Visiting family in Vancouver and recharging, but I can't switch off the city-nerd brain entirely. Yesterday I had a great conversation with Josh White, the City of Vancouver's GM of Planning, and it left me both energized and asking hard questions.
Josh is leading what might be the most ambitious planning reform in any major Canadian city right now. The core idea: stop treating every building project as a one-off negotiation and start giving landowners certainty about what they can build before they apply.
The bylaw diet. Vancouver's Zoning & Development Bylaw has ballooned to ~2,200 pages. Josh's team is stripping it back to essentials, moving from an application-by-application rezoning culture to a zoning-based development system.
Broadway as the proving ground. The City is pre-zoning ~4,300 properties in the Broadway and Cambie corridors. New R5 high-rise zones allow towers of 18–22 storeys (up to 26 on larger sites), tower spacing of 80 ft, floor plates up to 7,200 sq ft, and FAR densities, with 20% below-market rental, childcare, and local retail all baked into the bylaw. No separate rezoning. Straight to a development permit. That could cut 12–15 months from the timeline.
Standardized charges. Council just approved a new city-wide Amenity Cost Charge taking effect Sept 30, 2026, replacing much of the old CAC negotiation with a transparent per-square-foot charge. Less negotiation, more predictability.
Not the first mover. City of Edmonton went first and arguably further, eliminating single-family zoning city-wide in 2024 and already seeing a 30% surge in housing approvals. Vancouver's reform is different in scope: it's not just about allowing more housing types, it's about pre-zoning high-rises with prescribed densities, tower forms, affordable housing requirements, and standardized charges all built into the bylaw. Different city, different complexity, same direction.
Thanks Josh for taking the time and having me. More on where it's all landing, from SkyTrain stations to Granville Street, in my next post.
Original-Beitrag auf LinkedIn ansehen
