Greater Vancouver Development Map: methodology and data sources

What you can do with it

• See each parcel coloured by stage, with approved storeys drawn as height.
• Filter by stage, use, work type (new build, renovation, addition, demolition), city, start year or address, or show only parcels with a record this week or month.
• Click a parcel for the proposal, storeys, units, project value with its source date, and a timeline linking to each record.
• Turn on live buses, scheduled SkyTrain and live aircraft, or replay a day of transit with an estimated population layer.

Data sources

• City of Vancouver Open Data: issued building permits, property addresses and parcel polygons.
• City of Vancouver rezoning application pages, some from Internet Archive snapshots.
• Burnaby daily building permit reports and rezoning records; Richmond building permit reports and council and committee agendas.
• City and District of North Vancouver and West Vancouver: rezoning, development application, hearing and committee records. UBC and UEL are also included.
• ParcelMap BC lot outlines and the BC Address Geocoder (Province of British Columbia).
• Context layers: TransLink timetable (GTFS) and real-time buses, adsb.lol aircraft, Statistics Canada 2021 Census tables 98-10-0015-01 and 98-10-0496-01, Esri World Imagery, AWS Terrain Tiles and an OpenFreeMap basemap.

Some of the data used in this product or service is provided by permission of TransLink. TransLink assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or currency of the Data.

Cambridge uses HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, ONS census and Bus Open Data Service feeds (Open Government Licence v3.0), plus Ordnance Survey and Environment Agency data.

Method

• One parcel per address. Records are grouped by normalized address and city, with unit numbers stripped and street types unified.
• Locating. Vancouver building permits use the open-data coordinates; other addresses use the BC Address Geocoder, rejecting scores below 70.
• Matching to a lot. By parcel ID, then the point inside a lot, then a Vancouver civic address match, then the nearest non-road lot within 40 m. 90 of 19,123 located parcels found no lot and show as small markers labelled approximate.
• Stage. Each parcel takes the stage of its latest record (definitions in the FAQ).
• New tags mark a latest record up to 7 days old (this week) or 30 days old (this month).
• Population layer. An hourly estimate from 2021 Census population and place-of-work counts, not measured foot traffic.

Coverage and limits

• By stage: 16,522 permit issued, 1,654 demolished without a new permit, 730 under review, 95 approved without a permit, 122 completed.
• Completion is rarely recorded, so 122 is not a count of finished buildings.
• Richmond agendas have no closing status, so Richmond parcels never show as approved without a permit.
• Permits include many alterations; only about a quarter of Vancouver building permits are for new buildings.
• North Shore sources have no building permits, and closed applications count as approved, which may overstate approvals.
• Not yet covered: Surrey, Coquitlam, Delta, Langley, New Westminster and Abbotsford.
• Cambridge has no planning applications; its sales layer holds 19,658 sales since 2022-01-01, 19,588 of them placed.

Update schedule

Every Monday a script refreshes the TransLink timetable and the Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond permit data, geocodes new addresses, rebuilds the parcels and publishes. On the first of each month it also rebuilds the population layer. A failed step is skipped, so the "data to" and "built" dates in the filter bar show how fresh a build is.