Ken Sim's 3-3-3-1 targets
Why hasn't he been able to deliver?
In the 2022 election, Ken Sim’s “3-3-3-1” pledge was to dramatically speed up approvals:
Home renovations - 3 days
Low-density housing - 3 weeks
Mid-rise housing - 3 months
High-rise housing - 1 year
If he’d been able to deliver, this would have been a tremendous accomplishment. Delays are costly, which translates directly into higher prices and rents.
Dan Fumano provided the latest data in an October 2025 article: Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim strikes a more serious note as he makes the case for a second term.
Home renovations - 22 days (7X)
Low-density housing - 25 weeks (8X)
Mid-rise housing - 14 months (4X)
I think it’s fair to say that Ken Sim has failed to meet his own targets.
Meanwhile, Surrey seems to be doing a much better job of setting realistic goals and meeting them. Kenneth Chan, Daily Hive: City of Surrey cuts residential permit processing times from months to weeks.
As of early January 2026, new residential building permits were being processed in an average of 2.7 weeks, down from 16 weeks in September 2025 and well below the City’s 10-week target. Residential additions and renovations were averaging five weeks [comparable to Vancouver], also within target timelines.
Small-scale residential rezoning applications, including those for subdivisions and multi-unit housing, remain slightly above target at an average of 14.4 weeks, compared to a 12-week goal.
Larger multi-family, commercial, and industrial rezonings have remained within target timelines, averaging 14.6 weeks in 2025.
Why hasn’t Ken Sim been able to deliver?
To govern the city of Vancouver effectively, I think you need both impatience and patience. You need impatience, so that you don’t end up just deferring to the city’s terrible status quo. But you also need the patience and persistence to do the work, to understand how the current institutions work and figure out how to improve them.
My impression of Ken Sim is that he has the impatience, but lacks the patience. (As Bismarck said of Italy’s ambitions in the late 19th century: a good appetite, but poor teeth.)
Programmers have a saying: RTFM (which stands for “read the manual”). It’s an admonition against our tendency to learn the bare minimum that we need in order to get by - more bluntly, our laziness.
If you’re trying to run Vancouver’s municipal government, you need to have a solid grasp of a tremendous amount of policy. The city of Vancouver’s planning department currently has 230 policy documents (down from 345 a couple years ago), probably comprising hundreds of thousands of pages, approved by previous councils. Each report from city staff will refer to a number of these policies.
If you’re not willing to put in the work to understand what’s going on, it’s going to be really hard to make things happen.
Even the day-to-day work of running city hall must be an incredible grind for Ken Sim. Council has to ratify the recommendations of city staff for practically every new apartment building in the city of Vancouver, which means reading through hundreds of pages of reports and correspondence, and listening to hours of arguments. If you’re not engaged, it must be tremendously boring.
Previously:
I'd say that Sim mostly ran on a centrist platform, so any radical changes are pretty out of the question because they would alienate his base.
He's sort of stuck, and unless he runs much more radically this election he doesn't have the political capital to pull off major changes.