Just beyond central Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is building one of the most ambitious and unusual housing developments in the world, and getting rich in the process. How they did it has lessons for the whole world.
In a corner of the prestigious Kits Point suburb in Vancouver, eleven great towers are beginning to rise from their foundations. This is Senakw (pronounced sen-AHK), a new development owned, managed and championed by the Squamish Nation, an indigenous group native to British Columbia. It will ultimately house 9,000 people, and represents seven percent of Vancouver’s entire projected housing output up to 2033.
Senakw has an unusual history. The land it is built on was home to the Squamish people until they were forced out in 1913. Almost a century later, a court case restored the land to the descendants of those who were expelled, along with almost 100 million Canadian dollars in compensation. Freed from the restrictive planning rules that hold back densification in the rest of Vancouver, the Squamish decided in 2019 to use the land to build apartment blocks that, as well as housing Squamish people, are expected to generate around C$10 billion in income, equivalent to more than two million per person.
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This is a story of a dispossessed group that is making the most of a rare and remarkable set of circumstances to generate wealth through upzoning. But it is also a story with relevance all over the world. Senakw shows that when local residents stand to benefit from development, obstacles to housebuilding can be overcome, to the benefit of a much broader group of people.
The village that was lost
The Squamish are one of the Coast Salish peoples, the precolonial inhabitants of British Columbia. Today there are about 4,000 Squamish, and historically, the population inhabited a considerable territory, including the land on which the city of Vancouver was built.
Wilson Williams, council chairperson of the Squamish Nation, explains that in the precolonial period, the False Creek inlet served as a seasonal gathering place: ‘Senakw was a place of abundance ... It was the mainstay for spring and summer for our people. It was a welcome place for our families during those warm seasons because of the abundance of food’. Salmon, oysters, and berries, key ingredients in Coast Salish cuisine, thrived there. By the 1860s, records suggest it had evolved into a permanent village, featuring traditional Squamish longhouses.
Between 1869 and 1877, eighty acres were allocated by the Canadian government as False Creek Indian Reserve No. 6, more commonly known as the Kitsilano Indian Reserve. Like all reserves, the land was owned by the federal government and held in trust for its indigenous residents, a legal arrangement that would prove crucial more than a century later.
European settlers quickly drove out the existing villagers. The city of Vancouver was incorporated in 1886 and expanded rapidly. Conflict between settlers and natives over space began to worsen. A 1911 amendment to the Indian Act enabled the forced removal of indigenous people from urban areas. Vancouver did not wait: in 1913, the residents of the Kitsilano Indian Reserve village were summoned to meet British Columbia officials under attorney general William John Bowser. They were told they either had to accept a small cash offer for the land or receive nothing. They had no federal representatives to support them, which was unlawful even at the time, and many did not even speak English. Believing they had no choice but to accept, the residents disinterred the remains of their ancestors. Most sailed north to relatives in Howe Sound, and the village was burned.
Contemporary newspaper articles imply that the motive for removal was not primarily financial. At the time, the land was not nearly as valuable as it is now: it sits on the opposite side of the False Creek inlet from the city, and the Burrard Street Bridge that links it today would not be constructed for another twenty years. Instead, newspapers focused on concerns about noise from traditional ceremonies, and alleged immorality and public disorder.
City officials originally intended to designate the land for either courthouses or a public park, but had no fixed plans. The land seizure itself was the primary goal.
After the Squamish residents were evicted, the site was neglected for decades. It ended up being occupied by squatters, who made a living fishing and pulling in logs that floated down the creek. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, newspapers complained of worsening disorder and mess, as well as the city’s repeated failed attempts to evict the squatters. Ironically, the removal of the original residents in the interest of public order had failed even on its own terms.
Throughout the twentieth century, the land was parceled up and passed between various public bodies, including the harbor authority, as well as private companies like sawmills and breweries. From the 1940s, it was used by the Royal Canadian Airforce as a storage depot. In 1967, it was eventually turned into Vanier Park and became a museum complex.
The long fight back
The 1911 Indian Act amendment made it easier to expropriate land from indigenous people. Unfamiliar with legal processes and sometimes lacking a working command of the English language, they found the deck stacked against them. But even in 1913, the province’s actions in the Kitsilano Indian Reserve village were not lawful: the land was federally owned, and the province could not acquire it without federal consent. The Crown immediately began efforts to reclaim the land.
The Squamish people also began organizing. Between 1913 and 1923, sixteen local families amalgamated into the Squamish Nation band. But for the first few decades, they were legally prohibited from pursuing their claim to the land.
