I Said Zoned Isn’t Built. Vancouver Just Proved It, the Hard Way
Back in July, before the public hearing, I wrote an explainer on the Villages Plan for anyone who did not know a rezoning from a hole in the ground. The core of it was one idea: a zoning map changing overnight is not the same as buildings going up, and you should never pay today for a neighbourhood that exists only on a planning document.
On July 28, Vancouver City Council killed the Villages Plan. The vote was 10 to 1.
I want to walk through what happened, why it happened, and the part that actually matters for you: what changes on those 13,000 lots now that the plan is dead.
What council actually did
The plan would have rezoned about 13,000 lots across 17 areas to allow low rise and mid rise housing up to four and six storeys, eight near rapid transit, plus roughly a million square feet of new ground floor retail. It went to a public hearing spread over three dates, July 14, 20, and 22. Around 300 people registered to speak, the large majority against, and council received close to 3,000 letters and emails.
ABC councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung, who voted no, called it a “tsunami” of opposition. She was careful to say the idea was good, but that the consultation and execution fell short of what residents deserved. The only councillor to vote yes was OneCity’s Lucy Maloney, who tried to salvage it by sending it back for deeper consultation or piloting it in five villages first. Both amendments were voted down. She left calling the two year process a messy waste of taxpayer money.
So the plan that Mayor Ken Sim himself set in motion in 2023 was rejected by his own council, three months before a civic election.
Here is the honest part
If I wanted to take a cheap victory lap, I would tell you I called this. I sort of did, and I sort of did not, and the difference matters.
My argument was about feasibility and time. I said a lot of these lots would never pencil out at today’s costs and rates, so the map would change fast and the skyline slowly. That is still true, but it is not what killed the plan. The Villages Plan did not die of economics. It died of politics. Green councillor and mayoral candidate Pete Fry, who voted against it, said plainly that coming this close to an election it was doomed, and that the staff work was wasted. This was a political failure mode, not a financial one.
But here is why I am not walking anything back. Both failure modes point at the exact same lesson, and it is the lesson the whole explainer was built around. The distance between “the city is proposing this” and “this is actually getting built near you” is enormous, and that gap can open up two different ways. It can open slowly, through economics, when projects do not pencil. Or it can open all at once, through politics, when the plan gets voted down before a single permit is issued. This time it was the second one, and it happened faster and more decisively than the feasibility version ever would have.
If you had bought a presale in 2025 on the story that “this whole area is about to become a walkable village,” you would have paid for a future that, as of last week, is not coming. That is the point. Not that I predicted the specific cause of death, but that treating a planning proposal as a done deal is how people lose money, every single time, regardless of which way the deal falls apart.
What actually changes now
This is the part most of the coverage will skip, so read this closely if you own or are shopping near one of the 17 nodes.
The temptation is to think the rejection resets everything to how it was. It does not. Two things are still true the morning after.
First, the housing math that created the plan has not gone anywhere. Council rejecting a proposal does not add a single home or lower a single price. The pressure that produced the Villages Plan is still sitting there, which means some version of this fight comes back, probably after the October election, possibly in a form that looks quite different.
Second, and more concretely, the provincial rules still apply. British Columbia’s transit oriented area legislation and the existing multiplex permissions in Vancouver were never part of the Villages Plan and did not die with it. If your lot is near rapid transit, or already qualifies for a multiplex under current zoning, that potential is unchanged, though exactly what your specific lot allows is worth checking rather than assuming. The Villages Plan was mostly about adding an apartment and mixed use layer on top of the commercial corners. Killing it removes that layer. It does not roll the city back to single family only.
So the accurate read is narrow, not sweeping. What is off the table is the six storey apartment and ground floor retail upside on those specific village corners. What remains is everything the province already mandates and everything the city already allowed. For a homeowner hoping to sell to an apartment assembler, the near term premium just evaporated. For a buyer who was nervous about a six storey building landing next door, that specific risk is gone, for now. For everyone, the “this area is about to transform” story is dead until further notice.
The takeaway has not changed
I will say the same thing I said in July, and last week just underlined it in red.
Do not buy real estate on the strength of a plan. Plans are proposals, and proposals get killed, sometimes by their own author’s council, sometimes three months before an election, sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the buildings made sense. A zoning map is a statement of what someone hopes might be allowed. It is not a guarantee, not a timeline, and not a floor under your purchase price.
