Cranes tower over the offices of both Josh White and Ron Gill, the planning experts who must figure out how Metro Vancouver’s two most-populous cities will build more homes in the midst of a crippling housing crisis and an economic downturn.

Vancouver vs. Surrey: How B.C.’s two biggest cities plan to build their way out of a housing crisis Back to video

“In our city centre, I’m staring out the window here and I see cranes all around me,” said Gill, Surrey’s general manager of planning. “It’s an exciting place. It’s going to be our highest-density node in the city.”

Surrey, a sprawling suburb where most residents still rely on cars, plans to construct more dense neighbourhoods near transit lines as pressure mounts for it to add many more homes. But that comes with growing pains in a city where infrastructure and public amenities have not kept pace with the voracious appetite for places to live.

From his office near city hall, White, Vancouver’s general manager of planning, looks down on construction for the Broadway plan, a massive project that will shoehorn new homes, amenities and a subway extension into already populated neighbourhoods.

White’s challenge is that his city has close to the same population as Surrey on just one third of the land, but has been mandated by the province to build 28,900 new homes by September 2028 — more than the 27,256 required of Surrey.

“The city of Vancouver, we’re land constrained. So growth and housing will need to be facilitated through change,” he said.

White has many ideas to make it easier for land to be redeveloped, starting with simplifying the city’s rezoning rules.

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“We want to systematically go through every part of the rezoning process and shrink it. Shrink it and make it more productive.”

This is a tale of two very different cities trying to achieve similar goals: How does Vancouver, with 6,576 residents living on every square kilometre in 2024, create more homes without compromising green space and pushing existing residents out of their communities?

How does Surrey, with a density of 2,214 people per square kilometre, provide the schools and hospitals, water and sewer lines, and transit to accommodate a sharp rise in people across a large area of land?

“From Surrey’s perspective, our population is rapidly growing, and we’re adding about 1,200 residents per month, and right now the housing supply just isn’t keeping pace,” said Jasroop Gosal with the Surrey Board of Trade.

“If you look around downtown Surrey, about a year ago we had maybe 20 cranes building and creating housing. And right now we’re down to about six to seven.”

Surrey city hall is quickly approving building permits, but construction is held up by a variety of other factors, Gosal said. That includes insufficient underground utility pipes to support the growth, expensive provincial energy-efficiency requirements, and sagging profit margins for developers at a time of rising costs.

In Vancouver, though, Kitsilano resident Larry Benge thinks there are too many cranes building the wrong kind of housing. He believes his city needs to put the brakes on costly highrises, and instead accelerate affordable rentals, supportive housing and co-operatives.

“Right now we’re building unaffordable housing where we’re tearing down three-storey apartment blocks which are filled with units that are affordable,” said Benge, co-chair of the Vancouver Neighbourhood Coalition.

Projects like the Broadway plan, which is to add 41,000 new homes over three decades, do not consider how they will alter the character of Vancouver’s long-standing communities, he added.

“Along the Broadway corridor, people are noticeably anxious, and rightly so, about their futures because all of this development is coming like a tsunami at them,” said Benge, a residential designer of new homes and renovations.

In Metro Vancouver last year, compared to 2023, the average number of new building permits issued by city halls fell by eight per cent, mainly due to the troubled economy. Surrey and Vancouver, though, bucked that trend, said Anne McMullin, president of the Urban Development Institute.

Vancouver issued 6,494 building permits in 2024, a five per cent increase over the previous year. Surrey issued slightly more, at 6,836, a nearly 30 per cent jump over 2023.

Land prices and municipal policies have made the construction of condos more expensive in Vancouver, so the towers that once blossomed in that city are now being planted in Surrey, said McMullin.

In Surrey last year, more than 3,500 condo units went on the presale market, triple 2023’s number. In Vancouver, there were just 461 in 2024, one quarter of the previous year.

Vancouver built 848 rental units in 2024, four times more than in Surrey. Rentals come with federal government funding so are cheaper for Vancouver to build, McMullin said.

While buyers are increasingly priced out of Vancouver real estate, she added, Surrey has become a desirable alternative.

“What I’m seeing is a healthy competition between Surrey and Vancouver and a willingness in those municipalities to bring about change,” she said.

“They recognize the high cost of building and are looking to come up with ways to reduce the cost.”

The two influential cities don’t, though, appear to be collaborating on these new visions, but rather working in silos.

Within the last month, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim announced he would boycott Metro Vancouver meetings and pause new supportive housing for people with mental health problems and drug addictions until other municipalities build more, a move that Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke called unfair finger pointing.

This week, Surrey city council decided it would withdraw from participating in Metro’s long-term regional planning, accusing the district’s policies of being unaffordable and unaccountable. Instead, Locke said Surrey would invite mayors of only south-of-the-Fraser communities to participate in an alternative process.

Postmedia sat down with the two cities’ new planning bosses to learn their separate visions for how to create more homes in the future: White has been at the helm in Vancouver for eight months, and Gill has been on the job in Surrey for just three months.

Vancouver: ‘Speed matters’

In Vancouver’s real estate heydays, as prices reliably soared year after year, the city layered on onerous and time-consuming development requirements.

“It all worked because the price would always bail us out. But now the music has stopped,” said White. “Revenue is not as certain, and costs are also more uncertain. And so we’ve hit a bit of a wall.”

He laid out a series of proposals to back away from that wall.

They start with pre-zoning land for major development projects in advance, stating the size and type of housing allowed for each lot, thus removing the year-long zoning process that developers typically face.

