Vancouver's Villages Plan: 17 New Neighbourhoods
Vancouver's Villages Plan reshapes 17 neighbourhoods with new housing, high streets, and shops within a 5-minute walk. Council votes July 2026.
Vancouver Villages Plan
By Elke Porter | WBN News Vancouver | July 10, 2026
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Vancouver is preparing to reshape the way many of its low-density neighbourhoods grow, through a new framework known as the Villages Plan. After an 18-month planning process, the City has released a draft plan covering 17 villages spread across the west side, east side, and south side of Vancouver, and is set to bring it to Council this summer.
Where
The 17 villages are not new place names competing with existing hubs like Davie Village or Olympic Village. Instead, each one is built around small, existing clusters of shops and services located in areas that are currently dominated by single-detached homes, duplexes, and laneway houses. The plan is designed so that daily needs — groceries, coffee, a chance to run into a neighbour — can all be reached within a five-minute walk, roll, or bike ride from home.
What's Involved
Every village centres on a "high street," where mixed-use buildings put shops and services on the ground floor and additional housing above. Wider sidewalks, patios, small-scale seating, bus stops, and plazas are meant to make these streets places where people linger, not just pass through.
Surrounding each high street, within roughly a five-minute walk, are residential areas rezoned for "missing middle" housing — multiplexes, townhouses, and low-rise apartments up to six storeys. The idea is to let more people live close to shops and services, which in turn helps those businesses stay viable, while giving older residents a way to downsize without leaving their community and giving families and younger residents more housing options nearby.
Some larger or unique sites within villages are earmarked for renewal or new amenities, such as childcare spaces, and may be guided by special policies allowing greater density than the surrounding low-rise areas.
Why
The Villages Plan builds directly on Vancouver's official Development Plan, a city-wide framework guiding growth from the dense metro core down to quieter multiplex areas. During public consultation on that broader plan, residents said they wanted more housing options, shops, and services in the city's lower-density neighbourhoods — and the Villages Plan is the City's response.
Who
The plan draws on significant public input gathered through in-person events and surveys, including focused engagement with groups the City says it hears from less often, such as youth. The City also consulted the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations and the urban Indigenous community, acknowledging that the plan affects unceded ancestral and traditional homelands. Technical work was carried out collaboratively across City departments, with additional input from independent consultants — including retail consultants who helped determine how many shops and services future village residents would need.
How Change Will Happen
Rather than requiring a site-specific rezoning for every project, Council will be asked to rezone most village areas directly to low-rise residential and mixed-use zones this summer. If approved, developers could move straight to a development permit application followed by a building permit, streamlining the path to new housing and commercial space. Because all 17 villages are being enabled at once, the City expects growth to unfold gradually, with infrastructure and amenities added over time through both private development and city-wide capital planning.
The draft plan, the associated rezoning, and the amendment to the Vancouver Official Development Plan are scheduled to go before Council at a Public Hearing on July 14, 2026. Residents can review the full draft plan, submit comments ahead of the hearing, and sign up for updates through the City's Shape Your City page
Side Note: The Villages Plan and Vancouver's October 2026 Election
The Villages Plan reaches Council just as campaigning ramps up for Vancouver's next civic election, set for October 17, 2026 — and how the city should grow is shaping up as one of the campaign's central fault lines.
Ken Sim (ABC Vancouver, incumbent) has made accelerating housing construction a signature push of his term, including prezoning village areas so individual projects can skip a site-specific rezoning hearing. His administration has also moved to adopt the provincial building code in place of Vancouver's own local bylaw, arguing the change would remove a costly extra step for builders.
Colleen Hardwick (TEAM for a Livable Vancouver), making her second run for mayor, has built her campaign around slowing the pace and scale of development and pushing for more neighbourhood-specific, community-led zoning rather than blanket rezonings like the Villages Plan. She has argued that added density under recent plans hasn't been matched by the data or consultation residents were promised.
Kareem Allam (Vancouver Liberals), Sim's former chief of staff, is also campaigning on scrapping the Vancouver Building Bylaw in favour of the provincial code, plus consolidating the twelve city departments involved in approving new housing into one and conducting a full review of conflicting bylaws. Worth noting for readers: Vancouver's local bylaw currently exceeds the province's baseline in areas such as seismic resilience, energy efficiency, and accessibility, so critics — including TEAM council candidate Charles Kelly — argue that switching to the provincial code outright would mean losing those Vancouver-specific protections, even as Allam and Sim frame the move as cutting red tape rather than lowering standards.
Other declared mayoral candidates are staking out their own housing positions: Pete Fry (Green Party) wants city-owned land leveraged for below-market housing aimed at median-income earners; William Azaroff (OneCity) has pledged 4,000 affordable homes on city land alongside infrastructure fixes like modernized traffic lights and a fast-tracked Britannia Community Centre upgrade; and Rebecca Bligh (Vote Vancouver) has pledged to use "every square inch" of public land for below-market housing, paired with childcare space in each development.
Whichever direction voters choose in October, the outcome will shape whether — and how — plans like the Villages Plan continue once Council changes.
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