BCpropertycheck

Vancouver Villages Plan Rejected: What It Means for Your Lot

On July 28, 2026, Vancouver City Council voted 10-1 to reject the Villages Plan, the largest city-initiated upzoning ever put to a Vancouver council. Roughly 13,000 lots that would have been rezoned for four, six, and near-transit eight storeys stay exactly as they are. One piece did survive the vote, and it matters more than its size suggests. Here is what changed, what did not, and how to tell which category your lot is in.

The vote

Council rejected the plan 10-1. Mayor Ken Sim, the ABC councillors (Sarah Kirby-Yung, Lisa Dominato, Brian Montague, Mike Klassen, Peter Meiszner, Lenny Zhou), Rebecca Bligh of Vote Vancouver, Pete Fry of the Greens, and Sean Orr of COPE all voted against. Lucy Maloney of OneCity was the only vote in favour.

The public hearing ran across three dates, July 14, 20, and 22, drawing roughly 300 speakers and about 3,000 written submissions, overwhelmingly opposed. Councillor Bligh suggested the staff work could still form the basis of future planning or a smaller pilot, so the underlying analysis is not necessarily wasted. But as a rezoning, it is dead.

What the plan would have done

  • 17 village areas across the city, covering roughly 13,000 residential lots, most of them currently single-family.
  • Heights of four to six storeys, rising to eight in transit-oriented areas or for social and below-market rental projects.
  • About one million square feet of new retail and restaurant space in the mixed-use portions.
  • A deliberate east/west split. The Eastside would have used the existing R3-1 zone for residential low-rise and a new C-2D zone for mixed-use. The Westside would have used a new R3-4 and C-2E, both carrying inclusionary housing requirements that City staff judged financially viable on higher-value land.

Because the plan failed, R3-4, C-2D, and C-2E were never enacted. If you see those codes referenced anywhere, they are proposals, not zones. The current R3 district schedule contains R3-1, R3-2, and R3-3 only.

What actually passed

Council carved three items out of the package and approved them separately:

  • Single-egress stairs in four to six storey residential buildings. This is the substantive one. Requiring two exit staircases in a small building eats a punishing share of the floor plate, and it is a large part of why narrow lots cannot support a mid-rise. Removing that requirement makes single-lot infill pencil in places where the height was already permitted, either under existing zoning or under the provincial transit-oriented area rules. It changes what is buildable without changing anyone's zone.
  • Editorial amendments to the Official Development Plan, cleaning up terminology and cross-references.
  • Criteria for "consistency determinations", which set out how staff judge whether a proposal aligns with the ODP's generalized land use designations.

What your lot is zoned today

If you own a standard detached house in Vancouver, almost certainly nothing changed on July 28. R1-1 lots stay capped at roughly three storeys, with the multiplex rules under provincial Bill 44 unchanged. That path is covered here: multiplex Vancouver, how many units on your single-family lot.

Two things override that, and neither was touched by this vote:

  • Bill 47 transit-oriented areas. Within 800 m of rapid transit, the Province sets minimum density floors that beat city zoning. See what you can build near a SkyTrain station.
  • The R3, R4, and R5 apartment districts, which already exist and already apply to a meaningful chunk of the city. That is the part most coverage is getting wrong, so it is worth separating out.

R3 is not new, and it did not come from the Villages Plan

Council approved the standardized apartment districts R3, R4, and R5 on July 22, 2025, a year before the Villages vote, to implement the Broadway Plan and the Cambie Corridor Plan. They are live in the zoning bylaw now, with schedules current to June 2026. The Villages Plan would have extended R3-1 to many more lots. It failed. The zone itself was never at risk.

The design idea behind these districts is that they hold a maximum floor space ratio but let height flex, which removes the need for a site-by-site rezoning on most projects. The real numbers, from the June 2026 schedules:

  • R3-1, R3-2, R3-3 (low-rise). Minimum site area 460 m². Height 23.0 m, about six storeys, rising to 27.5 m where at least 20% of residential floor area is secured as below-market rental in a transit-oriented area, or where 100% is social housing. FSR is banded by site area (1,470 / 920 / 613 / 460 m²) and site depth: secured rental tops out at 2.70, and the 3.00 ceiling needs that same affordability test on a site of at least 920 m². Strata or any non-rental tenure is capped at 1.75 to 2.00. A 460 m² site is capped at 1.45 no matter what. R3-2 requires 100% secured rental outright; R3-3 requires it where the project displaces existing rental.
  • R4-1 (mid-rise). FSR 4.00, or 4.30 for a mixed-use building carrying at least 139 m² of non-dwelling floor area. Height 47.0 m. This is a site-assembly zone: minimum site area 1,532 m² (1,348 m² on a corner) and minimum frontage 45.7 m (40.0 m on a corner).
  • R5-1 to R5-4 (high-rise). Height 84.0 m, except R5-2 at 69.0 m. FSR runs 5.00 to 6.80 depending on district, tenure, and use, and every one of those numbers is conditional on delivering 20% below-market units or 100% social housing. Same site-assembly minimums as R4-1.

The practical read: these are not zones a single lot uses. R4 and R5 need an assembly of roughly 1,532 m² with 45.7 m of frontage, and the headline FSRs are unreachable without an affordability commitment. R3 is the only one of the three that a normal 460 m² lot can access, and at that size the cap is 1.45.

How to check which applies to you

Zoning maps are the wrong tool for this question, because the answer depends on which of three overlapping regimes governs your parcel. Enter your address in the free BC parcel map and the report returns the current zone code with its FSR, height, and setbacks, plus the Bill 44 and Bill 47 overrides where they apply. Vancouver-specific detail is on the Vancouver zoning lookup.

If the report comes back R3-1, R3-2, R3-3, R4-1, or any R5, you are in a Broadway Plan or Cambie Corridor apartment district and the numbers above are yours. If it comes back R1-1, you are on the multiplex path and the Villages vote left you where you were. New to the codes themselves: BC zoning codes explained.

The short version

The Villages Plan is rejected, 10-1, and about 13,000 lots keep their existing zoning. R3, R4, and R5 are unaffected because they were approved a year earlier for the Broadway and Cambie plan areas, and they are already in force there. The one genuine change out of July 28 is the single-staircase amendment, which quietly improves the economics of four to six storey infill on narrow lots that already had the height. Everything else is a return to the status quo.