It’s time to build the housing we need for the future of Metro Vancouver.
To address the twin crises of housing affordability and climate change, the region specifically needs more “missing middle” housing between the extremes of detached (“single-family”) homes and large condo towers. An aggressive build-out of affordable housing region-wide is central to creating a more fair and vibrant economy that also rises to the challenge of the climate emergency.
This paper proposes a framework of conditional upzoning, a regulatory shift away from detached housing to allow higher-density development across the region while requiring that all new housing development contributes to greater affordability. In particular, this research aims to enable a growing stock of affordable non-market rental housing (i.e., rents set at 50–80 per cent of median market rent).
About the author
Marc Lee is a Senior Economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Marc joined the CCPA’s British Columbia office in 1998, and is one of Canada’s leading progressive commentators on economic and environmental policy issues. From 2009 to 2015, Marc led the CCPA’s Climate Justice Project (CJP), which published a wide range of research on fair and effective approaches to climate action through integrating principles of social justice. Marc continues to write about climate and energy policy, strategies for affordable housing, federal and provincial budgets and macroeconomics. Marc has an MA in Economics from Simon Fraser University and a BA in Economics from the University of Western Ontario. Marc is a past chair of the Progressive Economics Forum, a national network of heterodox economists. He also served as a Visiting Professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Public Policy in 2024 to 2025.