Buy the actual home, in the actual market that exists on your completion date, at a price that makes sense even if nothing around it ever changes. If the neighbourhood transforms later, treat it as a bonus. If you would only buy because of what a plan promised, last week is your reminder of exactly what those promises are worth.
Presale vs. Completed New Construction in Vancouver
Most buyers think the choice is new versus used. There is a third option sitting between them that almost nobody shops properly: a brand-new home that is already built, standing, and available to walk through today.
Both are new construction. Both come with warranty. But buying a floorplan and buying a finished unit are genuinely different transactions, with different risk, timing, tax treatment and warranty position, and critically a completely different amount of room to negotiate. Here is the honest comparison.
The three things you might be looking at
Presale (pre-construction). The building does not exist. You buy from floorplans, renderings and a disclosure statement, pay a staged deposit, and complete in roughly two to four years.
Under construction. The building is going up. Sometimes you can see the actual floor, occasionally the actual unit. Completion is months away, not years.
Completed new construction, often called standing inventory or move-in ready. The building is finished and registered, the unit has never been lived in, and you can walk through the exact home you are buying and take possession in weeks.
That third category exists because developers rarely sell out at launch. Whatever has not sold by the time the building completes becomes finished inventory the developer is now carrying, and carrying costs money.
What you can actually see
This is the obvious difference, and it is bigger than buyers expect. On a presale you are buying a drawing. You are trusting the renderings, the ceiling height on paper, and your ability to read a floorplan. On a completed unit you stand in the room. You see the real light at four in the afternoon in November, the real view rather than an artist’s interpretation from a drone height nobody lives at, the real hallway noise, the real finish quality, and the actual neighbours’ balconies.
A meaningful number of presale buyers are disappointed at orientation not because the builder did anything wrong, but because a 720 square foot two-bedroom reads very differently in person than on paper. With finished inventory that risk is zero.
Certainty of timing
Presale completion dates move. Delays of several months are normal, and your contract will reference an estimated completion date and a much later outside date. If you have a lease ending, a sale closing, or children changing schools, that uncertainty is a real cost. A completed home closes on a date you can plan around, usually within 30 to 60 days.
The warranty clock, the difference nobody checks
Every new home in BC carries mandatory 2-5-10 warranty insurance: two years on labour and materials, five years on the building envelope, ten years on structure. But the clock starts when the first owner takes possession, not when you buy.
Buy a presale and you are the first owner, so you get the full clock, unstarted.
Buy a completed unit the developer still owns and has never conveyed, and you are typically still the first owner, so the clock still starts for you at possession.
Buy a finished unit that already conveyed once, such as an unlived-in unit being resold or an assignment that completed, and you inherit only the remainder. A building that completed in 2023 has already spent its entire two-year labour and materials coverage and three years of its envelope and structural coverage.
All three are “brand new.” Only some come with a full warranty runway. Always ask when the building completed and whether title has ever transferred.
Deposits, financing and price direction
Presale spreads 15% to 20% over the construction period, which is easier on cash flow but locks that capital up for years with no return and no ability to use the home. A completed purchase works like a normal transaction: a deposit, then the balance at closing, typically financed. Your money is tied up for weeks, not years.
Financing differs just as much. On a presale you are qualifying for a mortgage you cannot actually secure for years, and rates, lending rules and your own income can all change before completion. Buyers do get caught. On a completed home you get a real rate hold and a real approval on a real appraisable property, right now.
Presale is also a bet that prices rise during construction. When they do, you win. When they do not, you are still committed to a price set years earlier, and buyers who bought at the top of a cycle have completed into units appraising below their contract price, creating a financing gap they have to cover in cash. With completed inventory you are buying at today’s price, with today’s information and today’s appraisal.
Rescission rights and tax
The seven-day REDMA rescission period applies to development marketing. Depending on how a finished unit is being sold, your cooling-off rights may differ, because a home sold under a standard resale contract instead falls under the shorter Home Buyer Rescission Period. Confirm which regime applies before you sign.
On tax, both are new homes, so 5% GST applies, and the first-time buyer GST rebate and BC’s newly built home PTT exemption may be available. Eligibility depends on contract dates, price thresholds and whether the home has been previously occupied, so this is one to confirm on the specific unit rather than assume.
Where the negotiating room actually is
Here is the part most buyers do not understand, and it is the strongest argument for looking at finished inventory.
