact on affordability and the housing stock could be relatively rapid.

What should planners focus on instead?

Households and firms require infrastructure, transportation and social services that competent pros have to plan, design and implement. Planning infrastructure is a continuous exercise that must consider changing consumption patterns, new technology and external events like climate change. It can’t be done once every few decades.

How should they respond to high housing prices?

They can increase the supply of developed land by increasing investment in infrastructure and transport, adapting land use standards to the new demand and accelerating the process of providing building permits.

Video from Bertaud’s talk at the Roundhouse:

More

• Metro Vancouver's urban planning considerations need to prioritize urban economics, says renowned planner. Interview with Kenneth Chan, Daily Hive, November 2023.

• Vancouver’s Housing Challenges Are a Cautionary Tale for Successful, Well-Managed Cities. Interview with Robin Currie, Mercatus, February 2024. There’s two earlier posts on Bogota and Porto Alegre. “To continue to thrive, Vancouver needs a workforce that has a large proportion of young people—whether native-born or immigrant—who are more technology-minded, innovative and so on. But the departure of young people from the city is leaving behind an aging population. That population has to realize that in the long run, somebody will have to pay for their pensions or their health insurance. And young people are the ones who can do it. The negative results of the current regulatory approach will appear very slowly, over a period of 20 years or so. But by the time they do, the decline of the city will likely be irreversible. In effect, Vancouver will have regulated the life out of itself.”

• Alain Bertaud webinar with Diana Petramala, Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Urban Research, November 2020.

• Alain Bertaud presentation: Cities as Labour Markets, International Transport Forum Roundtable on Integrated Transport Development Experience in Global City Clusters, Beijing, July 2015.

• Earlier post on Bertaud’s Order Without Design.