Opinion: A Vancouver housing journalist of three decades on what follows Villages Plan | Daily Hive

Opinion: A Vancouver housing journalist of three decades on what follows the Villages Plan

To Live For Bakery Cafe's location on Nanaimo Street in Vancouver. (To Live For Bakery Cafe)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Frances Bula, an award-winning, longtime civic affairs reporter and journalism professor, and now a Vancouver City Council candidate under the OneCity party in the October 2026 civic election.

When Vancouverites were recently presented with a glimpse into their city’s possible future, the main image that burned itself into their brains was the map showing large pink blobs of future “Villages” scattered across the landscape.

Different groups translated that to very different real pictures.

Young people I know, desperately trying to find a way to stay in Vancouver as they start adding toddlers and teens to their lives, looked at those blobs and thought, I imagine, “Hey, here are some family-friendly places I could maybe find a place to live that’s not 40 kilometres away or in a basement.”

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They maybe looked at some of the interesting additions they’ve seen lately around Vancouver that gave them a sense of what’s to come. On Nanaimo Street, around the existing retail cluster at the intersection with Charles Street, anchored by the legendary and long-established Columbus Meats and Renzullo Market, they are flocking to the new apartment buildings, condominiums, townhouses, and cool little restaurants (upscale Folieta, the To Live For bakery, always with a crowd on the white plastic couches along the sidewalk seating) that have gone up recently as a result of the 2016-approved Grandview-Woodland Community Plan.

Or they might have seen what happened at the corner of 22nd Avenue and Rupert Street, once the home of my beloved Rupert Fish (Japanese owners long retired now) and half a dozen businesses. In recent years, as a result of some tweaks by the municipal government, it has added low-rise apartments on three corners, with retail spaces at ground level that are home to the popular Chong Lee Market, as well as a new patisserie, a nail bar, a banh mi shop, and more.

But when some current Vancouver homeowners looked at that map, what they saw was an image that made it look like a lot of the city was going to be immediately clear-cut and replaced with, well, they weren’t sure what. Something scary and unknown.

I don’t blame them. There was a lot to take in and a lot of questions to ponder in such a big, sweeping remake that was meant to be slowly realized over decades, as Vancouver’s population moves up to one million residents.

Villages Plan. (City of Vancouver)

And they particularly were alarmed, with good reason, about the notices telling them that if they wanted to renovate or add to their properties, they would only be able to build according to new zoning on their property, which might require as much as a six-storey apartment with ground-level retail.

I had questions myself from the moment that Ken Sim and his ABC Vancouver party decided to go all in on a big “Villages” plan three years ago, for what I’m presuming they thought was going to be another jewel in their election crown. That’s before they suddenly panicked at the opposition that primarily, but not only, emerged in the Vancouver Westside neighbourhoods, and then killed the whole thing, pretending to save the city from their own initiative.

I said from the beginning I didn’t understand why the City of Vancouver wasn’t following the original planned trajectory of the Vancouver Plan, which was to build up housing first around the neighbourhood centres — those commercial high streets that are the heart of the city’s residential districts: Dunbar Street, between 16th Avenue and 32nd Avenue; Fraser Street and Victoria Street, between 33rd Avenue and 43rd Avenue; and so on. And I worried about the level of retail proposed, when we have a 10 per cent vacancy rate and some notable struggles for our existing businesses.

For quite a few years now, I’ve seen Kerrisdale as a good model for that kind of development around a neighbourhood centre. It has preserved its charming main street, with small shops that have not been rezoned for higher density that risks wiping them out. Just as important, it has low-rise apartments and about a dozen 13-storey towers on the nearby side streets. Those are home to many residents who keep the local vegetable shops and dollar stores viable, while there is still upscale stuff for those in the $3- and $4-million houses all around.

My OneCity colleague, city councillor Lucy Maloney, tried to salvage parts of the Villages Plan, based on City staff’s suggestions, by lobbying for some modifications plus better consultation with residents around each designated village area. But ABC, after having relegated their own City staff to respond to the many options and questions after midnight on the last day of the public hearing, saw it as more politically advantageous to trash City staff and kill the whole thing.

That is not going to help anyone, least of all those who were opposed. The single-detached houses in their neighbourhoods are going to continue to get less and less accessible to any but the highest-income households.

In my 28-plus days of door-knocking as a newbie political candidate plus the usual social-media whirl, a lot of people have asked me what I — a reporter who has covered housing, development, and homelessness for more than 30 years — think should happen next.

Okay, here it is.

This is what I hope a new City Council, ideally one where I and my hard-working OneCity team, will take on. (I know some think we need to do nothing now that housing pressures have eased off a little for a couple years, but, people, that kind of refusal to look at the future is what got us into our current housing mess.)

So what to do now? Here’s my personal vision, one I came up with by talking to planners and others from both sides of the Villages debate:

Put our main energy into the original initiative that was focused on putting more housing around the existing neighbourhood high streets. (And don’t upzone those main streets so you don’t push out existing small businesses.)
Create new area plans where you take somewhere like Dunbar Street or Victoria Street, focusing on the high street for those new clusters of low-rise and modest towers.
At the same time we’re doing that, also look at nearby nodes in those specific areas that could benefit from some modest expansion — two or three new low-rise buildings at 33rd Avenue and Mackenzie Street, similar to the three-storey-plus-townhouses Butter Baked Goods complex, for example, or a new cluster of shops and small apartment buildings around Victoria Street and 61st Avenue, which is actually a food desert.
With those area plans, develop a strategy that encourages a diverse range of homes, from townhouses to four- to six-storey apartment buildings, with some tailoring of the zoning to ensure new development doesn’t all default to the highest density.

That is an approach I think most of us can support for Vancouver 2055, so we can create a newer, better version of our city, where we both provide a place for all the young (and older) people I know who can’t afford anything in the current dominant detached-house reserve and also ensure that we enhance, not wreck, the distinctive and varied neighbourhoods Vancouver has now.

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