The Arithmetic of Density

How Bill 44 added 175,000 potential homes to Vancouver - on paper.

On September 18, 2024, Vancouver replaced its entire single-family zoning map. The old RS districts - RS-1, RS-1B, RS-5, RS-6 - which had governed what could be built on roughly 64,000 lots since the 1970s, were folded into a single new zone: R1-1, Residential Inclusive.

A house that had been zoned for one family and one suite could now, depending on lot size, hold three, four, six, or eight homes. This is the story of what the numbers actually look like when you run them across every parcel in the city.

The scale of the change

We classified all 99,718 parcels in the City of Vancouver using the same zoning bylaw tables that power ZoneScout's lot reports. Of those, 71,229 are residential lots with a defined unit capacity - the kind of land a person could, in theory, build housing on.

Before Bill 44, the vast majority of these lots were capped at two units: one principal dwelling and one secondary suite or laneway house. That gave Vancouver a theoretical residential capacity of roughly 142,000 units on single-lot residential land.

After the R1-1 rezoning, the same 71,229 lots can theoretically hold 317,811 units. That's an increase of approximately 175,000 homes - a 123% expansion of Vancouver's single-lot housing capacity, accomplished with a single bylaw amendment.

How we counted

A zoning bylaw is just a complicated function applied to a geometry. We wrote code to apply Vancouver's R1-1 rules to every property boundary in the city.

The algorithm is straightforward: check the zoning district. If it's R1-1, check the lot area. If the lot area is over 280 square metres, check the frontage width. Check for rear lane access. Check if it sits in a designated floodplain or transit node.

The outcome of these spatial checks places every residential property into a "tier" of unit capacity.

Where the units are

The dominance of the 4-unit tier isn't an accident - it's the mathematical consequence of Vancouver's historic subdivision patterns. The standard Vancouver lot is 33 feet wide and 122 feet deep, yielding an area of just over 370 square metres. That lands perfectly in the middle of the R1-1 4-unit band (which requires 306m² area and 10.0m frontage).

Lots that reach the 6-unit and 8-unit tiers are much rarer. Reaching 8 units requires a minimum area of 557m² and 15.1m frontage. Crucially, any project in the 8-unit tier is legally mandated to be 100% secured rental housing - strata development caps out at 6 units.

At the bottom end, 12,049 lots are restricted to just 1 or 2 units. These are typically lots without rear lane access, lots situated in the flood plain, or awkwardly shaped parcels that don't meet the minimum frontage tests.

See every lot on the map

Explore our interactive map of Bill 44 zoning changes across Vancouver. Click any parcel to see its precise unit capacity.

The asterisks

Capacity is not construction. A unit count on a spreadsheet does not pour concrete.

While the theoretical capacity has more than doubled, the physical constraints of development remain. Vancouver's Floor Space Ratio (FSR) limits mean that squeezing four or six units onto a standard lot often results in smaller unit sizes. Parking requirements, setbacks, and building codes still apply.

Most importantly, the financial math of replacing a single-family home with a multiplex is notoriously tight. Land costs, construction financing, development fees, and current interest rates mean that only a fraction of this 175,000-unit "paper capacity" will be economically viable to build in any given year.

"You can rezone the whole city overnight, but you can't rewrite the laws of construction finance. The 175,000 units are a ceiling, not a forecast."

What it means

Bill 44 and the R1-1 rezoning represent a generational shift in Vancouver's land use policy. For half a century, the city's zoning map was designed to freeze single-family neighborhoods in amber. Today, that map is designed to let them grow.

The paper capacity is there. The question now is how much of it will actually get built.

Look up your own address

See exactly what you can build under Bill 44.

Parcel counts and unit capacities are derived from the City of Vancouver Open Data Portal (Property Parcels dataset) and analyzed against the R1-1 District Schedule (September 2024 amendment).

The 99,718 total includes all parcels within city limits. The 71,229 residential lots exclude commercial districts, CD-1 (Comprehensive Development) zones, industrial land, parks, and strata sub-parcels. "Net new capacity" assumes a baseline of 2 units for RS-zoned lots prior to Bill 44, though some specific corner lots or large sites may have had higher conditional allowances previously.