Canada’s First Nations Are Using Their Land To Build Dense Housing

It can be easy to be pessimistic about the potential for zoning reform to solve America’s housing crisis. Time and again, headlines herald a major zoning reform that ultimately proves unproductive.

Those in need of a deregulatory white pill need only look to the First Nation housing developments rising around the city of Vancouver, Canada.

Development in Vancouver itself is hemmed in by the standard thicket of zoning restrictions and urban growth controls. That’s not the case on a 10-acre former rail yard owned by the Squamish Nation. In 2002, a Canadian court ruled that the government had to return some of the land seized from the nation a century ago. A consequence of the transfer was that the Squamish land was freed from the labyrinthine land use controls constraining housing growth in the rest of the metro area.

In 2019, Squamish Nation voters exercised their newfound freedom to build by approving via referendum a 6,000-unit residential high-rise development known as Senakw. It’s one of several First Nation housing developments being constructed in ultra-high-priced metro Vancouver.

The project was not without controversy. Many of the homeowners in the low-slung areas of municipal Vancouver near the Senakw project did not care for Hong Kong levels of density in their backyard. Local elected officials decried the development as little more than a revenge plot by the Indigenous peoples.

But the Squamish Nation’s control over its own land meant these complaints had no legal force. The best the homeowners could do was petition the then-queen to intervene on their behalf. She declined.

The first tenants began moving into Senakw this May. Throughout the greater Vancouver region and other parts of Canada, more First Nations are using their freedom from land use regulations to build new housing developments.

In addition to the exclusively Squamish Senakw, MST Development Corporation, jointly owned by the Musqueam Indian Band, Squamish Nation, and Tsleil-Waututh Nation, is in the process of developing six separate projects across 160 acres of land.

Vancouver’s First Nation housing developments have something for everyone. Leftists can sing the praises of the people choosing to turn their communally owned land into social housing, complete with dedicated low-income units. Greens can enjoy the fact that the Senakw project is being built with a minimal number of parking spaces. Libertarians can correctly point out that this experiment in carbon-neutral, socialized housing was made possible by radical deregulation and the capital provided by private, profit-seeking developers.

The Senakw project is, like all corporations, an island of central planning in a sea of free markets. While it’s being built by a miniature nation-state, investors are only providing the capital needed for it because they expect to profit from the market rents the new units will fetch.

The only people who still manage to be upset are the NIMBYs.