The city of Vancouver is building.. Villages?

Every time I land at YVR, the drive usually takes me down Granville, through downtown, past Strathcona, and over the Second Narrows toward the North Shore. The amount of mid-rise housing that has appeared along that route over the last few years is remarkable.

Vancouver has always been a city deeply attached to the idea of the single-family neighbourhood. Yet more and more, the city I'm returning to looks like one becoming comfortable with building something different. Its a welcome change.

In some ways, this shift has been happening across the Lower Mainland for years, at a larger scale. Surrey, Burnaby, and Coquitlam have spent decades concentrating growth around rapid transit stations, gradually building a network of dense urban centres connected by SkyTrain. The result is a region where growth is increasingly organized around nodes rather than spread evenly.

The Village Scale

Vancouver's Villages program applies a similar logic at a much finer grain. The focus shifts toward smaller commercial streets and neighbourhood centres that already exist but have seen relatively little growth despite the city's rising population. The goal isn't to create another Metrotown. It's to allow more people to live near the kinds of places they already use every day: a grocery store, a coffee shop, a pharmacy, a park.

Across nearly 2000 survey responses, support for additional housing options emerged as the most common theme. Various housing typologies received broad support across the 17 villages being studied. While concerns around infrastructure, neighbourhood character and building height remain, the conversation appears to be shifting away from whether growth should happen and toward how it should happen.

The strongest support often came from younger residents and renters. Across both residential and retail boundaries, respondents between the ages of 20 and 39 consistently expressed more positive views than older age groups. Renters were also notably more supportive than homeowners. With rising housing costs, this divide is perhaps unsurprising.

What Young Residents Are Actually Asking For

Housing is not the sole focus of the villages. When respondents were asked about retail expansion, the most common theme was convenience and walkability. Many respondents expressed interest in completing more daily routines within walking distance. Again and again, the same priorities appeared: less car dependence, more social space, and stronger connections between essential infrastructure.

That said, support for the Villages program should not be mistaken for support of growth at any cost. Many respondents raised concerns around infrastructure, and the risk of poorly integrated development. More housing stock alone is not guaranteed to make a city affordable, nor is every form of density equally beneficial. A vote for the Villages concept should also come with a commitment to building thoughtfully. A one-size-fits-all approach applied uniformly across Vancouver's neighbourhoods risks producing places that feel increasingly sterile and interchangeable without meaningfully addressing the underlying affordability crisis.

Critics often point to the number of commercial streets already struggling with vacancies and declining foot traffic. But many of these neighbourhood centres suffer from the same problem: not enough people living nearby to support them. Density alone won't solve every issue, but local businesses are difficult to sustain without a critical mass of residents within walking distance.

The real opportunity lies in treating each village as a distinct place rather than a template to be replicated seventeen times, or simply another development opportunity to be maximized.

Young Vancouverites are not asking for entirely new forms of urbanism. They are asking for more complete neighbourhoods and more variety within them. For architects, developers and anyone looking to build in Vancouver, reports such as this are worth paying attention to. While census data can tell us where people live and planning documents can tell us where to expect growth, engagement reports offer something equally valuable: they reveal how residents imagine the future of their neighbourhoods. Understanding all three together could be the most useful tool in anticipating where Vancouver is heading next.