4,800 net new homes built in Vancouver in second year of legislated targets | Daily Hive

Over 4,800 net new homes built in Vancouver in the second year of provincially legislated housing supply targets

"19 on the Greenway" rental housing complex at 3619 Arbutus St., Vancouver, reached completion in 2025. (Take Off Photography/PCI Developments)

For the second year of the Government of British Columbia’s legislated housing supply targets, the City of Vancouver came up short in reaching its annual target of pushing new homes into a state of completion — not merely approvals.

In its second annual report under the Housing Supply Act, Vancouver’s municipal government recorded 4,845 homes reaching completion within its jurisdiction over the second year of the legislated targets — the period between October 2024 and September 2025. This is 90 per cent of the second year’s target of 5,395 net new homes.

Over the first two years of the legislated targets, a cumulative total of 8,988 net new homes have been completed, representing 85 per cent of the cumulative targets to date. In the first year, for the period between October 2023 and September 2024, the City recorded 4,143 net new home completions or 80 per cent of that year’s legislated target.

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By the end of the fifth year of the legislated targets, which is September 2028, the City is required to reach the cumulative total of 28,900 net new home completions, with specific sub-targets such as for secured purpose-built market housing, below-market rental housing, and strata/ownership housing, as well as prescriptions for affordable housing — social housing and supportive housing — and unit sizes based on the number of bedrooms.

In the second year of Vancouver’s realized net new home figures, over 40 per cent of new homes within multi-family residential buildings have two or more bedrooms — units sized for families. As well, 86 per cent were secured purpose-built rental homes, and just 14 per cent were ownership homes. These figures generally align with legislation.

In its report, City staff noted that from the outset of the legislation’s implementation, they fully expected to come short on net new homes for the first few years of the five-year legislated targets through 2028 due to fewer housing projects beginning construction during the pandemic and the early post-pandemic recovery period.

Housing starts peaked in 2023, and Vancouver is now beginning to see that wave of starts now reaching completion, made evident by the 17 per cent increase in the number of realized net new home completions between the first and second years of the legislated targets. Much of this increase is being propelled by secured purpose-built rental housing projects.

While there has been slow initial progress, City staff anticipate that greater activity during the latter years of the five-year target period will enable the municipal government to fulfill its overall legislated obligations.

“This wave of construction will continue to complete in the next one to three years. Despite lower than targeted completions, there is a significant volume of projects in-stream, including an increase in low-density multiplex applications, with enough capacity in our current development pipeline to meet the Province’s overall completions target over the five-year time frame,” reads a City staff report.

City staff emphasize that the projects reaching completion in 2025 are mainly measuring applications that began construction two to three years ago and were approved over the last five years or more.

While the municipal government can approve projects and simplify and expedite their regulations and processes, the pace of construction and completions depends on factors that are largely out of the control of the municipal level of government.

These factors include the capacity of the construction sector to take on more projects, market cost inflation for construction labour, equipment, and materials, trade tensions, access to construction funding and financing for market and non-market developers, and macroeconomic factors, such as the state of the economy and changing housing demand due to slower population growth — especially from the recent changes to federal immigration targets.

A number of projects that have entered construction over the last two years have been secured purpose-built rental housing projects — made financially feasible only by the availability of low-cost, repayable construction financing programs offered by the federal and provincial governments.

A growing number of projects have also undergone major redesigns to improve their financial viability, with developers taking advantage of the City’s recently implemented approaches and flexibilities that offer greater height and density. This includes emerging feasibility challenges for secured purpose-built rental housing projects.

City staff also highlighted there could be challenges with delivering more social housing, as one of the main ways of generating this particular affordable housing typology is through inclusive social housing within strata market ownership condominium projects. The continued poor pre-sales demand is prompting developers to pause their condominium projects until market demand improves.

In its report to the provincial government on the second year of the legislated housing targets, City staff noted that a total of 103 project applications with a combined total of 1,663 units were withdrawn by the proponents for reasons such as property sale, change of plans, and insufficient funding, as well as applications that were withdrawn to enable the project to go back to the design drawing board.

Vancouver was among the first batch of 10 cities in 2023 to be provided with five-year legislated housing targets. In August 2025, the provincial government announced the legislated targets for the fourth batch of 10 cities — including Burnaby, Coquitlam, Langley Township, and Richmond — growing the total number of municipal jurisdictions with legislated target orders to 40 cities.

Municipal governments that are behind their targets and perceived to be experiencing challenges with adopting policies and regulations that improve the feasibility of new housing construction risk seeing direct interventions from the provincial government, which was the case for the District of West Vancouver and the District of Oak Bay earlier this year.

Separately, adopted by Vancouver City Council in June 2024, the City has its own new housing target based on approvals — 83,000 net new units over 10 years through 2033.

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