At a presale launch, the price is the price. Developers hold firm on headline pricing because discounting early units reprices the entire building and undermines the sales program. What you get instead are structured incentives: a decorating allowance, a deposit structure, a parking stall, capped assignment fees. Real value, but the number on the contract rarely moves.
Completed, unsold inventory is a different conversation entirely. Once a building is finished, every unsold unit is costing the developer money through financing on the construction loan, property taxes, strata fees, insurance, marketing and staffing. Lenders want the project closed out. Sales teams have quarter-end and year-end targets. A unit that has been standing for six months is a line item somebody wants gone. That pressure creates leverage that simply does not exist at launch, on price, on closing timing, on upgrades and appliance packages, and on parking and storage.
This is where experience earns its keep. Having worked through twenty presale launches with six developers since 2014, I know which builders are carrying standing inventory, roughly how long it has been sitting, what has already traded in the building, and where each sales team’s pressure points are. That is not information published in a brochure. On finished inventory, knowing what a unit has actually been trading for and when a developer is motivated is frequently worth thousands of dollars on the contract price. If you are considering a completed new home, talk to me before you walk into the presentation centre, because once you are registered with the developer’s sales team your negotiating position is weaker.
Which one suits you
Presale tends to suit buyers with a long runway and no housing deadline, investors comfortable with construction and market risk, buyers who want first pick of the building and the ability to select finishes, and anyone who wants a full unstarted warranty clock and the maximum window for prices to move in their favour.
Completed new construction tends to suit buyers who need certainty, buyers who want to see exactly what they are getting, anyone with a firm move-in date, buyers who want a real mortgage approval today, and buyers who would rather negotiate than accept a fixed launch price.
Neither is universally better. The honest answer is that most buyers only ever get shown one of them, usually whichever the agent in front of them is selling.
Frequently asked questions
Is a completed new home still covered by the 2-5-10 warranty?
Yes, but check when the clock started. Coverage begins when the first owner takes possession, so a unit that already conveyed carries only the remainder of each period.
Can you negotiate on presale?
Rarely on headline price, more often on incentives such as deposit structure, decorating allowances, parking, storage and assignment terms. Finished inventory is where price itself becomes negotiable.
Why would a developer still have unsold units after completion?
Very few projects sell out at launch. Leftover units are normal, and carrying them costs the developer money every month, which is exactly why they are more negotiable.
Do I pay GST on a completed new home?
New homes are subject to 5% GST. Rebate eligibility depends on price, contract date and whether the home has been previously occupied, so confirm on the specific unit.
Is move-in ready the same as brand new?
Usually, but not always. Ask two questions: has anyone ever taken possession, and when did the building complete? Both answers affect your warranty position.
Every new home built in British Columbia must come with third-party warranty insurance. It is not optional, it is not a builder’s goodwill gesture, and it is not something you negotiate for. Under the Homeowner Protection Act, a residential builder must be licensed and the home must be covered by warranty insurance from an approved provider before it can be sold. Buyers hear it called “2-5-10” and nod along. Very few know what the three numbers actually protect.
Here is what each number covers, what it does not, when the clock starts, and why the start date matters enormously if you are choosing between a presale and a finished home.
What the three numbers mean
The name is shorthand for three separate coverage periods that run at the same time, from the same start date, but protect different things.
2 years — labour and materials
The shortest and broadest layer. It covers defects in the workmanship and materials of the home, the things that go wrong first. In practice it is tiered:
12 months on defects in labour and materials for a detached home, and for the non-common property of your strata unit, essentially inside your own four walls.
15 months on defects in labour and materials for the common property of a strata building: lobbies, corridors, amenity rooms, parkade.
24 months on defects in labour and materials relating to the electrical, plumbing, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, in every building type.
So “2 years” is really “up to 2 years, depending on what broke.” A faulty outlet or a failing HVAC unit gets the full two years. A poorly hung cabinet door gets twelve months. This is why your deficiency list at orientation matters so much: the shortest coverage window is the one covering the largest number of small, visible items.
5 years — the building envelope
The envelope is the building’s skin: the exterior walls, roof, windows, doors, membranes and everything that separates inside from outside. This layer covers defects in that envelope, and specifically includes unintended water penetration.
This is the coverage that exists because of BC’s leaky condo crisis. Water ingress is the most expensive and most common serious failure in Lower Mainland multi-family construction, and it typically does not reveal itself in the first twelve months. It shows up in year three, after a few winters. Five years is the legislated recognition of that.
