The skyscrapers that NIMBYs and zoning couldn't stop

This is Planet Money, from NPR.

A few weeks ago, reporter Alex Miosci and I headed to Canada to meet a leader of a small

nation.

This is Gilbert Jacob, everyone calls him Chief Gibby.

He used to be one of the leaders of the Squamish Nation, a nation of around 5,000 indigenous

people living in the Pacific Northwest.

We met him in this charming little neighborhood full of single family homes.

There was a big open park nearby.

Now the land that we were standing on used to be a squamish village, it was called Sinak.

Chief Gibby's ancestors once lived here back in the 1800s.

This was one of the most bountiful areas in all of the coast.

We had elk, we had moose, we had killer whales, we had seals, sea lions, we had catch lots

of different fish out here.

And then what happened?

And the white people came.

Government officials from British Columbia in 1913 came and took the land.

They forced the Squamish to leave and destroyed the village.

They didn't even give them time to go and take their belongings.

They put our people on a barge.

And when they were going out there, they turned around and they'd set this whole place ablaze.

They burned everything.

All our people belonged to them.

They didn't want us to come back.

Because the land that Sinak was sitting on, it was right next to a fast-growing seaport,

a seaport that would eventually become a major city, Vancouver.

Over the decades, the land where Chief Gibby's great grandparents used to hunt and fish

was turned into streets, houses and apartments, government buildings, a park, a wharf, a marina.

But the Squamish kept fighting for Sinak.

In 1977, the Squamish nation sued the Canadian government.

The legal battle took decades.

And in 2003, they were able to get some of this land back, about ten and a half acres.

I was ecstatic, you know.

This place, we never doubted it belonged to our people.

The location of those ten and a half acres was incredible.

We were standing right next to it.

It's so close to downtown Vancouver.

This was the biggest economic opportunity in the history of the Squamish nation.

When we got it back, I brought my whole team together, I said, we got a plan.

The land they got back was a prime piece of real estate in one of the most expensive cities

in the world.

And now, they had to decide, what were they going to do with it?

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

I'm Alex Miaozi.

And I'm Jeff Guow.

In most cities in North America, regulations put limits on how high or how quickly you can

build.

But Sinak is the sovereign territory of the Squamish nation.

They are not bound by these regulations.

They can build in a way that almost no one else can.

Today, on the show, we follow the Squamish nation as they live a kind of economic experiment.

What would you build on a piece of land when all the normal rules go out for winter?

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Chief Gibby and the Squamish nation had this once in a generation opportunity.

In 2003, they'd gotten back those 10 and a half acres of undeveloped land about the size

of a large football stadium in the middle of Vancouver.

And right away, Chief Gibby knew what he wanted.

I sat down with the whole consulting team.

I said, this is our first opportunity.

My people's first opportunity to get into development.

This has to be a signature project.

And Chief Gibby wanted their signature project to make money.

After decades of being displaced, generations of Squamish had struggled.

Growing up in the 1950s, when Chief Gibby was a young kid, he didn't have plumbing, didn't

have running water.

And since then, it had been hard for many Squamish people to catch up economically.

So Chief Gibby's dream was to turn these 10 and a half acres into a dependable money-making

machine.

But I want to do an ATM to what I call these.

Like the garden, every end of the month, the money comes out, pay the bills, you know.

In the US, some native tribes might choose to build casinos.

But in this case, Chief Gibby and his team were looking at a piece of land in the middle

of a major city.

They realized the best use of land was rental apartments.

A lot of young people like you guys, you know, they can't afford to buy anything around

here too expensive.

So my view is always let's house them.

So as Chief Gibby remembers it, this is the plan the team came up with.

They would build a few mid-rise apartment buildings.

They'd be like a dozen stories tall, with a total of maybe 1,500 units.

So a fairly typical modest-sized development.

And then Chief Gibby and his team had to sell the idea to the entire Squamish nation.

They shared the proposal in bulletins and newsletters, and people debated the merits and

drawbacks at family and community meetings.

Wilson Williams remembers those conversations.

He was in his early 20s at the time.

Wilson Williams is my English name, Swerktin's my ancestral name, my carry on behalf of my

father's side of my Squamish nation ancestry.

Wilson's great-grandfather lived in Snoch in the early 1900s.

He was one of the people driven off the land.

And at the time when they were discussing Chief Gibby's plan, Wilson found himself

thinking a lot about this one phrase, this saying that he'd often heard a Squamish

elder repeat about their responsibility to future generations.

