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Vancouver Zoning Map
- tantalor 5y agoWhat's FSD? It's not in the legend or the "Zoning and land use document library"
- kredd 5y agoFirst Shaughnessy District, aptly named after the area.
- jjaaammmmy 5y agoIt stands for First Shaughnessy District, it's an area with a lot of unique pre-1940 single-family Tudor-style homes
- wheretolive 5y agoIt's First Shaughnessy District. Most historic area of Vancouver and has many heritage protections e.g. a. can't demolish houses built before 1940, b. every change in the exterior have to be approved by a First Shaughnessy Design Committee apart the city. By many metrics, FDS is one of the best places in the world to have a house in, due to following reasons: 1. Big lot size: Average size Half acre (21k+ sqft). No other world class city has such sized lots in walking distance to the downtown (< 30mins walk, <10min drive). 2. Incredibly safe. 3. Right next to the Granville shop area which is even closer than the downtown (< 10 mins walk). Major develpment happening in nearby Broadway area. 4. 15mins drive to Vancouver International airport. 5. Incredibly safe. 6. 10mins drive to beach 7. 30-40mins drive to skiing. While Vanvouer itself gets snowed in maybe 10 days an year. 8. Other benefits which apply to Vancouver due to being centrally located in Vancouver.
- cameronpm 5y agoMain problem is its a requirement to live around people who like mansions and being hoity-toity.
- wheretolive 5y agoMansions might be positive for some. And doesn't take benefits away! Vancouver downtown is amazing too. Used to live there. But living in a high rise with young kids and constant false fire alarms where a big pain.
- Tiktaalik 5y agoThe big problem with the mansions is that they take up so much space that there's no room for anyone to live here. It's such a great area because of the proximity to the city, so we should let more people live here. Raze the mansions to the ground and build apartments that regular people can afford.
- deanCommie 5y agoAll neighborhoods with 10MM+$ houses are "incredibly safe".
- wheretolive 5y agoAgreed. Still doesn't take away the other unique features away. I am yet to find any more place with such size houses which are walkable. Which was the charm for me.
- brailsafe 5y agoWell, if you've made that kind of money, I guess I can't necessarily blame you, but on the other hand it's an absolutely repulsive level of wealth and opulence that would make a lot of people pretty uneasy
- desiarnezjr 5y agoCheck out Drummond Drive and Belmont on the west side near UBC and Jericho. Makes First Shaughnessy look like paupers.
- ripley12 5y agoThe problem with this is that by design, it's a nice place for very few people. Zoning central land for houses on massive lots is effectively a cap on how many people can live there; it's an incredibly regressive policy that benefits a few owners of $10M+ homes at a large cost.
- shroompasta 5y agoi'm interested in the engineering behind this. is this kepler-gl? looks very uber
- mrmuagi 5y agoInteresting. I'm kind of shocked at how much one-family dwelling there is. I would love to see expansion to Richmond, Delta, Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam as there is a ton of commuting population that ingress and egress to Vancouver.
- nickff 5y agoVancouver used to be the city with the highest proportion of single family dwelling zoning in North America. It was the example of SFH zoning in "Zoned in the USA", a very good book on the history of zoning in North America.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoWhy would Vancouver be used as an example of “Zoned in the USA”? Unless that was meant to be tongue and cheek?
- nickff 5y agoVancouver had the highest proportion of single-family house zoning in North America, and the book was really about Canada and the USA, not just the latter.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoIf it is not meant as a joke, they might be referring to the other Vancouver next to that active volcano.
- nickff 5y agoI read the book, and that section was very clearly about Vancouver, British Columbia; Vancouver, Washington was not discussed.
- ripley12 5y agoNorth American zoning shares a lot of the same origins in both Canada and the USA; Vancouver's first zoning code was drafted by Harland Bartholomew who did a lot of American cities' first zoning codes.
- ceeplusplus 5y agoAnd people wonder why real estate prices and rent are through the roof in these cities. If you replace all that SFH zoning with 6 floor apartment complexes density instantly goes up something like 10x. If you build like China with 50 floor towers then density goes up something like 100x.
- haroldp 5y ago> If you replace all that SFH zoning with 6 floor apartment complexes Or replace it with 2-6 story mixed-use, with commercial space on the ground floor, and density goes way up and suddenly you can survive without a car.
- adamiscool8 5y agoSure, but you dramatically change the character of a city or neighbourhood when you upzone with that intensity. Real estate prices and rents would also come back to reality if rates go up meaningfully and foreign investment is banned without easy loopholes. But since BC (and Canada at large) have built their flywheel for growth on a giant RE ponzi scheme, we’re stuck debating supply side solutions to a fundamental demand problem.
