“It’s been making progress, but the damage is done. “When I look up and down the coast, San Francisco was late to the game,” Kelley said. This will be especially important in coming years as many American tech corporations plan to open Canadian locations, with their workers slated to follow. Kelley noted that the city of Vancouver and the region are now able to compound those early successes-combined with recent pushes that started during his tenure to ensure that new housing is more in line with local incomes-to potentially take a bigger step toward solving the ubiquitous housing crisis hitting many cities. “Vancouver made some good moves early on, with a rail system and a pattern that can be built on,” said Gil Kelley, Vancouver’s former chief planner who has also been a planner in San Francisco and in Portland. On the upside, the city and region’s current efforts to add homes can draw from their decades-old (and unfortunately rare) culture of planning for density that has created some of the most exemplary transit-rich, compact communities in North America. It appears that the sheer volume of Vancouver’s planned projects could be enough to cover its current housing deficit-a severe shortage that manifests in near zero percent vacancy rates in some areas of the region. “It may seem like we’re overbuilding, but what we’re doing is correcting for the past.” Seattle and the surrounding Puget Sound region-with 70 percent more residents than the Vancouver metro-plan to add about 130,000 apartment homes. Compared with other construction-active areas on the West Coast, Vancouver is booming. On paper, it may appear that Vancouver’s housing problems have been solved, but to successfully address housing affordability and availability, those plans have to become reality.Ī back-of-the-envelope sum of proposed projects comes to about 235,000 homes in the works around the region, with tens of thousands more on the way through initiatives like laneway housing, duplexes, small private apartments, and social housing. With new kinds of land opening up, Indigenous groups looking to develop their land holdings in the region, and new policies to encourage different and denser housing in many of the 21 cities that compose Metro Vancouver, the region has hundreds of thousands of new homes in the planning pipeline. Cities facing housing crises should look to Vancouver.

Metropolitan vancouver bc studio