What Vancouver Can Teach Cambridge About Increasing Housing Density and Affordability

Above housing and population growth chart from Condon and Kroeker comparative city study, with Boston highlighted  with arrow.

As Cambridge addresses the impact of recent radical zoning reforms, specifically the Feb 10 upzoning in the name of housing affordability, a powerful cautionary tale emerges from across the continent: Vancouver.

Vancouver urban planner Patrick Condon and teamed up with former Vancouver Mayor Thomas Kroeker to undertake a study of impacts in their city of recent housing number increases on the cost of residential units in the city.  A draft copy of their research findings was made available this week on X and is titled "The 50-Year Vancouver Experience with Housing Affordability and Increased Density." [request report access HERE]

As the authors note, over the last fifty years, Vancouver has undertaken perhaps the most aggressive campaign of housing densification in North America. Yet today, it ranks as the least affordable city on the continent relative to household income.

The promise behind upzoning is deceptively simple: increase housing supply, and prices will drop. It’s a principle rooted in classical supply-and-demand economics, and many well-meaning planners and advocates—including the authors of the Vancouver study—have embraced it for decades. But Vancouver's half-century of data tells a more sobering story.

Since the 1960s, Vancouver has increased its housing stock by an astounding 200% within its original pre-WWII boundaries, even as population growth rose only 78%. By comparison, Toronto increased its housing stock by 120%, and cities like San Francisco and New York managed just 30%. Yet Vancouver's home prices, when adjusted for local income, are now the highest in North America.

As Condon observes in a July 2025 social media post introducing this study "This data raises significant questions about the effects of increased housing density on home prices and, more importantly, on urban land values.... In light of these findings, it becomes apparent that simply increasing the housing supply does not necessarily lead to more affordable home prices for average wage earners."

So what happened?

According to the study, increasing the number of housing units didn’t lower housing prices—instead, it inflated land values. The more you allow to be built on a lot, the more the land underneath is worth. That appreciation gets capitalized into property values and rents, canceling out affordability gains. In short: densification made housing more plentiful, but not more affordable.

This phenomenon isn’t just economic theory—it’s lived experience. Vancouver’s extensive infill development brought transit access, walkability, and urban vibrancy, but affordability was “not among them,” as co-author Patrick Condon bluntly concludes.

Cambridge must take this lesson seriously. Our city is under pressure from real estate developers and policy advocates who argue that the solution to our housing crisis is more supply, more height, and more density. But as we densify, land values rise, speculation increases, and market-rate housing prices follow suit. Without deliberate mechanisms to control land costs and protect affordability—such as robust rent control, public housing investment, or land trusts—density alone risks making Cambridge even less affordable.

This is not to suggest that all densification is bad. The Vancouver authors acknowledge that adding housing can, in some contexts, reduce prices. But the data shows that density without regulation is not a magic wand—it can backfire. Cambridge, like Vancouver, is a geographically constrained, highly desirable, knowledge-economy city. The parallels are striking, and so are the risks.
Let Vancouver's experience serve as a wake-up call. A more nuanced, equity-driven approach to housing policy is essential if we want to avoid turning Cambridge into a cautionary case study of our own.

And as Condon notes in accompanying social media "For decades, I and others have championed the cause of mixed-use, mixed-income, and diverse housing types as the cornerstone of sustainable and equitable urban design. I believed, as many of us did, that such strategies would lead us to a brighter, more affordable future. Yet, after years of empirical observation and personal involvement in projects..., I find myself frustrated. Frustrated that our ambitions for densification, carried out more boldly in the Vancouver region than perhaps anywhere else in North America, did not yield the affordable housing we had hoped for."  

In  Cambridge, we find ourselves in an equally frustrating position.