Prof. Patrick Condon has publicly shared his letter to Vancouver City Council regarding the “Villages” plan to upzone nearly 14,000 land parcels in 17 areas of Vancouver this week. Prof. Condon is Professor Emeritus at University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and author of many books on cities, including Broken City.
The attention-getter here is that if Council approves the Villages plan, if tallied with existing plans, Vancouver is setting itself up to add around 1.4 million more people to the population. This is worthy of serious discussion by our elected officials. In public. This week.
The public hearing is July 14, 2026. More information and links can be found on our Villages portal page.
July 12, 2026
Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Plan.
Dear Mayor and Council,
I write to challenge key elements of the Villages Plan.
Combined with the Official Development Plan and Broadway Plan, the City envisions a fully built-out future that adds around 1.4 million people to our city of 670,000.
This massive oversupply is promoted as the path to housing affordability. Yet there is no historical evidence to support this claim.
Vancouver has tripled its housing stock since the 1960s – more than any other major North American centre city – yet our prices remain North America’s highest, not the lowest. If adding hundreds of thousands of units truly lowered prices, we would already see it.
The market, driven by globe-wide speculative inflation has failed us. Our plans are feeding this speculative beast rather than taming it.
True affordability requires mandating that new housing be affordable to average wage earners, primarily through non-market housing development.
I urge you to revise these plans accordingly, deeply involving residents from every corner of the city, to arrive at sustainable, equitable, and affordable housing growth
Thank you,
Yours truly,
Professor Emeritus Patrick M. Condon
University of British Columbia
School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture