Adopt Buildings Seismic Risk Plan
Motion 16 · Council Meeting, June 2, 2026
Summary
- Vancouver faces serious earthquake risk, with a magnitude 7.2 quake potentially damaging over 6,080 buildings, causing up to 1,370 deaths or serious injuries, displacing 365,000+ people, and generating over $17 billion in direct losses.
- Nearly 70% of Vancouver's buildings were built before 1990 seismic standards, and half before any seismic standards existed (pre-1973), with risk concentrated in six neighbourhoods and five building types including concrete towers, wood apartments, and unreinforced masonry.
- Higher-risk areas are home to 70% renters, up to 20% of whom are low-income or seniors — populations with the greatest barriers to earthquake recovery.
- The proposed five-year Buildings Seismic Risk Reduction Action Plan prioritizes community-guided policy development, incentives for private building upgrades, and building the case for senior government investment, drawing on lessons from programs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Zealand, and Seattle.
- The plan does not mandate retrofits at this stage but aims to lay a foundation for long-term, sustained risk reduction while balancing affordability concerns and the risk of displacement from building upgrade requirements.
- Staff recommend Council adopt the plan and direct staff to report back on implementation progress.
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Transcript
4 segments
Aye.
Thank you. Councillor Claassen? Very quick comments to wrap things up here, Mayor. First of all, I just want to thank staff for this work and this report. I think it does give us some comfort as somebody who was born and raised in the city, the ever-present notion that we would potentially... fall prey to a large seismic event has always been in the back of our minds. I remember specifically in February 2001 working for my home office when the building started to sway and I thought I had some vertigo. I tried to get a hold of my wife who was at that point eight months pregnant with our daughter and she was in a tower downtown and the building was swaying and this cell phone signal eventually died. So it was a moment in time that I remember very distinctly about the the bit of fear and uncertainty about what to do at that point in time. So I think as a city, we have to be very vigilant about this one. So just, again, thanks very much for this work and I look forward to supporting it.
Thank you very much. Seeing no one else in the queue, we will put the main motion to a vote.
If you could please go to the voting panels.
And that passes unanimously. Thank you very much. And that completes item number two.
Statement Watch
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We can hear you great. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Hi. So yes, I am a resident of Vancouver. I am broadly in support of this work and appreciate the work that staff have done. But I do have some comments on recommendation number four, explore redevelopment as a risk reduction approach. I'm concerned that this approach may incentivize the avoidance of necessary maintenance and upgrades. Regrettably, Vancouver has many examples of risk developing because maintenance on residential buildings is deferred or neglected. Despite staff's best effort, enforcement is often spotty. We saw examples of this recently when members of the Vancouver Tenants Union and others came to council to describe unsafe living conditions in their buildings, despite ongoing work by bylaw enforcement. The most egregious example of this that I can think of is, of course, the Balmoral Hotel. where known life safety issues remained unaddressed until residents sought to hold the city liable for damages they might experience as a consequence of unenforced bylaws. And so the city ultimately shut the building down. We know that city staff are often caught between the rock of identified unsafe living conditions and the hard place of potential removal of the deteriorated housing stock from the market entirely. In my experience working with tenants and unsafe buildings, there can be a paralysis at the staff level while landlords essentially hold removal of the building from the market as a threat against enforcement. I'm not clear that this is the best way to resolve that paralysis. recently staff also signaled that they're concerned that a rezoning application in the west end would trigger a wave of rezoning applications on aging affordable walk-ups they went so far as to recommend rejection of the application because of the potential risk of mass displacement for west end tenants for whom we have no plan and where we do have plans tenants tenant representatives and tenant organizers have told council repeatedly including in this report that the plans are inadequate So we don't have effective protections for residential tenants. We don't have effective protections for commercial tenants. And there's a historical and persistent disjunct between what tenants are experiencing and what council is prepared to acknowledge. I ask council to take notice of these statements. So it's in this context in which I hear this recommendation, which may signal that there's a priority risk reduction route out that avoids care for existing buildings. We have examples all across the city of buildings that have been empty to facilitate redevelopment and speculation, whether or not redevelopment is in the near distance. So I'd encourage council to reframe and prioritize building upgrades and preservation and retrofits where appropriate for the site and to consult in a meaningful way with tenant organizations about their on-the-ground evaluation of the city's existing tenant protection policies. Thank you. Thank you very much.