Wilson Williams’s great-grandfather, Andy Paull, was a young man when the village burned. Selected at a community meeting to learn English and represent the nation’s interests, Paull studied in a Catholic residential school in North Vancouver and was educated as a lawyer. Williams recalls his grandfather telling him that the seizure of the village was the catalyst for the nation’s focus on strengthening their legal capabilities. But indigenous people were legally prohibited from joining the bar unless they gave up their indigenous status, which Paull was unwilling to do. ‘He became an off-the-record lawyer’, Williams explains, helping not just the Squamish Nation but other indigenous people across Canada.
The Indian Act heavily restricted the ability of indigenous people to seek legal redress over land. Throughout his career, Paull focused instead on advocacy, using his legal skills indirectly to push for the right to launch land claims, a right that was eventually won in 1973.
The eventual breakthrough for the Squamish came from an unexpected direction: academic research. In 1971, anthropologists Dorothy Kennedy and Randy Bouchard began what at first seemed an uncontroversial project: recording historical place names to preserve indigenous peoples’ languages and history. Working with Squamish chief Louie Miranda, they had no idea they were assembling evidence for a legal case that wouldn’t be heard for decades.
Chief Miranda, who had himself been a resident of the Kitsilano reserve, was the Squamish Keeper of the Names, responsible for memorizing ancestral names and history going back generations. Without him, there would have been little to work with.
Following Catholic missionary efforts from the 1840s, almost all Squamish people had converted to Catholicism by 1913. Accordingly, their births, deaths and marriages were usually recorded by the Church. However, Kennedy recalls that ‘the church was reluctant to hand over information’. They did eventually gain access, and not only did they accurately reflect Chief Miranda’s memory, the records also enabled them to ‘bring back hundreds and hundreds of names’, something of great cultural significance in Squamish tradition.
By cross-referencing Miranda's extraordinary memory against Catholic church records, government surveys, and early anthropological notes, Kennedy and Bouchard could reconstruct not just genealogies but precise information on who lived where. ‘We transcribed all the Catholic records for the Squamish back to 1860’, Kennedy explains. Thanks to the connection between anglicized names in the church record and traditional Squamish names, ‘We could reconstruct where the houses were, who lived there, and their descendants... All of the success was thanks to Chief Miranda’.This painstaking work would prove invaluable in the court battles that began in late 1977, led by Chief Joe Mathias. It took several decades of legal dispute, but the case that turned the tide was decided in 2001: Mathias vs Canada. The case centered on the fiduciary duty of the federal government towards Indian Bands. Several other indigenous groups also made competing claims over the same land.
One focus was proving that the 1869 residents, when the land was originally set aside as a reserve, were Squamish. The court accepted the anthropological evidence as overwhelming proof, largely because of Kennedy, Bouchard, and Miranda’s meticulous work decades earlier.
Most of the other claims were dismissed by the court, partly due to the statute of limitations expiring. But in order to close the decades of continued legal battles, the federal government came to an out-of-court settlement with the Squamish Nation: it paid C$92.5 million (USD $66.9m) in compensation, which, under the terms of the settlement, would be held in a trust fund for band members. The settlement also included something that received much less media attention at the time, but which has since proven far more significant: 11.7 acres of the original 80 acres of land.
In a ceremony in 2002, the Squamish Nation sailed 28 canoes to the beach in Kitsilano, a symbolic homecoming for the Squamish people. The site did not seem especially valuable: a thin patch of land, approximately half of which lies directly beneath the Burrard Street Bridge in an unusual tri-point shape. With the neighborhood zoned largely for single-family housing, observers did not initially notice its development potential.
The grand bargain
Vancouver is one of the most expensive housing markets in Canada. An average detached house there now costs over C$2 million (USD $1.5 million). Data scientist Jens von Bergmann and UBC associate professor Nathan Lauster estimate that the metro area has 130,000 to 200,000 suppressed households: people doubling up with family or roommates who would live independently if they could afford to. That backlog alone represents six to ten years of recent construction. In 1981, two thirds of 25- to 29-year-olds in Vancouver lived in their own households; by 2021, only a third did. Rental vacancy rates often hover below one percent; vacancy rates in more affordable housing markets, such as Austin, Texas, hover around ten.
This pressure comes in part from Vancouver’s success. Vancouver is Canada’s third-largest metropolitan economy. With its stunning backdrop of mountains and ocean and its mild winters, it repeatedly ranks among the world’s most liveable cities. Accordingly, the metro area adds over 40,000 new residents each year, each needing somewhere to live.