10 years — structure
The longest and narrowest layer. It covers structural defects: defects in materials or labour that cause the failure of a load-bearing part of the home, or that compromise its load-bearing function to the point that the home’s safety or habitability is threatened.
This is not cosmetic and it is not “something is a bit off.” It is the foundation, the frame, the load path. Claims are rare. When they happen they are catastrophic, which is why the coverage runs a decade.
The coverage limits
Warranty insurance is capped. The limits are worth knowing before you assume you are covered dollar for dollar:
Strata unit: the lesser of the first owner’s purchase price or $100,000.
Detached (fee simple) home: the lesser of the first owner’s purchase price or $200,000.
Strata common property: the lesser of $100,000 multiplied by the number of dwelling units, or $2.5 million per building.
For most Greater Vancouver condo buyers the practical ceiling on your own unit is $100,000, with a separate pool covering the building’s shared elements. On a large envelope failure the common property limit is the number that matters, and it is shared across every owner in the building.
What the warranty does not cover
The gaps cause more disappointment than the coverage causes relief. Warranty insurance generally does not cover:
Normal wear and tear, and normal shrinkage of materials as the building dries and settles, such as minor drywall cracking and nail pops.
Damage from your own actions or neglect, including failure to perform routine maintenance.
Failure to mitigate. If you notice a leak and let it run for a year, the additional damage is on you.
Landscaping, appliances and items covered by a manufacturer’s own warranty, though the manufacturer warranty still applies.
Anything you were told about and accepted before purchase.
Missed deadlines. Coverage is a claim window, not a guarantee. If you report a defect after its period expires it is not covered, even if the defect existed earlier.
The single most common mistake is assuming someone else will notice. The warranty is claims-based. Nobody inspects your home at month eleven on your behalf. Diarize your dates, walk your unit before each deadline, and submit in writing.
When the clock starts, and why it decides everything
This is the part that matters most for anyone weighing a presale against a finished home.
Warranty coverage generally begins on the date the first owner takes possession of the home, or for common property when the building is complete and the strata is created. It does not begin when you sign your contract, and it does not begin when construction starts.
The consequence: buy a presale and you are the first owner, so you take possession on completion day and receive the full 2-5-10 clock, starting fresh from day one. Buy a completed new home that someone else already took possession of, even if nobody ever lived in it, and you inherit whatever time is left. A unit that completed in 2023 has already burned its two-year labour and materials coverage and is three years into its envelope and structural clocks.
The warranty does transfer to subsequent owners for the remainder of each period, but it does not restart. “Brand new” and “full warranty” are not the same claim, and the difference can be several years of protection.
How to actually use it
Find out who your warranty provider is. It is named in your documents, and it is an insurance company, not your builder.
Write down your possession date and calculate the 12-month, 15-month, 24-month, 5-year and 10-year deadlines. Put them in your calendar now.
Do a deliberate walkthrough before each deadline. Month ten and month twenty-two are the two that catch the most.
Report in writing, to both the builder and the warranty provider. A verbal report to a site supervisor is not a claim. Keep dated copies and photographs.
For strata common property, work through your strata council. Envelope and structural claims are almost always building-wide, and the strata corporation is the claimant.
What this means for you as a presale buyer
Your orientation walkthrough is warranty work. The deficiency list you build before completion is your first and best chance to document defects while the builder is still on site and motivated. Confirm the builder is licensed and the warranty is in place before you commit, which is a legal requirement and is verifiable. And recognise that being the first owner has real value: a full, unstarted 2-5-10 clock is one of the genuine advantages of buying presale over buying a finished unit that has already changed hands, and it is rarely priced into the comparison.
Frequently asked questions
Is the 2-5-10 warranty mandatory in BC?
Yes. Under the Homeowner Protection Act, new homes must be built by a licensed residential builder and covered by third-party home warranty insurance, with limited exemptions such as certain owner-built homes.
Does the warranty transfer if I sell?
Yes. Coverage attaches to the home and transfers to subsequent owners for whatever remains of each period. It does not reset.
Who pays for the warranty?
The builder arranges and pays for the policy as a cost of the project. You do not buy it separately.
What is the building envelope?
The parts of the building that separate the interior from the exterior: exterior walls, roof, windows, doors and the membranes and assemblies around them. Water penetration through the envelope is covered for five years.
