From Exception to Entitlement

Vancouver is once again asking a familiar question: how tall should the city grow?

Framed through the City’s ongoing review of the Higher Buildings Policy, the discussion is presented in terms of skyline, views, and architectural expression. It asks residents what they value—mountain views, variation in building form, the overall shape of the skyline—and where additional height might be appropriate.

These are important questions. Vancouver’s skyline, set against the North Shore Mountains, is one of its defining features. The system of protected view cones, first introduced in 1989, has long ensured that this relationship between city and landscape remains intact. These sightlines were not incidental—they were deliberately designed and protected as a public good, based on the understanding that without intervention, they would be gradually lost to private development.

Together with the Higher Buildings Policy, adopted in 1997, this created a careful balance. Most buildings would remain within defined limits, preserving shared access to views and maintaining a coherent skyline. A small number of “higher buildings” could exceed those limits—but only under strict conditions.

But the significance of that policy was never just about height. It was about how height was used.

Additional height was treated as an exception—something to be earned. Projects seeking to exceed established limits were expected to demonstrate architectural excellence, contribute to the public realm, and deliver meaningful public benefits, from amenities to housing. Height, in other words, functioned as a bargaining tool.

That logic matters. Because when height is limited, it has value. And when it has value, it can be negotiated. Planning tools do not simply shape buildings—they shape the distribution of value.

What the current review introduces—quietly but significantly—is the possibility of expanding where tall buildings are allowed downtown. On its surface, this appears to be a technical adjustment: an update to reflect growth, changing conditions, and new priorities. But when read alongside recent planning decisions across the city, it suggests something more fundamental.

In Vancouver today, rezoning doesn’t necessarily mean building. Increasingly, it means something else: securing entitlements—legal permissions that inflate a property’s value regardless of whether anything is actually constructed.

This distinction is critical. Because entitlements have value independent of outcomes, they can be held, leveraged, or traded. They can sit idle while land values rise. They can reshape the economics of a site long before a single unit of housing is delivered.

The Higher Buildings Policy, in its original form, implicitly resisted this dynamic. By treating height as discretionary and limited, it ensured that additional value could only be realized through a negotiated process tied to public benefit. But if height is enabled more broadly—if the geography of where tall buildings are allowed expands—then that logic begins to shift.

In this sense, expanding height operates as a form of pre-zoning—where value is effectively granted upfront, rather than negotiated at the point of development.

The value of height is no longer created at the moment of negotiation. It is created earlier, through policy itself. What was once exceptional becomes expected. What was once negotiated becomes embedded. This is not a dramatic change. It does not arrive as a single tower or a single decision. It is incremental, procedural, and easy to miss. But its implications are significant.

Because once entitlements are widely distributed, the City’s leverage changes. Public benefits—whether in the form of affordable housing, amenities, or public space—depend on the ability to negotiate from a position of scarcity. When that scarcity diminishes, so too does the capacity to secure those outcomes. When additional height is widely enabled, it no longer functions as a bargaining chip but as a baseline expectation—making it significantly harder for the City to secure additional public benefits without introducing new forms of subsidy or concession.

This dynamic is already visible in recent large-scale rezonings, where entitlements are secured well in advance of construction, reshaping land values long before public benefits are delivered.

This is where the current conversation risks becoming misaligned. Much of the discussion focuses on the skyline: where height should be located, how it should be shaped, and how it might affect protected views. These are visible and legible questions. They are easy to visualize, easy to debate, and easy to survey. But they are not the core issue.

The deeper question is not about the skyline itself, but about the system that produces it.

In this way, the focus on skyline operates as a kind of displacement—redirecting attention toward what is visible and measurable, while the more consequential shifts in governance and value creation remain largely out of view.

A recurring concern in Vancouver’s planning history and my writing has been what happens when public goods—like shared access to views—are gradually privatized, transformed from something collectively held into something increasingly accessible only to those who can afford it. Removing or weakening view protections does not simply alter the skyline, but redistributes access to the city’s most defining features.

That concern extends to the realm of land economics, where planning decisions can generate value that is captured privately, often without delivering the public outcomes that justified those decisions in the first place.

Taken together, they point to a broader shift—one that the current policy review risks accelerating. It is a shift from a planning system that allocates value through negotiation to one that increasingly creates value through entitlement. Height is simply the latest and easiest mechanism through which that shift is being expressed.

And like other recent changes—whether through large-scale rezoning, pre-zoned growth areas, or the increasing standardization of development rights—it operates not through overt transformation, but through subtle recalibration. The rules change just enough to alter the underlying dynamics, while the surface language remains the same: growth, housing, efficiency, design.

The risk is not simply that buildings become taller. It is that the relationship between planning, value, and public benefit becomes inverted.

Height alone does not produce affordability. It does not guarantee livability. It does not ensure that infrastructure, services, and communities can absorb growth. Those outcomes depend on how—and when—decisions are made.

Vancouver’s existing framework, for all its imperfections, was built around a clear idea: that additional height should be limited, deliberate, and tied to public benefit. That it should be something earned, not assumed. The question facing the current review is whether that idea will be maintained or quietly transformed.

This is not simply a question of how tall Vancouver should grow. It is a question of when value is created, how it is distributed, and who ultimately benefits from it.

Vancouver’s skyline may remain recognizable. But the system that produces it—and who it ultimately serves—may not.

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Erick Villagomez is the Editor-in-Chief at Spacing Vancouver and teaches at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. He is also the author of The Laws of Settlements: 54 Laws Underlying Settlements Across Scale and Culture.