We got to start planning seven generations ahead.

Plan for seven generations.

What did that mean to you when you heard it?

I had to go ask my mom, honestly.

So this is the idea that you should be stewards of the land so that it can keep providing

for your children and your children's children and, you know, your children's children's children.

It's a kind of popular idea in a lot of indigenous cultures.

Wilson says he learned about it as a Squamish teaching to ensure the health and wealth

of the next generations.

We got to be prepared for the unborn children that are coming and make sure they're survival

in that they don't have to deal with what we've had to.

This idea about providing for the future made Wilson think twice about Chief Gibby's proposal.

I was like, okay, this is it.

How is it going to give us generations of wealth?

And that wasn't justified enough to me, even as a young person.

To Wilson, Chief Gibby's plan had two problems.

First, these buildings just felt like your standard generic apartment complex.

They didn't really feel Squamish.

Sinoch was the place of beauty.

And that beauty wasn't presented in this proposal.

And the second problem was that the whole plan also seemed kind of small.

Like a few mid-rise buildings weren't going to bring in the kind of profit that would

change the future of the Squamish nation.

And as a self-governing nation, they were in this unique position to build kind of

anything they wanted on this land, which is extremely unusual.

Yeah, in Vancouver, like in most cities in North America, there are zoning laws that limit

what you're allowed to build on any given piece of land.

At the time, more than half the land in Vancouver was restricted to single family homes.

There were also laws regulating lot sizes and requiring a minimum number of parking spaces,

all of which make it hard to build dense neighborhoods.

But the Squamish nation don't have to follow those laws.

Vancouver's zoning laws do not apply on Squamish land.

So, according to the government, when you're on reserve, you're not obliged to follow all

the same regulations.

So we can do different things, build higher, build differently, not abiding by the same

bylaws and stuff.

Wilson Felt that putting mid-rise apartments on this land would be squandering a huge opportunity.

And he was not alone.

In the end, those initial plans never moved forward.

So for many years, the land sits there, vacant, eventually Chief Gibby retires.

And in 2013, Wilson Williams gets elected to the Squamish Council.

When I got on council 12 years ago, my late father in law, Byron Joseph, he said, oh,

we need to get you some silver.

And I was like, oh, okay, I'd like to just think of that.

Oh, you're all right.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

He meant that's what I thought he meant.

But it wasn't.

He's like, no, part of our teachings, when you wear silver, it deflects bad energy away

from you.

So Wilson got some silver jewelry and stepped into his role as one of the leaders of

the Squamish nation.

He was part of a new generation, trying to come up with a plan for this 10 and a half acres.

But then Vancouver had become one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Rents had gone bonkers.

And that's because Vancouver is surrounded by water.

So to build more housing, the city had to build up.

But they couldn't build up because of all the zoning laws.

And this is not just a Vancouver problem.

Economists almost universally agree that restrictive zoning laws are one of the main reason

rents are so high in cities like New York, Los Angeles, in San Francisco.

In Vancouver, those laws were contributing to a housing crisis.

Was the housing crisis and really high rents in Vancouver an opportunity in a way for

the Squamish nation?

Yeah, it was.

A true opportunity.

Wilson and the council worked with a developer on a new plan.

Instead of a few mid-rise apartment buildings, they would build skyscrapers.

11 of them.

The tallest would be about 60 stories.

This would be a mega project that would add around 6,000 new apartments to the city.

Most of them would be available to anyone in the public.

They'd be luxury units with market rate rents.

But there would also be some subsidized apartments for members of the Squamish nation.

This new plan would make Sonak one of the densest uses of land in Vancouver.

It would also include shops, restaurants, and parks, and there'd be artwork and designed

by Squamish artists.

So the Squamish nation put it to a vote.

In 2019, they set up two polling stations.

One in the city of Vancouver and one just outside, like an hour away.

And when the ballots were counted.

The Squamish nation is very happy to announce that the Squamish people have given us a resounding

mandate to move forward on the Sonak development.

So really, the evolution from that first proposal to now that was music to the ears of our

people.

The announcement was big news in Vancouver.

The Squamish were about to permanently make over the city's skyline.

And that is when the nasty letters started coming in.

The rest of that story is after the break.

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The Squamish Nation had decided six years ago to build huge towers on their 10.5 acres

of land near downtown Vancouver.

Oh!

It's the closest I've ever been to a forklift.

This month we went to visit the construction site.

Do we need hard hats for this?

