Feint by Numbers: 129,057 Homes for Whom?

City Conversation #40: I’ve been collecting the housing numbers Vancouver City Hall continues to hide. Here they are—you can help.

April 2, 2022 — This is NOT a belated April Fools joke. Since the current City Council was elected in 2018, Councillors and members of the public have been unable to obtain from city management and staff comprehensive, aggregate data that place individual spot or area rezonings into the wider neighbourhood and city context. Reacting to that information’s absence, and assisted by CityHallWatch and a growing number of concerned citizens, we have been mining hundreds of individual address-based city web pages to build the bigger pictures that should be available to all in order to evaluate the impacts of the (so far) 372 proposed or already approved spot rezonings introduced since the current City Council was elected in 2018.

The Current Spot Rezoning Totals—from Brian Palmquist’s Homes for Whom? database

“Dad, this is a bit much even for you, isn’t it?” My son asked as he looked over my shoulder at my computer screen. He was looking at a portion of my (so far) 31-column, 405-row web-based database about Vancouver housing development that I have christened Homes for Whom? “And why do you say City Hall is hiding these numbers?”

I scrolled to the top of the database—the illustration above. “Over the past several months I have heard again and again that nobody could find the actual numbers around housing development in the city. Even City Councillors were denied that information by city management and staff, with excuses that the records were not in formats they could break down or add up, apparently.” He gave me that so what stare so I kept going.

“Many people who are concerned at a gut level that City Hall is approving too much of the wrong kinds of housing too quickly have been frustrated in their attempts to get more fulsome, current data. For example, if you live in, say, Grandview Woodlands, how do you figure out what’s been applied for or approved in your neighbourhood? Short of walking or driving every street and adding up what’s on every one of those blue rezoning and development application signs, your options are very limited. Then you’d need to do it again and again, to catch every new or amended sign.” He had seen me photograph some of those signs, nodded, giving me licence to continue.

“I’ve been following the CityHallWatch blog for some time, noticed they have been publishing a monthly list of new rezoning and development applications, as well as the list of all they’re aware of that’s already in process. Theirs is probably the best source of information about what’s going on in the city, but their core consists of a few concerned citizens supported by many others—they can’t do it all. So I decided to work with their information and flesh it out a bit.” He continued his so what stare so I kept going.

“They publish links to the city’s web site about each proposed development,” I started, but he interrupted. “Wait, Dad, you just said the city was hiding the information, now you’re saying you got it from their web site? What does that mean?”

“A great question that leads me to the grand deception. When does a city get to say the data is all there, except it’s not really?” 

“I give up and what do you mean by the grand deception?” he responded.

“Although the city continues to change the format and web places it stores individual project data, it is there. But here’s the challenge. Every single rezoning and development application has its own web page, and none of them is aggregated in any way.”

“What do you mean by aggregated?” he interrupted again.

“Let’s consider Grandview Woodlands again, as a sample of Vancouver’s 20+ neighbourhoods.” He nodded understanding. “There might be two projects a half block apart, of various types and at different stages of development approval, but their publicly-accessible information is kept on two different web pages that have no connection one to the other. So the information is available but almost impossible to aggregate into a picture of what’s going on in Grandview Woodlands.”

“So have you aggregated the data, and how?” he asked.

I smiled—I love an entrée like that. “Working with the CityHallWatch addresses, which link to the individual web pages, I had to visit each of the 370+ web pages, read them—they have no consistent format—and extract the data I was looking for: number of homes proposed, of what type, how high, how dense, that sort of thing. Then I used the free VanMap application to identify what neighbourhood they belong to.” I noticed his raised eyebrows. “That’s right, the city’s web pages don’t even tell us what neighbourhood a proposal is in. I set up a column where, after searching VanMap, I could identify which neighbourhood a proposal is in, then, if needed, filter just for that neighbourhood. That’s what lets me know, for example, that there are currently 20 spot rezoning projects in Grandview Woodlands, of which nine have already been approved since 2018, the other 11 are still in process.”

“That explains all of the time you’ve been spending on your computer lately,” he noted. “What do those summary numbers mean?”

“The column headings are the lists of some of the data I’ve aggregated:

• Approx. prezoning Homes are the housing units (goodness, I hate that term!) that are in plans not yet formalized in rezoning applications, projects like the Broadway Plan where all I have to go on are the aspirational targets city staff have declared in their visions—the Broadway Plan, for example, has a staff vision of 30,000 of the 61,035 homes. The project count of 8 in the bottom row means that these 61,000+ housing units are contained in only eight projects—I may very well have missed some, which would only increase the numbers;

• Extra Homes capture where somehow, between an approved rezoning and a building permit, the housing count increased without any public review or approval—the number is very small only because I only recently started to capture that data—I’ve not had the time to revisit all 370+ projects yet (I grimaced);

• Total project Homes is the sum of the prezoning vision numbers like the Broadway Plan together with the individual spot rezonings with firm numbers—129,057 means there is more than a 40-year supply of housing approved or in play;

• Homes—social housing, market rental, secured rental are the three types of rental currently categorized by city staff—except, different web pages call them different things, so the exact numbers may vary a bit although I am confident in the rental total;

• Homes—Co-op is the zero identified across 370+ projects—disgraceful, in my humble opinion—where are the feds and province the current Mayor said he would convince to invest in co-ops?;

• Homes—strata are the balance, generally condos and townhouses intended for sale. Sometimes the web pages say they are strata, sometimes not. We are always told when there is rental, so anything else by default is strata.”

