Erick Villagomez’ analyses of an FOI response from a CRD Watch investigation provides a stark window onto the Vancouver Broadway Plan, the Housing Bills, and the private interests who have been benefitting from massive Provincial intervention into the local government sphere.
Sept 9, 2025
The City of Vancouver’s Freedom of Information response to an FOI request made by Andrea Miller as part of a CRD Watch investigation was provided after what seemed to be considerable reluctance from the City of Vancouver; yet thanks to Andrea’s hard work and perseverance, the FOI has provided some stark revelations:
The following is excerpted from Erick Villagomez’ article: The Coriolis Effect, Part IV: When Viability Becomes Destiny – Spacing Vancouver | Spacing Vancouver
“A recent FOI document—part of a CRD Watch investigation—pulls back the curtain and reveals the oracle’s authors. Behind the scenes, a tightly connected network of consultants has been writing the formulas that dictate Vancouver’s future. Coriolis Consulting appears again and again, shaping everything from the Broadway Plan to province-wide housing reforms. Some of these actors simultaneously advise the City while advocating publicly, blurring the line between independent expertise and vested interest.
Public hearings and op-eds begin to resemble choreographed performances—where key actors are already contracted to implement the very policies they’re defending.
The FOI also exposes the pressure cooker in which these decisions were made. Provincial housing bills—44, 46, 47—imposed a non-negotiable compliance deadline of June 30, 2024. One internal email captures the mood perfectly: “We’re still trying to keep our heads above water,” wrote a senior staffer as the date loomed.
With staff overwhelmed and time running out, cities leaned heavily on external consultants to meet provincial mandates. The Province sweetened compliance with $51 million in “capacity funding”—a mix of carrot and stick. Municipalities were paid to align quickly, not to deliberate deeply. In this context, outsourcing wasn’t a strategic choice—it was survival.
But oracles are never neutral. This one speaks in absolutes but harbours blind spots. It assumes landowners will sell once the numbers break even, though many expect premiums—often 20 to 30 percent above what the sheet labels “viable.” It treats apartment blocks full of tenants as mere variables, not as homes with memories, social ties, and fragile livelihoods.
Worse, it freezes time itself.
Interest rates, absorption, presale values—these are locked in as constants, even though zoning will outlive this market cycle and the next. It is like designing a city for the climate of a single afternoon, then living with the consequences for a generation.
This is a dangerous dynamic: pro formas are snapshots of a moment in time, while urban plans are meant to guide cities for decades. When long-term visions are based on short-term financial assumptions, instability ensues.
The staff memo that accompanies Appendix L embraces this logic almost without question. Redevelopment is no longer viewed as a civic choice but as a financial threshold. If the numbers work, towers rise; if not, concessions follow. Affordable housing is reduced to a footnote, offered only when it doesn’t erode investor returns.
Affordable housing becomes a footnote—offered only when it doesn’t erode investor returns. Amenities become bargaining chips, traded away when margins tighten. Displacement disappears from the ledger, as though a family forced out of a walk-up never existed.
Reading these documents, one can’t help but picture density being rationed like oil. Two to five towers per block face. Height caps and floor space ratios held like barrels to be released at carefully measured intervals. It has the feel of OPEC more than urbanism: a cartel of scarcity, where development rights—or “Vitamin D”—are monetized long before they are delivered.
The irony is sharp: in trying to manage the pace of growth, the City ends up inflating the very land values it claims to regulate. Scarcity breeds speculation, and speculation drives the cycle ever faster.
Moreover, land values are shaped by zoning and policy choices, meaning pro formas are not fixed truths but contingent narratives built on those assumptions.
This is not city-building. It is deal-making, dressed in the language of planning. The question animating the Broadway Plan is no longer “What kind of city do we want?” but “What kind of city will pencil?”
Public purpose bends to private feasibility—not the other way around.
To be clear, ignoring economics would be naïve. Feasibility matters. But treating it as destiny is equally reckless. A pro forma should inform deliberation, not dictate it. Alongside financial yield, we must measure other values: tenants retained, affordable stock preserved, carbon emissions avoided, equity advanced, to name a few.
A city’s health cannot be reduced to a return-on-investment hurdle.
Broadway is a warning shot. When viability becomes the sole measure of possibility, democratic choices are quietly foreclosed. Futures that don’t “pencil” are abandoned before they are even imagined. The spreadsheet’s neat rows conceal the messy realities of eviction notices, moving vans, and lives uprooted. They flatten human stories into residual land values.
The FOI makes clear that the Broadway Plan was never an one-off—it was the prototype. The same consultants and the same models are shaping rezonings across BC. Bills 44, 46, and 47 have scaled up the Broadway Plan logic, embedding planning-by-spreadsheet into provincial law. If Broadway Plan feels like a parable today, it is because the story is being retold in every municipality, each with its own cast of consultants, deadlines, and compliance incentives.”
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See also: The Trifecta of Control: Stealth. Speed. Complexity. – Spacing Vancouver | Spacing Vancouver
The “Hong Kong Model, transit density – Setting expectations and having clear guidance. MDE [Minister David Eby] First step target approach”. UDI Executive Committee Meeting in April 13, 2022 with David Eby when he was the Attorney General and Minister Responsible for Housing. – CRD Watch Homepage
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