Does the warranty cover my appliances?
Generally no. Appliances are covered by their own manufacturer warranties. The two-year labour and materials coverage applies to the installation and to the building’s electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems.
$2,800 a Foot: How Vancouver Presale Pricing Lost the Plot, and How to Spot the Next One
In May, a condo at Westbank’s Butterfly sold. It was the first resale in the building to close on MLS. It had been bought presale for $2,561,000 plus GST. It sold for $1,518,000.
That is a gap of just over a million dollars, and the real damage is worse, because the original buyer also paid GST, property transfer tax, and eventually realtor and legal fees on the way out. Call it roughly ten percent on top.
The million dollar number is what gets shared. It is not the number that should interest you. This one should: that sale prices the building at about $1,425 per square foot. The building’s average presale price, per Altus Group, was about $2,800 per square foot.
The market repriced this real estate at roughly half of what it originally sold for. That is not a story about one seller’s bad luck. That is a story about a price that was never anchored to anything.
First, the honest caveats
I want to be careful here, because there is a difference between analysis and a pile-on.
This is one closed trade. One. Westbank’s position, given to Daily Hive, is that resale listings like these are outliers driven by sellers’ personal circumstances rather than the building’s value, that several sales over the past year were not recorded on MLS, and that Butterfly continues to sell at some of the highest prices per square foot in the city. The “outlier” framing is self-serving, but the underlying point is fair: you cannot draw a trend line through a single dot, and I do not have visibility into the private sales.
I also sell presale condos and townhomes for a living. An article arguing that presale buyers overpaid is an article arguing that people in my business helped them do it. So take the following as someone describing a machine he works inside, not as someone throwing rocks from outside it.
With that said, the single dot sits inside a pattern that is harder to wave off.
It is not one unlucky seller
According to an affidavit from a former employee lawsuit, first reported by Bloomberg, Westbank’s Alberni by Kengo Kuma has many unsold units and vendor take back mortgages outstanding, while Butterfly itself is well over budget with closings that are slow and uncertain. Vendor take back mortgages are worth pausing on: that is the developer lending the buyer money to complete the purchase. It is a tool you reach for when buyers cannot or will not close at the contract price.
Meanwhile, Westbank’s Joyce 2, a 35 storey, 360 unit rental tower, went into receivership this spring. The filings are specific. OPTrust said the loan matured December 31, 2025, that National Bank issued a demand in January after at least six defaults, that a cost consultant estimated $15.5 million in overruns, and that as of March 19 it was owed $109,211,965 with default interest running at $60,136 a day.
Three different symptoms, one underlying condition: the revenue assumptions did not survive contact with the market.
And this is not confined to one developer. CMHC’s own outlook says a significant decline in condominium presales in Vancouver and Victoria has stalled many planned projects, and expects more to be postponed or cancelled in 2026 with effects running into 2027 and 2028. Steve Saretsky has documented an assignment market so illiquid that realtors stopped taking the listings. Westbank is the most visible case because it built the most visible buildings. It is not the disease.
So how did $2,800 a foot ever make sense?
This is the part most coverage skips, because “buyers were greedy idiots” is easier to write. They weren’t. Every leg of that price had a real argument behind it at the time.
Architecture was sold as an asset class. Not a home with nice design, but a piece of art you could live in, by a name architect, singular and unrepeatable. The implicit promise was that scarcity of design translates into scarcity of value. Nobody ever wrote that promise down, because it cannot be underwritten.
Scarcity was framed as permanent. Land is finite, the city won’t approve towers like this again, the West End will never build another Butterfly. All true. None of it means a buyer will exist at $2,800 a foot in 2026.
The exit door was the product. For most of the last cycle you did not need an end user to justify the price, because you could assign the contract before completion to the next person who believed the same thing. Presale pricing was underwritten by the assignment market, not by the resale market. That worked exactly as long as assignments stayed liquid.
Money was nearly free, and then it wasn’t. Foreign buyer, speculation, and empty homes taxes drained the international trophy bid over several years. Then the Bank of Canada’s 2022 rate shock removed the cheap leverage. The bid did not soften. It left.
Put those together and you get the honest description of what a $2,800 per foot presale actually was: not a price, but a bet that someone else would pay more before you had to close. When the assignment market froze, buyers discovered what they had really bought, which was an obligation to complete at a number set in a different universe. The completion date does not negotiate. It just arrives.