I continued. “The Percentages of Total project Homes are just that, but based on the total 129,000+ number. The totals and percentages automatically recalculate every time I add a new project or modify an existing one based on new information.”

He interrupted. “So almost half the total have not even been tabled yet?”

“That’s unfortunately correct,” I responded. “And the true numbers are even more.” I took his knitted brows as my permission to continue. 

“The Broadway Plan and Jericho Lands themselves account for 40,000 of the 61,035 homes mentioned by planning staff but not confirmed as yet. However, the actual zoning diagrams presented so far show way more than those numbers—14,000+ for Jericho, 77,000+ for the Broadway Plan. That totals more than 90,000 homes, more than twice as many as the vision numbers tabled by city staff.”

He paused for a moment of mental math.

“So if you are correct, the 61,035 is actually more like 110,000?” I nodded, he continued. “The 129,057 may be as much as 180,000?” I nodded again and interjected.

“So the reality of what’s already approved plus what’s up for discussion may amount to homes for more than 400,000 more folks (based on the historically accurate 2.2 people per home)—that’s in a city whose current population is less than 700,000 and growing at a rate of 1% per year since Expo ’86.” 

“How could your calculations and theirs be so far apart?” He asked a very reasonable question.

“They generally ignore me, but on those occasions when my numbers have been challenged by city staff, I’ve simply replied, show me your numbers and we can compare. Then the line goes dead. I speculate either they have not done the math, or simply don’t want to share it with a mere citizen.” I paused for effect.

“Of course,” I continued, “with the majority of Council throwing their weight behind the proposed SkyTrain extension to UBC, staff have already indicated they want to densify the Broadway corridor from Arbutus west to Alma Street—I haven’t even done that calculation yet but it will be in the tens of thousands of housing units.”

He visibly gulped, regrouping his thoughts. “You said in your subtitle, you can help—how does that work?”

I smiled. “When I set up my Homes for Whom? Database, I used a software platform that works on laptop, tablet and smartphone. So if a citizen sends me a photo of a rezoning sign—all I really need is the address—I will add their information to the database if it’s not already there.” He waited for my punch line. “I’ve set up the database so that a person sending me sign data (or similar) will automatically be updated on their smartphone, tablet or laptop with the information for their project as well as any new information I become aware of, such as when a Public Hearing is scheduled—if they want the information, that is.”

“After all,” I continued, ”perhaps we can agree that only telling the folks in a few block radius about a major rezoning is unfair, as the city now does. If CityHallWatch and Homes for Whom?  can let anyone know what’s up almost instantly, why can’t City Hall?”

Calls to Action

Email to me at bpalmquist@shaw.ca photos of the signs in your neighbourhoods that make you wonder what’s going on, and I will add them to the Homes for Whom database while adding you to the list of folks who want to know more about their city’s evolution—I will keep you apprised of a project’s status, but only if you want me to. Fair warning—I may also send your name to TEAM for a Livable City, the only civic political party committed to the concept and the essential value of neighbourhoods. They may contact you (once only) for information about joining TEAM. Your call, your city.

I reserve the right to winnow out the trolls and nasties who try to deny, delay, distract or deride.

Vancouver’s civic election is in mid-October of this year. Lots of damage can be done by the current Council, city management and staff before that date—and it will continue, and worsen, unless TEAM for a Livable City elects a majority (6 of 10) City Councillors—less than 6 and not much will change. If you are concerned that what you’ve just read is an example of what’s wrong with our city, and want to bring back its livability, join TEAM and work with us to restore Vancouver as a place we all wish to and can afford to call home.

The Last Word on the Numbers

Until Vancouver City Hall agrees to release to the public useful, aggregate data about housing proposals, when I am writing other City Conversations I will periodically include the Homes for Whom? summary totals here, at the bottom.

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Today’s question: Do you want to to know about the rezonings occurring in Vancouver? Why or why not? 

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Brian Palmquist is a Vancouver-based architect, building envelope and building code consultant and LEED Accredited Professional (the first green building system). He is semi-retired for the moment, still teaching and writing, so not beholden to any client or city hall. These conversations mix real discussion with research and observations based on a 40+ year career including the planning, design and construction of almost every type and scale of project. He is the author of the Amazon best seller “An Architect’s Guide to Construction.” He is also a member of team for a livable Vancouver, a new political party dedicated to restoring a livable Vancouver starting with the 2022 civic election. City Conversations are generally congruent with TEAM policy, so if you like the ideas that I’m writing about, please consider joining TEAM.