A Tale of Five Cities: How Metro Vancouver Mapped Bill 44

One provincial mandate. Five completely different municipal realities.

The provincial government passed Bill 44 as a blanket mandate: allow 3 to 6 units on single-family lots. But land-use policy is ultimately executed by local municipalities through zoning bylaws and GIS databases.

When you map every parcel across Metro Vancouver, you realize there is no single "Bill 44" - there are five entirely different implementations. From Vancouver's geometric formulas to Surrey's infrastructure checks, each city interpreted the mandate through its own administrative lens.

The Arithmetic of Zoning: Comparing the Rules

When looking at the hard numbers, the differences in municipal strategy become apparent. Burnaby is the outlier by completely abandoning FSR in favor of lot coverage, simplifying massing calculations for builders.

Surrey restricts height to 9m for a houseplex, making three storeys very tight when accounting for structure and insulation, whereas Vancouver allows a more generous 11.5m.

Coquitlam is the most conservative: strictly capping standard lots at 4 units and 0.75 FSR.

The Municipal Vibe Check

Action: Replaced old RS zones entirely with a single R1-1 zone.

Approach: Tiers are defined strictly by lot geometry (area, frontage) and rear lane access.

Result: Created a massive 4-unit bucket because the standard 33-foot lot fits perfectly into it. An 8-unit tier exists but is strictly for rental tenure.

Action: Publishes an explicit SSMUH_R1_MAX_UNITS field directly on their GIS server.

Approach: The math is entirely transit-driven (distance to Frequent Transit Network) rather than lot size. A 694 square-meter lot inside the transit area gets 6 units, while an 857 square-meter lot outside gets 4.

The Catch: The field is so literal it forgets provincial exemptions. ZoneScout has to manually cap lots back to 2 units if they have a heritage designation or are oversized (>4,050 square-meters).

Action: Surrey's implementation hinges heavily on physical infrastructure.

Approach: Exemption (c) of the provincial mandate states you don't have to allow multiplexes if there's no community sewer system. We had to map 96,181 sanitary laterals.

Result: Over 2,700 Surrey lots are capped back to 2 units simply because they lack a mapped sewer connection within 35 meters. Additionally, 34.5% of R3 lots are eligible for "houseplex" bonuses due to corner/lane geometries.

Action: Created specific Small-Scale Multi-Unit (RSM) zones that rely on a density bonus structure.

Approach: While base density allows for 3 to 4 units, unlocking the full 6-unit capacity requires the owner to provide an affordable housing unit or pay cash-in-lieu.

Result: The highest tier of density is financially gated by community contributions rather than relying solely on geometry or transit proximity.

Action: While Burnaby and Surrey went to 6 units for transit proximity, Coquitlam's bylaw implementation essentially stops at 4 for SSMUH on standard lots.

Approach: Anything above 4 is tied to large-scale units-per-hectare yields or negotiated Heritage Revitalization Agreements (HRAs) which grant extra density rather than restricting it.

Result: The map doesn't show 6-unit SSMUH capacity because the city didn't structure their bylaw that way.

The limits of a blanket policy

The province passed a single piece of legislation, but a mandate is only as good as the local bylaw that enforces it. The reality of building housing in British Columbia is that local constraints - whether they take the form of sewer lines, heritage designations, or simple zoning geometries - still dictate what actually gets built.

By attempting to unify zoning across the province, Bill 44 highlighted exactly how fractured and localized land use policy remains. If you are a builder trying to make sense of the new rules, you don't just need to know the provincial mandate. You need to know exactly which municipality you are standing in.

"You can mandate density from Victoria, but you can't bypass the local GIS server."

Explore the Maps

See exactly how these different approaches impact every single parcel in Metro Vancouver. Click on a property to view its precise capacity.

Parcel counts and unit capacities are derived from the respective Open Data portals of Vancouver, Burnaby, Surrey, and Coquitlam.

The 99,718 total for Vancouver, 98,705 for Surrey, 36,904 for Burnaby, and 27,990 for Coquitlam include the analyzed parcels within each municipality. Implementations of SSMUH (Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing) were cross-referenced with local bylaws and infrastructure maps as of September 2026.