British Columbia is big. It’s really big. It’s bigger than Texas. It’s 40 percent bigger than Texas. And while Texas has four major urban areas with a combined population of more than 15 million people, British Columbia has only one major urban area with fewer than 2.3 million people.
So, naturally, Vancouver regional planners fear that urban sprawl might overrun the entire province. The plans and regulations they have written to preserve British Columbia’s supposedly scarce open space have made Vancouver the least-affordable housing market in North America, according to Wendell Cox’s latest review of housing prices. In the rest of the English-speaking world, only Hong Kong is more expensive.
In 2007, the Fraser Institute asked me to visit Vancouver to review its regional plan–or plans, actually, since the first one was written in the 1960s and later, more-restrictive plans were written periodically after that. I spent several days in the offices of the Greater Vancouver Regional District (now known as Metro Vancouver), which were located not in Vancouver but in the suburb of Burnaby. Continue reading