Jacob Lewis III has helped to oversee the Synok development for years.

Three of the 11 towers are almost done.

So this is tower 3.

I'd been reading about Synok for years, but seeing these towers in person, they're sleek

and modern.

Huge floor-to-sealing windows made of tinted glass, story after story.

Can it just feed away and cranny my neck to see the top?

The towers felt massive.

The word tower feels appropriate when we're at the base of it, where they are.

They are towering over us.

It's an impressive thing to be standing here.

It's got that mountain topology designed into it, so you feel like you're at the base

of a mountain, right?

Yeah.

The towers do evoke mountains with a wide base and they're a bit narrower at the top.

They also have these orange accents.

They've got orange balconies and giant orange panels of metalwork that kind of look like

wishbones.

Jacob says this shape is called a trigon.

You see it in all kinds of squamish artwork.

This represents us.

We've experienced so many years of erasure.

It's very important for people to understand who's land and territory they're visiting.

To really understand this project they're building, Jacob took us up to the very top floor of

the tallest tower so far.

Hi.

Hi.

What floor are we going to?

38.

38?

Yeah.

We're going to an active construction site.

We walk past bare concrete pillars, exposed pipes, wires, dangling from the ceiling.

We walk up one more flight of stairs and this is the roof and it is spectacular.

Oh, there's the bay.

Straight ahead are the blue waters of English Bay.

To a right just across a narrow inlet is downtown Vancouver with all those skyscrapers.

But here around the towers themselves, it's all parks and a leafy neighborhood with

cute houses.

What's that?

This is this little section here.

That's the the the Nimby area.

From 38 stories up, it was easy to see.

The collision of the free market and the city zoning laws.

Jacob was pointing out a charming little neighborhood right next to the towers.

It's called Kits Point.

And when the squamish first announced their plans to cram 11 huge towers onto this land,

some of those neighbors were not happy.

They were like, not in my backyard, you know, Nimby.

There's some some definite resistance and, you know, was made loud and clear.

And I think they had put signs in their yards and then there's online social media activity.

Like, it's not what their view of their neighborhood should look like.

Some people in Kits Point had real rational concerns.

They worried that the towers would bring lots of traffic that the parks would be overrun.

And some said that the high rises would disrupt the migratory birds.

This is why even when cities know that zoning is making it harder to build housing, they

still have all of these very restrictive zoning laws.

Because zoning laws give people a say in what happens in their own neighborhoods, which

sounds really great in theory.

But in practice, most people generally don't want big new disruptive construction projects

in their own neighborhood.

And so they complain about it to planning boards and city politicians.

They complain very loudly.

And meanwhile, the people who'd potentially benefit from high rises like Sonak, they probably

don't live in that neighborhood yet.

They might not even live in Vancouver yet.

So they're not around to vote for pro housing politicians or advocate for the project.

This all leads to a classic problem in politics, one that a lot of economists have studied,

where a project that might benefit lots of people gets stalled because it would hurt

a small minority of extremely vocal, extremely motivated people.

There's an asymmetry here.

Economists call it the problem of concentrated costs versus diffuse benefits.

Jacob says, in the early stages of the Sonak project, they heard a lot from this very vocal

minority.

But some of the complaints, he says, seem to have this other undercurrent.

It seems like people were calling this squamish greedy.

Some even questioned why indigenous people were trying to build tall modern high rises at

all.

Former city counselor told the reporter that there was a quote, big gap between these big

concrete high rises and quote, an indigenous way of building.

A lot of people look at us as, you know, we're indigenous developer, so they're expecting

longhouses and they're expecting, you know what I mean?

Like things like we used to live in, no, like we're, we're going to, we're creating something

new, right?

Jacob says these critiques were kind of offensive.

I mean, it's frustrating.

I know what it is.

And I call it out what it is.

It's, you know, there's levels, just levels of racism.

Normally, developers have to be very careful about not defending the neighbors, even if

the neighbors are saying kind of offensive things.

But in this case, Jacob and the squamish nation could more or less ignore the critics, because

this was their land.

The squamish got to make their own zoning laws.

But they did listen to the criticism.

They agreed to fund upgrades to help with traffic, like maybe a new transit hub for buses

or adding bike lanes to the area.

And as this project moved forward, the squamish eventually started to find allies.

Like when they approached the city of Vancouver about connecting the towers to the local roads

and sewage system in power grid, the city was supportive.

They signed an agreement.