The actual question: is it a good project, or a well marketed one?
Here is what I would tell a client today, and what I wish more people had been told in 2018.
Look at the spread, not the price. Compare the presale price per foot to what finished, comparable product sells for in that same neighbourhood right now. If a presale asks 40% more than the resale market next door, that spread is not a bonus. It is the risk. You are pre paying for appreciation that has to actually happen. Sometimes a modest premium is defensible for new construction, warranty, and a genuinely better location. Double is not a premium. It is a bet.
Ask who the buyer is at completion, not today. Every project has a story about who wants it. Ask what happens if that buyer is gone in four years. If the honest answer is that only an investor would want this unit, and investors have left the presale market, you have a problem with no floor under it.
Separate the concrete from the brochure. Good design genuinely holds value. What does not reliably resell is the marketing narrative wrapped around it. A useful test: strip out the architect’s name, the renderings, the sales centre, and the launch event. Would you pay this per foot for this floorplan, in this location, at this quality? If the answer is no, you are buying the story.
Underwrite the developer’s balance sheet, not their brand. Prestige is not solvency. Ask about the lender, whether the project is financed to completion, and what their recent completions actually closed at. Vendor take back mortgages and quiet bulk sales are a tell.
Assume you cannot assign. Not “assume it’s hard.” Assume the door is welded shut and you will complete this purchase with your own financing, in whatever market exists on that date. If the deal only works if you can flip it, you don’t have a deal.
The finished today test. If this building were standing right now, complete, and offered to you at this price, would you buy it? If you would only buy it because it is not built yet and might be worth more later, you are not buying real estate. You are buying time, and time is the one thing presale contracts are worst at protecting.
The point
Hype is not the enemy. Great buildings deserve great marketing, and Vancouver is genuinely better for having ambitious architecture in it. The Butterfly is a beautiful thing and will still be beautiful in fifty years.
The problem was never the hype. It was that at some point the hype stopped being the wrapper around the price and became the reason for it. When that happens, the building can be everything the brochure promised and the buyer still loses a million dollars, because they weren’t paying for the building.
Ask what you are actually paying for. If a meaningful part of the answer is “the feeling in this sales centre,” walk out and think about it for a week. The good projects will still be there.
If you are evaluating a specific presale and want a second set of eyes on the numbers, get in touch. I will tell you when the math doesn’t work, including on projects I represent.
Vancouver’s Villages Plan, Explained: What’s Changing, and Why “Rezoned” Doesn’t Mean “Built”
Update, July 29, 2026: On July 28, Vancouver City Council rejected the Villages Plan in a 10-1 vote. I have written a full breakdown of what happened and what it means for buyers. The explanation below of what the plan was still stands.
On July 14, 2026, Vancouver City Council holds a public hearing on the Villages Plan. If you own a home, rent, or are thinking about buying a presale anywhere near a small shopping node in this city, it is worth understanding, because this is one of the largest single rezonings the city has ever attempted. Roughly 13,000 to 14,000 properties, about 14 percent of all the land parcels in Vancouver, are being rezoned in one motion across 17 areas.
Most coverage so far has been written for planners or for people already fired up about it. This is the plain version for buyers and owners who have never had a reason to learn what “zoning” actually means. I sell presale condos and townhomes for a living, so I will also flag the thing the headlines skip: a zoning map changing overnight is not the same as buildings going up. More on that below.
The one-breath version
The city has identified 17 “Villages,” small areas built around existing shopping corners, and wants to allow more homes and more shops in each one. Think townhomes, small apartment buildings up to six storeys, and buildings with stores at street level and homes above. The goal is neighbourhoods where you can walk to a coffee, a grocer, and a pharmacy instead of driving.
That part is not controversial. The way the city is doing it is.
First question: does this touch my block?
Normally when a lot gets rezoned, a developer applies, and there is a public process for that one site. The Villages Plan flips that. The City itself is rezoning all 13,000 plus lots at once, without waiting for anyone to apply. Planners call this a city initiated rezoning. In practice it means your property, or the one next to you, could have brand new building rights the day after Council votes, with no separate application and no separate hearing.
To find out if you are affected, the simple test is location. The Villages are clustered around existing retail corners in areas like Kerrisdale, Dunbar, Kitsilano’s edge, Riley Park, Kensington-Cedar Cottage, Renfrew, and several others. If your home sits within a short walk of one of those shopping nodes, check the City’s Villages map on the Shape Your City website. Being inside a Village boundary is what matters.
