Land value creation, capture, and transformation

In Vancouver, possibly Canada’s most expensive city, multi-million-dollar single-family homes occupy most of the land zoned for residential use. The rezoning process is one of the main ways to increase density to build multifamily housing projects. When the City grants this additional density, it captures some of the resulting increase in the land’s monetary value by requesting cash or in-kind contributions from the developer to fund infrastructure and amenities. Through a cohousing project’s rezoning process, this chapter presents a case of land value capture as a temporal process during which multiple local actors make decisions that both adhere to and defy market rationality. Rather than a fixed monetary payment from the developer at a moment in time, it considers land’s value over time and makes visible the plurality of value concepts held by local actors as they deliberate the value of the additional density granted, the affordances, and desired outcomes. The practice of value capture is conceptualized as a means to support innovation, achieving outcomes of housing decommodification, community building, and social wellbeing. The chapter concludes by encouraging urban planners not to routinize the unique powers municipalities have to grant additional density and to give greater consideration to social value creation embedded in our land practices.