Vancouver's 20-year plan update 'built for compromise'; officials to vote on 'Our Vancouver 2045' Monday

May 26-Vancouver officials are set to vote Monday on the city's wide-ranging, 20-year comprehensive plan update known as "Our Vancouver 2045."

The plan includes several land-use zoning strategies designed to tackle insufficient and increasingly unaffordable housing, create space for local jobs, combat climate change and give all Vancouver residents better access to public amenities such as parks, schools and public transit routes.

In the introduction to the "Our Vancouver" comprehensive plan update, Vancouver city staff members explain the issues facing the city over the next 20 years and say Vancouver's population is expected to jump from around 202,000 today to 281,000 by 2045.

"Vancouver's next two decades will be shaped by continued growth, demographic transition, climate impacts and economic restructuring," according to the plan. "The community issues we face today - housing affordability, environmental stress, inequity and safety - are projected to intensify without decisive, coordinated planning."

The update includes hundreds of changes to the city's current comprehensive plan, but many residents took issue with zoning alterations that will allow higher-density housing near schools, parks and public transit lines regardless of a neighborhood's current zoning.

Zachary Pyle, vice chair of the Vancouver Planning Commission, told Vancouver City Council members on May 11 that the comprehensive plan update was "built for compromise."

"This plan reflects thousands of opinions, hard facts and competing interests," Pyle said. "As conditions shift in the years ahead, I believe its underlying structure is flexible enough to meet and adapt to the demands of the community."

The plan also opens up the possibility of building more affordable housing types - townhomes, duplexes, multifamily apartment complexes - and community commercial buildings such as cafes and retail shops in neighborhoods traditionally zoned only for single-family homes or other types of restrictive residential uses, he said.

"It removes regulatory barriers to meeting market demand. Whether that means infill housing or neighborhood commercial services, this plan opens the possibilities for the market that was previously barred from pursuing," Pyle said.

The planning commission, Pyle said, voted unanimously to recommend adoption of the "Our Vancouver 2045" comprehensive plan update.

"The plan has been both a joy and a burden to participate in," Pyle said. "The process has spanned several years and dozens of touch points. ... For some, it hasn't moved fast enough, and for others it is moving much too fast."

Building heights

Prior to the city council's vote on May 11 to advance the plan to a public hearing and final vote on Monday, three members of Vancouver's Northwest Neighborhood Association called for officials to reconsider creating medium-density zones that would allow 75-foot-high, multifamily buildings in their traditionally single-family residential neighborhood.

The Northwest neighborhood residents said they had recently attended a neighborhood association meeting where the vast majority of the 60-plus neighbors in attendance opposed the zoning changes included in the comprehensive plan update.

Paul Quimby, who said he has lived in the Northwest neighborhood since 1958, told city councilors that allowing five- to six-story residential buildings in a neighborhood lacking sidewalks and other public infrastructure would burden the area.

"We are very much against it and would encourage you to ... not vote on this and to continue to find some viable options," Quimby said. "The diversity, I think, could be found more useful in other parts of the city where it's already more developed with transportation."

Ben McCarty, president of the Northwest Neighborhood Association, said his neighbors overwhelmingly oppose the inclusion of medium-scale residential districts in their neighborhood.

"We embrace the desire to increase diversity," McCarty said. "But we oppose the scale of these changes and the overuse of medium-scale in many established neighborhoods."

During the city's public outreach, residents repeatedly voiced a desire for more housing near parks, schools and other public amenities, said Rebecca Kennedy, the city's deputy director of community development.

"There is medium-scale housing around parks because people say that they need access to those things on a daily basis," Kennedy said.

"We analyzed public facilities and services, both what we have now and where we know we have planned investments and improvements, then looked at climate health and vulnerability. We applied this framework consistently around the city," Kennedy added.

For instance, Kennedy said, though Lincoln Avenue in the Northwest neighborhood may seem like a small road without the infrastructure to support higher-density housing, the road is on the city's list of streets that will someday be improved for better bike and pedestrian access.

Why 75 feet?

Kennedy also addressed the 75-foot maximum height allowance included in the medium-scale residential districts that would be sprinkled throughout the city under the proposed comprehensive plan update.

She said the maximum was built with the state's energy code in mind.

"The way this impacts housing is that you need more space between floors to insulate," she said. "And so you need more height for each floor."

Housing developers also told city staff that mixed-use buildings with commercial on the ground floor and residential units above will likely require higher ceiling heights.

"That first floor will need to be a lot taller than our residential (units)," said Mark Burson, a senior planner at the city. "If you walk into a lot of commercial spaces, it's not 9 or 10 feet, it's 14-, 16-, 18-feet tall, so that first floor is almost a double-height floor."

Plus, developers told the city that people who are considering renting or buying a space inside denser housing complexes are looking for taller ceilings and more light, Kennedy said.

"They're going to want to build taller ceilings to increase the livability and meet the market demand," Kennedy said.

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This story was originally published May 26, 2026 at 6:05 PM.