Despite this massive demand for housing, and its dense urban core, most of the city looks as it did decades ago. Vancouver pioneered single-family zoning in Canada: the municipality of Point Grey became the first in the country to adopt such rules in 1922. When Point Grey amalgamated with Vancouver in 1929, the principle spread citywide, although initially in a relatively permissive fashion. In the 1960s, the city briefly experimented with allowing apartment towers in residential areas, but a political backlash voted in a council in 1972 that was more resistant to development. From that point onwards, Vancouver systematically downzoned, restricting building heights and locking most of its land into low-density use. Today, 52 percent of Vancouver’s residential land supports just 15 percent of its homes.
Vancouver never managed to comprehensively reverse the downzoning of the early 1970s, despite the huge pressure on housing affordability since. But it did find a way to permit intensive development in narrow strips, typically along transport corridors, while leaving the suburban expanses largely untouched. The city is dependent on such developments: property taxes are low, so almost half of its C$3.5 billion capital budget comes from developer payments. Through a mixture of fixed development fees and Community Amenity Contributions, which are negotiated during spot rezoning on a case-by-case basis, planners extract funding for parks, childcare centers, and affordable housing units in exchange for permission to build. They aim to capture 75–80 percent of the land value uplift. Because each negotiation process can be lengthy, the city prefers to allocate a small number of highly valuable permits, creating an incentive structure that favors concentrated towers, rather than gentle density across the city.
The downside is that the negotiation process is slow, expensive, and unpredictable. Von Bergmann notes that planners ‘typically get it wrong – they either charge too much or too little’. Getting it right requires predicting market conditions years in advance. Charge too much and the project is rendered unviable and dies, potentially taking the developer and many jobs down with it. Charge too little and the city misses out on valuable capital spending opportunities. Frances Bula, a journalist who has covered Vancouver planning for decades, describes the practical reality: ‘Big developers just cough up when planners demand.’ Smaller builders, including homeowners wishing to add small extensions to their own houses, lack the resources to play the game.
This system is what is known as Vancouver’s grand bargain, and what leads to the largely untouched suburbs occasionally punctuated with tall, thin towers. The grand bargain generates some income for public spending, while minimizing property taxes and development across most of the city. But the price is paid through worsened housing affordability and the economic costs of suppressed construction.
The mandate to build
After the land at Kits Point was returned to the Squamish Nation, they initially made plans to develop it at low density: two residential towers and some mid-rise offices, barely distinguishable in scale from the commercial buildings that already exist nearby. However, these plans stalled after the 2008 financial crisis, and it took some time for the Nation to return to its development ambitions.
In 2018, the Nation established a development arm, Nch'ḵay Development Corporation, bringing in much-needed expertise in construction. Moving quickly, in April 2019, they formally requested the Minister to order a referendum on the designation of the site, which Squamish people were eligible to vote in. In two votes, they approved the land designation for a mixed-use development, passing with 87 percent approval, and business terms with the development partner Westbank, one of Canada’s largest developers, passing with 81 percent approval. The Nation agreed to a 50-50 partnership with Westbank, though Westbank later sold its shares to OPTrust, which manages one of Canada’s largest pension funds. Despite a low turnout of 27 percent, the votes were considered to give a decisive mandate to the development plans.
But why did designating the land for development require a referendum? The site at Kits Point was returned to the Squamish Nation as reserve land. The Indian Act requires that reserve land be ‘designated’ by the federal government before it can be leased, a process that is considered ‘tedious, expensive and time consuming… with no guarantee of the outcome’, and which makes development difficult. Senakw's swift progression is a testament to both political will and the Squamish Nation’s effective navigation of the system.
While reserve land can be leased with federal permission, it cannot be alienated from the band, meaning freehold ownership cannot be transferred in any way. This means it cannot be parceled up and sold off. It also means that the land cannot be borrowed against, because securing a loan on land is only possible if the land’s ownership can be alienated in the case of default. Traditional development finance uses loans as residential mortgages. Apartments cannot be sold as condominiums (where each unit is privately owned, like a house, and each owner also has a share of the overall building), but must instead use leasehold, where residents purchase a right to live in a property for a set period of time rather than owning their home outright.
These restrictions might have made the project impossible without support from the federal government, which agreed to a C$1.4 billion loan through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the largest in the corporation’s history. To work within leasehold constraints, the residential units were earmarked for 100 percent rental.