- cameronpm 5y agoThis is a great point about trying to fix Demand side problems with a Supply solution. This is a recent paper talking about this todo with nutrition (Does access to healthy food actually make people healthier?): https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/134/4/1793/5492274?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/134/4/1793/549... Here is another example with calorie labels (Do calorie labels actually reduce calorie intake?): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4209007/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4209007/
- ceeplusplus 5y agoCalling it a demand side problem implies you don't want more people living in desirable areas (I'm guessing you live in one of these areas?). That is blatant NIMBYism mixed with some xenophobia. When you reduce demand people are priced out by high interest rates and have to move to less desirable locations. That has real impacts. People have to commute further to their jobs. People can't get their ideal jobs, not because they're not qualified, but because they can't afford housing. That is not an ideal outcome compared to just building more supply. Contrasting calorie consumption with the housing market is just disingenuous. One is clearly not a market and the other one clearly is. People like you are just going to have to understand that as population in North America grows cities are going to have to get denser and your lifestyle is no longer a viable one because it comes at the cost of millions of peoples' lives.
- spaniard89277 5y agoI have a question about cities in North America. I know you don't have many apartment buildings, the urban sprawl etc. In fact I studied a bit of urbanism so I got the gist of it (I think). But I always wonder why don't you have more smaller supermarkets closer to where people lives, instead of larger ones that require so long trips. I guess it wouldn't make it walkable, because cities are not designed like that, but it would be a 5 minute trip maybe. In my mind that is probably more efficient. People may come more often, so more opportunities for cross selling, real state is probably cheaper and the only downside I see is that would probably require more labor. If I had to hop in the car for doing anything I think I'll die of laziness.
- 99_00 5y agoI doubt that many small trips per week is more efficient than one big trip per week.
- epicureanideal 5y ago> But I always wonder why don't you have more smaller supermarkets closer to where people lives, Maybe we’ll leapfrog that step straight to Amazon Fresh delivery to the door.
- blamazon 5y agoI'm not sure why this is the case, but American consumers have come to expect (have been trained to expect?) a wide variety of choice at the supermarket. I'm talking like, you want honey? You've got 50 different brands/sizes of honey available. Repeat for every expected type of product, and you need a big centralized building for this to work out economically. Of course, all problems in NA urbanism seem to stem from land zoning. Building a small grocery store in a residential neighborhood is illegal in a distressingly huge percentage of urban land here, and it's been this way since the 50s. So that's probably part of why the megamart has succeeded. The concept of 'mixed use' is a new idea to many cities, and it's not well distributed on the zoning maps.
- spaniard89277 5y agoDo people really make use of this choice? Or is more like companies conditioning customers?
- cameronpm 5y agoIncredible map, I've never seen this before and I grew up here. Zoning decides so much of the vibe of a city/neighbourhood. Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in. Having lived in 6 other cities, other things Vancouver does well that aren't obvious on this map: - Narrow streets (avoids traffic in side streets) - No highways in the city (loud, dangerous, take up lots of space) - Grass on both sides of sidewalk and trees on every street. - Extremely high park density. - Protected bike lanes everywhere. - Side streets with random dead ends. - Commercial streets every ~4-6 blocks that allow more traffic + bus routes. - Rectangle structured blocks with numbers 1 direction and names the other.
- MikeSchurman 5y agoThey also have view cones, which are: "a policy enforced by the City of Vancouver that limits the heights of the buildings to protect sight lines of the North Shore mountains from a number of arbitrary perspectives" Interestingly the 1st image result of view cones is how they could be a bad thing for Vancouver: https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-view-cones-economic-potential https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-view-cones-economi...
- Tiktaalik 5y agoSeems like view cones are a frequent criticism of certain pro-housing activists, but I think we can see from this Vancouver Zoning Map is the real low hanging fruit for more housing development is the vast swath of land zoned exclusively for single family homes. Personally I can't understand the hate for the viewcones that I sometimes see. Talk with any newcomer to the city and they absolutely love the mountains. The mountain views are one of the selling points of this city. It would be utterly mad to block them.
- ripley12 5y agoDepends on the view cone, I think. I agree that view cones aren't public enemy number 1, but some really are bad. I live near one in East Van that is utterly useless; it's defined as starting in the middle of a road, and the view is blocked by tree foliage most of the year anyway. And yet because of it, multiple proposed apartment buildings have been cut short.
- munk-a 5y agoAh darn - it isn't extended out to Surrey and Richmond - a lot of areas east of the city itself are extremely livable due to highly opinionated zoning decisions.
- baybal2 5y ago
- wheelinsupial 5y agoHere is one for Metro Vancouver, so it stops at Langley: https://mountainmath.ca/zoning_map https://mountainmath.ca/zoning_map
- munro 5y agoWow, the UX on this web app feels really slick on mobile. Better than Google Maps on mobile web. Nice work!
- lbrito 5y agoI'm not the author btw; just found it interesting :) Kudos to author https://twitter.com/rbrtwhite https://twitter.com/rbrtwhite!
- randyrand 5y agoI'm really impressed on Desktop! I love the 'shift + drag = zoom to rectangle' feature And considerably more responsive than the Google Earth mobile app.
