Vancouver Plan: residential, shopping areas, rapid transit

What's in the draft plan.

The city of Vancouver has a patchwork of neighbourhood-level plans, but no official community plan guiding development across the entire city. The Vancouver Plan - now released in draft form, to be approved or rejected by city council in June - is an attempt to create such a plan. It’s basically what the city would look like in 2050, with about one million residents (up from 660,000 today) and about 640,000 jobs (up from 400,000 today).

There’s basically three areas the plan looks at:

• 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”). These are the light-coloured and yellow areas on the map. The Village areas could include buildings up to six storeys.

• Local shopping areas (“Neighbourhood Centre”) - allow buildings up to twelve storeys. These are the vertical purple areas on the map.

• Rapid transit areas - includes an anticipated corridor along 49th and 41st. Allow a lot more housing, up to and including high-rises. These are the pink horizontal areas on the map, along with the dark purple areas downtown, along Broadway, and near Oakridge.

Note that the plan, if approved, doesn’t do any immediate rezoning - it’s just an overall guide for future development.

If you’d like to give your feedback to city council, there’s a survey open until April 24. It takes maybe 5-10 minutes to complete.

• The draft plan

• Kenneth Chan, Vancouver Plan prepares city-wide growth of 260,000 more residents, Daily Hive

• Christopher Cheung and Jen St. Denis, What You Should Know about Vancouver’s New City Plan, Tyee

• Dan Fumano, Is this the end of 'single-family zoning' in Vancouver?, Vancouver Sun

• Frances Bula, Vancouver proposes zoning plan with emphasis on equity, The Globe and Mail. Includes comments from Michael Wiebe and Sarah Kirby-Yung.