Yet reserve land also offered a crucial advantage: because it is reserve land, it is exempt from zoning rules which apply to the rest of Vancouver. The Squamish Nation made the decision to ‘maximize economic benefits for the Squamish community’, which, in Vancouver’s housing-starved market, meant maximizing density: 6,000 rental homes plus commercial space. It also meant opting not to impose many of the costly mandates that cities typically require. They maintained the same safety and building standards that other Vancouver developments adhere to, but stripped away height limits, inclusionary zoning, zero-emissions requirements, parking minimums, design panels, and the years of public consultation that other projects must stick to.
Although Senakw is not subject to the normal city zoning rules, it nonetheless required standard public amenities like sewerage connection and transport access, including installing roads through public land. The City of Vancouver could have blocked or severely delayed the project simply by refusing these services, and might have been tempted to, given that the development sidesteps the city’s own planning rules.
Yet the city proved amenable. Kennedy Stewart, Vancouver’s mayor from 2018 to 2022, strongly supported the development and oversaw the signing of a services agreement in 2022. The Squamish Nation agreed to fund the sewerage upgrades, as well as the installation of cycle paths and seawall repairs to reduce flood risk to the neighborhood, paying roughly what they would have for site infrastructure under the standard planning process. They were not, however, required to pay the far larger sums that Vancouver normally extracts from developers to fund other municipal priorities.
Mayor Stewart emphasized to me that Canada’s intensifying political discourse around ‘reconciliation’ was critical. Many dismissed this discourse as performative symbolism, but at Senakw it had practical consequences: ‘Promises about reconciliation forced governments’ hands when it came to enabling indigenous-led developments’. The Squamish Nation’s referendums gave the project a democratic legitimacy that Vancouver's usual stakeholder consultations rarely achieve. A city government that had spent years resisting modest density increases facilitated a far more ambitious project when backed by a clear community mandate and a compelling moral case.
The financial rewards to the Squamish Nation are substantial. A minority of the homes are earmarked as below market rate housing that will be let out to members of the Squamish Nation. The rest will be let out at market rates. With their 50 percent stake expected to generate up to C$10 billion in rental income over the entire lifespan of the buildings, and around 4,000 members, the project could be worth around C$2.5 million per person. How it will be distributed or spent is as yet undecided.
Beyond Senakw
On just one site, Senakw will provide a year’s worth of housing normally built in the city of Vancouver. It functions as a sort of policy laboratory, showing that cities like Vancouver can build many more homes if the decision-makers allow it.
Senakw also offers two lessons for those of us in other cities who want to get more homes built. The first is about incentives. When the Squamish Nation’s members voted on development, they were voting on their own land, and for the economic development of their own community. They chose to maximize density and limit the costly requirements that cities like Vancouver typically impose on new developments because they would bear the costs of these requirements directly. Yet in terms of quality and safety, Senakw is just as good or better than other new developments built just across the river. But residents voting on their own projects make very different assessments of the value of some of these mandates and vote accordingly. Similar dynamics have appeared in other resident-led ballots such as estate regeneration programs in England, and Israel’s Pinui Binui program.
The second lesson concerns democratic legitimacy. It is partly a myth that Senakw slipped through a loophole in normal land-use restrictions. The City of Vancouver could have obstructed Senakw by refusing infrastructure connections and services. The federal government could have obstructed it by refusing the land designation or not offering the financing agreement. That both chose not to do so reflects the power of a clear democratic mandate. Governments that spend years resisting modest density increases may nonetheless facilitate ambitious projects when backed by direct community approval and a compelling moral case.
It’s an open question how replicable Senakw’s model is in the rest of Canada. Most reserve land in Canada is not urban; the Indian Act ensured that most such sites were seized long ago. However, ongoing legal battles make the future unpredictable. Indigenous groups may apply to the federal government to convert land they own to reserve status, and at the moment the federal government is amenable to doing so.
Nations may also build on land they own outside of reserves using standard zoning processes. Not far away from Senakw sit the Jericho Lands, a 90-acre site being developed in a joint partnership of the federal government and the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. This site is owned on a freehold basis. The overall development plan has been approved through the standard city planning process, although it will require further approvals of rezonings on individual parcels. It is expected to take 25–30 years to deliver around 13,000 new homes, an annual rate much slower than Senakw.
Whatever lessons cities do or do not draw from Senakw, for the Squamish Nation, the significance extends beyond housing policy. For Wilson Williams, it represents something important: ‘We're no longer out of sight and out of mind in our own village.’ More than a century after his ancestors were forced to sail away from the burning ruins of their homes, a new generation of Squamish people will return to live where their ancestors once fished for salmon in the abundance of False Creek.