- reggieband 5y agoI wish the popup would link to the actual zoning by-law documents. I haven't read the ones for Vancouver specifically but generally they are pretty readable and interesting. One minor bug I noticed was the popup title bar color usually matches the map zoning coloring, except for zoning district DD where the title bar color matches CD-1 instead. At first I thought I was misclicking but it is just a display issue.
- ripley12 5y agoI've read way too many Vancouver zoning bylaws and I can tell you that they're generally not very readable and not very interesting :) But if you do want to read them, here you go: https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/zoning-and-land-use-policies-document-library.aspx#regulation-zoning-regulations https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/zoning-and-la... The "CD-1" zoning is notable in that it's actually 800+ unique zoning districts: https://cd1-bylaws.vancouver.ca/ByCD-1Number.htm https://cd1-bylaws.vancouver.ca/ByCD-1Number.htm For a variety of depressing reasons, the Vancouver planning department is quite reluctant to use broadly-applicable zoning districts; a lot of new development happens with new unique zoning districts that apply to one lot only.
- s1mon 5y agoOne of the things I really like about Vancouver's architecture, which I assume is a result of zoning, is that while there are tall apartment buildings for density, they aren't all bunched close together creating narrow dark cold streets with no views. You'll have a small number of stories near the wide streets, and then a big setback before there's a 20-story tower. It all feels open and approachable as a pedestrian, but there's decent density. I'd love to see similar maps for other cities.
- Tiktaalik 5y agoThis is def a direct intention of the city planners. Despite being in one of the warmest parts of Canada, it still has long dark winters due to its latitude. "Point Towers" are a way to maximize light and also to provide peak a boo views of the mountains.
- brailsafe 5y agoI think I agree in part, but part of this that I take issue with, is that it takes what would otherwise be publicly accessible land, and rises it up off the street for people who only live in the towers. This has its own miserable effect on the streetscape, because I really don't think that people in those buildings actually use those spaces, and the land could be much more effectively used.
- prideout 5y agoVery clean presentation. What frontend technologies were used to make this?
- brailsafe 5y agoI think it was largely MapboxGL which has it's own sort of layering studio https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-studio https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-studio
- nikanj 5y agoWhite means ”you need to be able to afford a multi-million dollar mortgage to live here”. Most of the map is white.
- brailsafe 5y agoThat's actually also true of all the yellow and orange bits, and most of the other bits as well. In the yellow zone, you can live there without having millions in a mortage, but you likely won't be able to buy anything for less
- woah 5y agoWow, it's 90% single family homes. I thought Vancouver was a Hong-Kong style concrete jungle filled with skyscrapers of vacant luxury 1 bdrm apartments owned by foreign real estate corporations.
- brailsafe 5y agoThat's just downtown and some other places that have built a lot of skyscrapers. There's an artificial scarcity of condos in part for that reason, and there's an artificial scarcity of condo buildings/higher density buildings because of the single family zoning among some other anti-density initiatives.
- brailsafe 5y agoShaughnessy has its own fucking zoning ordinance!?
- ripley12 5y agoYes, and it's awful; it's essentially mansion zoning (each lot is required to be massive). The history of Shaughnessy land use is kinda interesting; it was designed to be an ultra-exclusive enclave from the start, and the province and the city have both used their powers to keep it that way. In the first half of the 1900s, the province enacted laws mandating single-family homes only in Shaughnessy; they were particularly weird in that the Shaughnessy Heights Property Owners' Association was empowered to enforce them. In (more) recent years the City has done largely the same thing with zoning restrictions. Some links if you're curious: https://twitter.com/GRIDSVancouver/status/960183009017135104?s=20&t=zJzCVaEoXlr4hNHnzQBFEg https://twitter.com/GRIDSVancouver/status/960183009017135104... https://web.archive.org/web/20190722191318/vancouver.ca/home-property-development/shaughnessy-walking-tour.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20190722191318/vancouver.ca/home...
- liketochill 5y agoYou also get tax breaks in shaughnessy if you have horses on your property. Not encouraging density there! Edit: not shaughnessy. Somewhere further south - can’t remember where I was now
- ripley12 5y agoProbably thinking of Southlands, the technically-zoned-for-agricultural-use mansion district which includes Vancouver's only part of the provincial Agricultural Land Reserve.
- willyt 5y agoI don’t understand the map. If an area is zoned commercial can you build shops on the ground floor with flats above or is that not allowed?
- nikanj 5y agoYes but no: On a zoning level it is allowed, but on an actual lot-by-lot level you'll probably get blocked by complaints https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-apartment-for-rent-not-in-my-vancouver-neighbourhood/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-a... In addition, you can't build anything that's so tall it would block people's view of the mountain backdrop ( https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/protecting-vancouvers-views.aspx https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/protecting-va... ). Vancouver has it's priorities straight, and it's more important to have scenic views from existing housing, than building new housing
- imtringued 5y agoHow is that a justification against duplexes and row houses?