And when they were looking for funding, the Canadian government gave them a huge $1.4 billion

low interest loan.

That's Canadian dollars, so about a billion in U.S. dollars.

And this loan was a big show of support.

Canada wanted to support the building of more rental housing.

And sure, most of these inocupartments are going to be expensive and high-end.

When there's a housing shortage, every additional unit helps.

In 2022, the squamish started construction.

They held a groundbreaking ceremony.

Squamish elders were there, the mayor was there, and so was Justin Trudeau, the prime minister.

You had the prime minister of Canada come to the groundbreaking.

What does that mean?

I mean, that means this project's pretty damn special, right?

After the ceremony, the tower started rising fast.

We're three years in, and we have three towers up.

I mean, it says something, right?

Yeah, let's see, it's fast.

Crazy fast.

Let's say crazy fast, yeah.

Okay, this is another thing that makes Zenoch unique.

It's not just the size of the towers.

It's the speed at which they're getting built.

Because when neighbors can block projects and take real estate developers to court,

that slows everything down.

It creates delays and uncertainty that cost developers real money.

These are hitting costs that are usually pretty hard to quantify.

But recently, economists at MIT in Princeton came out with a clever new working paper

that tried to do just that.

We'll put a link to it in our show notes.

The economists looked at the housing market in Los Angeles,

where developers can buy land that is pre-approved for new construction,

where someone's already gone out and gotten all the right permits.

And they found that on average,

developers are willing to pay 50% more for land with all the right permits attached.

Basically, developers are willing to pay big money,

hundreds of thousands to avoid battles with nimbis.

The paper estimates that in LA,

the slow and messy permitting process is responsible for about a third of the construction costs of a project.

Over the years, more and more voters and politicians in Vancouver and in other cities

have started to recognize the costs of zoning laws.

In fact, in 2019, Vancouver got rid of almost all single family zoning.

The city allowed duplexes, and in 2023, they allowed multiplexes.

There was a moment recently, when Jacob realized that maybe more Vancouver residents

were on his side than he thought.

He was looking at this news report about the towers on his phone.

It was posted through like a TikTok, right?

And then you see the comment section.

You see people like, oh, you know, like saying like, oh, it's so ugly,

like it shouldn't be in this neighborhood.

They were the same complaints he'd heard before.

But then he scrolled down and saw something new.

You had people jumping in now and saying, like opposing those naysayers,

and they were standing up for the project.

And she started to see people like, no, this is great.

The, you know, the housing's being provided, the way they're doing it,

it's being provided.

Yeah, now people on the internet were defending the Sonak project.

They were saying, yimbi, like, yes, in my backyard.

In the next three months or so, Sonak will open its doors to the public.

The first phase of the project will add about 1,400 new apartments.

For context, that's about a third of the number of new rental units

built in Vancouver last year.

The Squamish expect that the full project, all 11 towers and 6,000 apartments

will finish by 2033.

When we talked to Chief Gibby, who helped lead the fight to get this land back

in the first place, we were standing in a park right next to the construction site.

It was afternoon and the towers cast these long shadows.

What do you think the story of this village and now these towers means?

We're back.

We're back.

It's just placing our footprint back on our land again.

To me, that's important.

These towers, they are a key study in what's possible.

How big you can build and how quickly if you don't have to follow the regular rules.

And look, the Squamish are very clear about their main goal for this project.

Their goal is to make money to provide for the next seven generations.

But these towers are also providing something to the rest of Vancouver.

They're providing housing in the middle of a housing crisis.

Alex, I think it is time to put you on the spot because this entire episode

was based on one of the chapters that you wrote for the Planet Money book.

Yes, that's right.

It was one of my favorites to work on.

But there are lots of other great stories in the book that I hope people will read and enjoy.

There is a story about a corporate lawyer who kind of accidentally became a referee of global business.

Guys, I read that chapter. It's amazing.

A very Jeff chapter.

There's a story about a bank teller who helped install a machine meant to replace her.

And a college dropout who won a competition meant to identify the next Warren Buffett.

You can find the book at planetmoneybook.com.

Please read it, enjoy it.

We're so excited to share it with you.

This episode was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kessler with an assist from Emma Peasley,

is edited by Jess Zhang, back checked by Sarah Hades, and engineered by Sina Lefredo.

Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

Special thanks to Petsabook and to Daryl Fairweather,

who, by the way, is an amazing housing economist and will be at our Seattle Book Tour event.

I'm Alex Vansi, and I'm Jeff Quo.

This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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