What 304 Submissions Reveal About Vancouver’s ODP — And What They Don’t
We reviewed every submissions ahead of Vancouver's 30-year Official Development Plan to understand what residents, organizations, and experts were actually saying — and where the public record remained incomplete.
On March 10, 2026, Vancouver held its only public hearing on the city’s proposed 30-year Official Development Plan.
By the time the hearing closed, Council had received 304 written submissions.
We read every one.
The record shows a public deeply engaged with the future of the city. It also reveals a sharp divide between the issues people are worried about and the evidence available to explain them.
Of the 304 submissions:
- 249 opposed the plan
- 47 supported it
- 8 were classified as other
That means nearly 82% of the written submissions were opposed.
The numbers alone, however, only tell part of the story.
How the submissions arrived
The City released the correspondence to Council in six batches over five days.
The first batch closed on March 5. The final batch remained open until 10:00 PM on March 10, while the public hearing was already underway.
More than half of the submissions arrived on the day of the hearing itself.
| Distribution | Support | Oppose | Other | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| To March 5, 5 PM | 6 | 41 | 0 | 47 |
| To March 9, 3 PM | 19 | 83 | 4 | 106 |
| To March 10, 4 PM | 20 | 90 | 3 | 113 |
| March 10, 4–7 PM | 2 | 33 | 1 | 36 |
| March 10, 7–8 PM | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| March 10, 8–10 PM | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Total | 47 | 249 | 8 | 304 |
What stands out is how consistent the split remained.
Opposition accounted for roughly 81% of the earliest batch and 81.9% of the final record. The surge in submissions on hearing day made the opposition louder, but it did not meaningfully change the proportions.
After 7:00 PM, every remaining submission opposed the plan.
What supporters said
The 47 supportive submissions were largely focused on housing.
Their argument was straightforward: Vancouver has too little housing, scarcity contributes to high rents, and the ODP could make it easier to approve more homes. Several supporters argued that the plan should go further.
A few submissions also praised City staff or expressed confidence in the planning process.
What was largely absent was any discussion of the infrastructure needed to support growth.
None of the supportive submissions meaningfully addressed:
- School capacity
- Childcare
- Enrolment projections
- Community facilities
- Infrastructure coordination
- The relationship between new housing and public services
No supportive submission cited school data, named a specific school, or examined how population projections were produced.
The strongest supportive submissions came from a developer who made a thoughtful case for the Villages initiative and a Fairview resident who argued that the ODP represented the minimum response required by the housing crisis.
Both were serious contributions. Neither addressed infrastructure capacity.
What opponents said
The 249 opposition submissions were broader, more detailed, and more organized.
Five themes appeared repeatedly:
| Theme | Approximate number of submissions |
|---|---|
| Infrastructure, schools, parks, and community facilities | 100+ |
| Removal or reduction of public hearings | 90+ |
| Neighbourhood character and one-size-fits-all planning | 90+ |
| Rennie projections and methodology | 50+ |
| Affordability and displacement | 70+ |
Other recurring concerns included tree canopy, heritage preservation, land speculation, the Villages concept, embodied carbon, solar access, and the cost implications of the BC Energy Step Code.
Several submissions were based on shared templates. The HousingReset letter, submitted by an organization and later reproduced or endorsed by approximately 25 additional people, became the central document around which much of the opposition was organized.
The opposition was therefore more substantive than the support record.
But it had its own limitation.
Many people identified the same failures. Very few explained the system producing them.
Institutional submissions
Eight institutional organizations filed submissions.
Together, they represented community centres, neighbourhood associations, tenants, academics, planners, and long-standing advisory groups.
The Associations Presidents Group, representing 19 community centre associations, provided the most specific infrastructure claim in the institutional record. It identified a 300,000-square-foot gap in community centre space.
The Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods submitted a comprehensive ten-point critique of the plan.
HousingReset brought together 30 urbanists, planners, architects, and academics from UBC and SFU around a five-point framework.
The Vancouver Tenants Union focused on displacement, demoviction, and the potential effects of the plan on renters.
West Point Grey, Dunbar, West End, and Riley Park–South Cambie organizations raised concerns about consultation, public hearings, neighbourhood planning, and gentrification.
These submissions carried institutional weight and reflected a serious level of public concern.
Still, none provided quantitative evidence explaining how school enrolment, infrastructure capacity, and development planning are coordinated.
The strongest individual submissions
Several individuals made especially notable contributions.
Patrick Condon, UBC Professor Emeritus, offered one of the most analytically developed critiques. He compared Vancouver’s growth in housing stock with its population growth and challenged the claim that additional supply alone would produce affordability.
Former city councillor Colleen Hardwick described repeatedly asking for the housing data behind the City’s growth assumptions during her time on Council. According to her submission, that information was never fully provided.
Karen Webber connected the long-delayed Olympic Village school with the Province’s reactive approach to school planning.
Lopa Sircar identified four specific infrastructure failures: Olympic Village, Carleton Elementary, Champlain Heights, and the River District community centre.
Jessie Halonen examined the possible construction-cost effects of future BC Energy Step Code requirements.
Carol Volkart questioned the City’s claim that the ODP consultation process included 52,000 “touchpoints,” asking what the term actually meant and how those interactions were counted.
