Where Vancouver's multiplexes are going

Since October 2023, most Vancouver lots that used to allow one house, a suite and a laneway home can hold a multiplex instead. Today that means up to six homes, or eight if they're all rentals. The City issued the first multiplex permit on , and has issued since. A front and a back building each need their own permit, so those add up to projects.

Bigger neighbourhoods get more of everything, so we compared each one with the number of lots where a multiplex is allowed. Across the city it's per 1,000 lots.

Both sit along the Canada Line.

We also checked whether multiplexes are going up near frequent transit. They are, but so is nearly everything else. The bus grid already reaches almost every block where this kind of housing is allowed.

Highrises follow a different logic. A line under construction, the Millennium Line's Broadway Extension to Arbutus, is on the map as a dashed line.

Explore the map ↓ Read the permit story →

HOW WE MADE THIS

Where the numbers come from

Permits are from the City's issued building permits data. A multiplex is a new-building permit whose description says so. Houses and duplexes use the City's own categories. Mid-rises are new buildings of five to 11 storeys with homes in them, and highrises are 12 storeys or more, going by the storey count in the permit. Where a permit covers several buildings, the tallest one sets the height, and the dot gets bigger the taller it is. Some of these permits are for site work and underground parking, which is sometimes the only permit a building has so far.

Projects. We matched each permit to the nearest lot on the City's parcel map. Permits on the same lot within three months of each other count as one project.

Eligible lots are lots on the 2026 property tax roll in zones where the City's multiplex rules apply: R1-1, which covers most of the city's low-density streets, plus First Shaughnessy, RT-7 and RT-9 and the newer R3 zones. R3 also allows small apartment buildings, so builders there have bigger options. Almost all of Mount Pleasant's eligible lots are R3. Not every lot is wide enough for six homes. Neighbourhoods with fewer than 500 eligible lots aren't ranked.

Frequent transit means a bus stop within 400 metres with a route running every 15 minutes or better between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on a weekday, or a SkyTrain station within 800 metres. Distances are in a straight line, and the schedule is the one TransLink published on . It's the same test we used for voting places.

The Broadway Extension isn't open, so it isn't counted as frequent transit above; the dashed line and its station markers are for context only. Station locations come from Wikipedia's station articles, cross-checked against the City's rapid-transit-stations data; the route between them is a straight-line approximation, not the true tunnel alignment. The 2027 opening is provisional, from TransLink's project reporting.

Download the neighbourhood figures (CSV)

Tap a dot for the permit, or a neighbourhood for its numbers.

Where the numbers come from