“Creating a system that can function more smoothly, geared toward getting housing and development on the ground quicker,” White said.

This will reduce the financial loses developers endure while waiting for approval to start digging, which lowers the economic risk of a project not proceeding.

“Speed matters,” he said.

White wants the public benefits required at each new project, such as below-market housing, daycares and parks, to also be decided by the city in advance, based on the need for amenities in the neighbourhood. That would replace the protracted negotiations that happen today.

This pre-zoning is to begin this year with some of the city’s biggest development areas, such as along Broadway and Cambie. “Then we’re going to do that through more and more of the city over time,” White said.

His other proposed changes include:

• Development fees, charged by the city to offset the cost of infrastructure and amenities, should be paid after units are sold, rather than the current system of paying at the start of a project. That won’t be an easy switch for a city that relies on this money upfront, and will require council approval.

• Slashing 1,800 pages of municipal policies, written during Vancouver’s economic boom times, to condense the time between developers first inquiring about projects through to issuing building permits.

• Increasing the dimensions of residential towers, which could add one more unit per floor. This could be achieved by being more flexible with building heights, the size of a tower’s base, and the number of towers on larger development sites.

White said the larger dimensions should not reduce green space and trees around future projects, and that the city will not change the current rule of a 24 metre (80 foot) separation between towers to ensure access to sunlight.

While White insisted those factors are “part of Vancouver’s identity,” he is the planner who last year convinced council to relax the city’s long-standing view and shadow polices to open up more development space.

Many of White’s proposals echo requests made by the UDI, the development industry association. It says rules that make it more expensive to build in Vancouver need to be relaxed, such as more rigorous environmental rules and requirements to provide public art.

“While we’re in this economic crisis,” McMullin said, “we need to get housing built first.”

When asked about Surrey’s growth, Sim said that city’s success is a benefit for Vancouver.

“It makes the region stronger. Now, don’t get me wrong, we’re also focused on (making) Vancouver the coolest and best city on the planet. And you know what? We can do both.”

Surrey: ‘A big player’

Swaths of Surrey’s land mass are still undeveloped, so it doesn’t face Vancouver’s space constraints.

“We’re a big player in terms of delivering housing for the region,” said Gill, who worked in planning for the city for two decades before taking over in November.

Like White, he wants to make building easier and faster, and has set a target to eventually reduce development approval waiting times by 30 per cent.

In December, Surrey launched a multilingual chatbot to answer questions about development, a move that McMullin says puts it ahead of Vancouver when it comes to using time-saving artificial intelligence tools.

Surrey is increasing density near transit stops, such as the Scott Road corridor, and the Clayton corridor to align with the new SkyTrain extension to Langley. The towers are to include larger units to accommodate families.

There are also plans to revamp neighbourhoods not on the SkyTrain line, such as Grandview Heights and Cloverdale.

“The bulk of our development is now condos or townhouses or high rises,” Gill said.

While the single-family home is not dead in Surrey, those traditional neighbourhoods are slowly starting to transform, given the high cost of land.

“People are needing the mortgage helpers,” Gill said, “a basement suite or a coach house or a garden suite.”

In response to an edict by the province last year, Surrey and Vancouver allow up to four housing units on a traditional single-family lot, and up to six if it is near a main transit stop.

That will be a sea change in Surrey neighbourhoods dominated by large houses. But the city has had little community opposition so far, perhaps because few property owners have applied to redevelop their lots.

“We’ve got about 40 or 50 permits right now for fourplexes and garden suites. So I think it’s going to take a little time for people to start seeing these pop up in their neighbourhoods, and then we might start to see some concern,” Gill said.

Surrey’s immediate challenge is its shortage of infrastructure and amenities, given the “significant role” it plays in housing creation, the mayor said. Locke is adamant she needs more help from the province — and comes armed with statistics to make her case.

• It will cost an estimated $800 million to upgrade sewer and water lines to support fourplexes on single-family lots.

• Only a quarter of Surrey’s properties have access to transit, leaving residents dependent on cars.

• Vancouver has four times as many hospital beds, and mental health and addictions beds, as Surrey.

• Schools in Surrey rely on about 400 portables because of overcrowding.

“So,” Locke said, “as much as we are ready to build housing in Surrey, the infrastructure to support it is just by the day weakening.”

‘Don’t ignore neighbourhoods’

In Vancouver, Benge questions whether the answer to the affordable-housing crisis is to continue to accelerate big towers and developments, because that hasn’t appreciably brought down costs.

He believes the solution is to instead focus on constructing homes for those most in need: larger units for low- and medium-income families, and supportive housing for people struggling with mental illness, addiction and homelessness. The city could also use its land for affordable co-ops, arguing that otherwise many of the new rentals will be out of reach for most workers.

“They’re unaffordable to most of the people in Vancouver, especially the people that the city always says we’re targeting — the baristas, the service people,” he said.

While provincial legislation has limited the number of public hearings in order to speed up development, White said Vancouver will hold more open houses for residents to voice opinions about development proposals. He adds, though, the city must balance the long-term goal of building housing for future residents against short-term concerns raised by existing residents.

“There’s going to be some people who are more happy with that change, and other people who are less happy with that change,” he said.

Benge’s perspective is that Vancouver has an international reputation for its successful urban design, and city hall should listen to its citizens’ opinions on where and how to build in their communities.

“Don’t ignore the neighbourhoods. The neighbourhoods are the building blocks of the city.”

lculbert@postmedia.com

With a file from Dan Fumano, Postmedia