With record immigration targets and a chronic housing and infrastructure backlog, is Greater Vancouver heading toward a tipping point? A closer look at the growing disconnect between population growth and city planning.
Over the past few years, Canada has embraced immigration at a historic scale. The federal government’s targets are ambitious: over 500,000 newcomers per year by 2025, with permanent and temporary residents fueling growth like never before. From a national perspective, the rationale is clear—immigration supports economic growth, addresses labour shortages, and helps offset aging demographics. But zoom in on the Lower Mainland, and a different picture emerges—one where infrastructure, housing, and municipal services are struggling to keep pace. The result is a region that risks buckling under the weight of its own good intentions.
Vancouver, long a top destination for both immigrants and international students, is feeling the crunch in real time. Transit systems are operating at or near capacity. School waitlists are growing in dense urban areas. Hospitals and clinics are understaffed. Most critically, housing supply continues to lag well behind population growth, despite a flurry of zoning reforms, densification pushes, and development incentives. The numbers simply don’t line up.
According to the CMHC, Metro Vancouver needs around 570,000 new homes by 2030 to restore affordability. Yet even in the best-case scenarios, we’re building at a pace that falls dramatically short of that mark. In 2024, despite policy shifts like missing middle legislation and pre-zoning around transit hubs, completions were down year-over-year. Developers point to interest rates, labour shortages, and permit bottlenecks as key obstacles. But behind all of that lies a more systemic issue: our infrastructure and planning frameworks weren’t designed for this rate of growth.
The disconnect is both physical and political. At the city level, councils wrestle with NIMBY resistance, environmental impact considerations, and design reviews that drag out timelines. At the provincial and federal levels, funding commitments for infrastructure often trail behind immigration policy. We’re inviting hundreds of thousands of new Canadians each year—many of whom gravitate to urban centres like Vancouver—without the transit lines, affordable rentals, schools, or clinics to support them.
And the consequences are compounding. Rents in Metro Vancouver hit new records in 2024, with the average one-bedroom approaching $2,800/month in the city and over $2,400/month region-wide. Temporary foreign workers, students, and recent immigrants are often the hardest hit, competing for a shrinking pool of entry-level or secondary rental units. Many are forced into overcrowded or informal housing arrangements. In extreme cases, we’ve seen stories of international students sleeping in cars or relying on food banks just to get by in what was promised to be a land of opportunity.
This isn’t just a housing issue—it’s a social stability issue. Without proper planning, rapid immigration combined with slow infrastructure deployment creates pressure points: longer commutes, overstretched public services, rising resentment among longtime residents, and mounting skepticism about immigration itself. None of this is the fault of newcomers, but without a serious realignment between immigration policy and urban readiness, tensions will grow.
Developers are caught in the middle. On one hand, demand is obvious and urgent. On the other, they face increasingly difficult terrain: higher carrying costs due to interest rates, uncertainty around municipal approvals, and rising construction costs. Even shovel-ready projects can sit idle for years, while the need for housing only escalates. It’s a paradox unique to our time—unprecedented demand and widespread political will, yet a system that can’t execute fast enough to respond.
And while housing gets the spotlight, infrastructure in a broader sense is equally strained. The Broadway Subway Line, a long-awaited expansion, is years away from completion. Bus routes in areas like Surrey and Langley are overcrowded and underfunded, despite those regions absorbing a massive share of population growth. Community centres, child care facilities, and civic amenities are under-built relative to current usage—let alone future demand.
There’s also a timing mismatch in how infrastructure gets delivered. Immigration growth is immediate. People arrive, they need homes, jobs, schools—now. Infrastructure, by contrast, takes years of consultation, funding cycles, tendering, and construction. By the time a new school opens or a SkyTrain extension is complete, the demand it was designed to address has already been surpassed. It’s a game of catch-up that never ends.
The solution isn’t to pull back on immigration. Far from it. Canada’s future depends on population growth, especially in a region like British Columbia with an aging workforce and a low birth rate. But we can’t keep layering newcomers onto a city without rethinking how we build, fund, and approve the things they need to thrive.
That means faster, more agile infrastructure delivery. It means aligning immigration targets with regional growth management plans. It means empowering municipalities with the tools—and funding—they need to scale services in lockstep with demographic change. And it means viewing housing not just as a commodity, but as critical infrastructure in and of itself.
Until we bridge that gap, we’ll remain in a state of contradiction: a country welcoming the world, and cities struggling to make space for them. Vancouver, with its global appeal and constrained geography, sits at the heart of that contradiction. The question is how long we can sustain it before it starts to break.