Second question: what could get built next door?
This is where a bit of jargon becomes useful. The main one is FSR, or floor space ratio. It is just the size of a building compared to the size of its lot. An FSR of 2.5 means you can build floor area equal to two and a half times the lot. Higher FSR means a bigger building.
The plan creates new zones and splits the city roughly by geography:
East side. Lower rise residential areas use an existing residential zone (R3-1), and shopping corners use a new zone called C-2D.
West side. Residential areas use a new zone called R3-4, and shopping corners use a new zone called C-2E.
On the shopping corners, the numbers look like this. A secured rental building can generally reach about 3.5 to 3.7 FSR and six storeys. A strata condo building is held lower, around 2.5 FSR and four storeys. On sites close to rapid transit, buildings can go up to eight storeys. Any building on these corners has to include shops at street level, so the plan adds retail space, not just homes.
There is one detail that quietly shapes who benefits. On the west side, the new R3-4 zone sets a minimum lot frontage of 50 feet before you can build the larger six storey form. A typical older Vancouver lot is only 33 feet wide. That means a single homeowner usually cannot build the big building alone. Two or more neighbours have to sell together, or an assembler buys the block. So the “gentle density” language is real, but the mechanism rewards land assembly, which tends to favour buyers with deep pockets over individual owners. Whether that is good or bad depends on your point of view, but it is worth knowing before anyone knocks on your door with an offer.
Third question: when does any of this actually happen?
Here is the part I would underline for anyone treating this as an investment story. Rezoning changes what is legally allowed. It does not build anything, and it does not set a timeline.
The city has calibrated the density and the affordability rules against a consultant’s feasibility analysis, meaning the rules are meant to let projects pencil out without being so generous that nothing gets delivered. Critics have questioned that modelling, and honestly the real test is the market, not the spreadsheet. At today’s construction costs, land prices, and interest rates, a large share of these newly rezoned lots will not be financially worth building for years. Even the city’s own process shows patience: privately driven rezonings can move now, but development permit applications will not be processed until October 2026.
So expect the map to change fast and the skyline to change slowly, and only where the math works. If someone tells you a Village is about to transform, ask them which specific projects are funded. Usually the answer is none yet.
Why some people are fighting it
There are really two separate objections, and they get blurred together.
The first is about design and character. A group of planners, architects, and academics argues that applying one template to 17 different neighbourhoods at once flattens what makes each one distinct, and that you cannot plan for “community” the same way you plan for raw density. This is a taste and urban design argument, and reasonable people land on both sides of it.
The second is about process, and it is the one generating the most heat. Because the Villages Plan is an amendment to the city’s overarching land use plan, once Council approves it, future projects that fit the new rules will not need their own public hearings. For a lot of residents, July 14 is effectively the last chance to speak on what gets built near them, possibly for a very long time. Add weak public awareness, a summer timeline, and the sheer scale of 14 percent of the city moving at once, and you get the “last hearing” anxiety you may have seen online. Some of that commentary is measured. Some of it is activist framing that treats worst case assumptions as fact, so read it critically, the same way you should read anyone (including me) who has a stake in the outcome.
So what if you are buying or building here?
A few honest takeaways.
If you are a homeowner inside a Village, your land may be worth more to an assembler than it was last year, especially if you are on a corner or your neighbours are willing to sell together. That is an opportunity, not an obligation, and the rezoning itself creates no rush.
If you are a presale buyer, do not pay a premium today for a neighbourhood that exists only on a zoning map. The Village vision is a decade long story, not a two year one. Buy the actual project on its own merits: the builder, the location, the price, the deposit structure, and the completion date. If the surrounding area fills in later, treat that as upside, not as the reason to buy.
If you are a small builder or investor, the opportunity is real but concentrated. The lots that will move first are the ones where assembly is straightforward and the numbers already work, largely secured rental on the corners rather than four storey strata. The affordability requirements on the west side, including a below market rental component on the larger rental buildings, will shape which sites are worth pursuing.
The Villages Plan is neither the housing miracle nor the neighbourhood apocalypse it gets described as. It is a big, permanent change to the rules, followed by a slow, uneven, market driven change to the buildings. Knowing the difference between those two is most of what you need to read the next few years correctly.
If you own or are considering buying in one of the 17 Village areas and want to understand what it means for your specific block, feel free to reach out.