Aissa Aggoune raised the risk that broad rezoning and land assembly could increase speculation and institutional investment without improving affordability for residents.
Jeff Ang connected Vancouver’s ODP with Calgary’s blanket-rezoning debate, noting similarities in the policy approach and planning leadership.
These submissions helped deepen the record.
They also reinforced the same broader pattern.
People could describe the failures. The underlying mechanism remained largely missing.
The evidence gap
Infrastructure was the most frequently cited concern in the opposition record.
More than 100 submissions mentioned schools, parks, community centres, or public-service capacity.
The examples were often specific and persuasive:
- Olympic Village still waiting for a permanent school
- Carleton Elementary remaining closed
- Community facilities failing to keep pace with growth
- Uneven school enrolment across the city
- Development moving ahead before infrastructure is secured
These are real and recurring problems.
Yet almost no one explained why they continue to happen.
The public record contained many symptoms, but very little diagnosis.
Across all 304 submissions, only eight people came close to identifying the school and infrastructure coordination problem with any specificity.
| Submitter | Issue identified | What remained missing |
|---|---|---|
| Kathleen Emerson | Loss of school-land protections | Policy numbers and structural mechanism |
| Jen Petersen | East-west enrolment imbalance | Data and planning framework |
| Veronica Yakoleff | Removal of school-ground language | Exact policy references and timing |
| Karen Webber | Olympic Village school and reactive planning | Enrolment data and legal structure |
| Emma Harvey | Replacement school with lower capacity | School name and supporting evidence |
| Lopa Sircar | Olympic Village, Carleton, Champlain Heights, and River District | Structural cause and data |
| Andrew Nichols | Mixed-use school sites and protected space | Quantitative evidence |
| Michael Cao | Village-specific infrastructure audits | Methodology and data |
Each submission identified part of the problem.
None fully connected the planning, legal, demographic, and institutional systems behind it.
What VTCo submitted
The Visual Thinking Company filed its own ODP Evidence Package, identified as VTCo-EP-2026-001.
The submission was classified as “Other” because it did not support or oppose the ODP.
Its purpose was to add evidence to the record.
VTCo’s filing included 16 pieces of analysis, evidence, or structural framing that did not appear anywhere else in the submissions.
These included:
- A five-scenario enrolment range showing a spread of more than 24,000 students
- Evidence that VSB plans for approximately 76 of every 100 school-age children
- Student-yield differences between housing types
- The reversal of enrolment assumptions at David Thompson Secondary
- The removal of school-site protection language between ODP drafts
- An undisclosed Long Range Facilities Plan relying on 2020 inputs
- The legal distinction between consultation and reconciliation under the Vancouver Charter
- The proposed subdivision of land at Sexsmith Elementary
- The removal of childcare from the Joyce-Collingwood project
- Three subdivision applications involving Carleton Elementary before public consultation began
- Thousands of children missing from earlier VSB projections
- Conseil scolaire francophone facilities operating far beyond intended capacity
- The structural “denominator problem” behind infrastructure planning
- Unresolved coordination gaps raised by the federal government
- The sale and eventual repurchase of the Henry Anderson school site
- A recurring pattern of school-site disposal, closure, and expensive reacquisition
Two of these issues were partly identified elsewhere.
Kathleen Emerson and Veronica Yakoleff both noticed the change in school-land protection language, although neither identified the specific shift from Policy 7.8.4 to 7.8.5.
Lopa Sircar mentioned the closure of Carleton Elementary, but did not discuss the three subdivision applications filed before the public consultation process began.
The remaining evidence appeared only in VTCo’s filing.
What the record tells us
The ODP hearing produced a record rich in concern.
Residents, neighbourhood organizations, planners, academics, and former elected officials all described serious problems with how Vancouver is growing.
They pointed to crowded schools, missing community facilities, rising land values, displacement, weak consultation, and infrastructure arriving years after development.
Those concerns deserve attention.
But concern alone does not explain the system.
The deeper questions are structural:
- How are population and enrolment projections produced?
- Which children are included or excluded from school planning?
- When does the City consult school boards?
- What happens when land-use plans and capital plans do not align?
- Who is responsible when development is approved before public infrastructure is funded?
- What legal mechanisms exist to reconcile conflicting plans?
Without answers to those questions, the city will continue debating the same visible failures without understanding why they repeat.
VTCo’s submission does not prescribe a position on the ODP.
It adds the evidence needed to examine the system behind the debate.
Methodology
This analysis covers all 304 written submissions distributed to Vancouver City Council between March 5 and March 10, 2026.
Every submission was read in full.
Theme counts are approximate because many submissions raised more than one issue.
“Absent from the record” means that the specific evidence, data point, or structural explanation did not appear in any other submission.
“Near miss” refers to a submission that identified part of an issue but did not provide the supporting data or explain the underlying mechanism.
VTCo’s filing was classified as “Other” and did not take a position for or against the ODP.
Its purpose was to surface evidence already relevant to the public decision.
The Visual Thinking Company Inc.
Vancouver, British Columbia
From Complexity to Clarity
VTCo-PUB-ODP-001
March 11, 2026