Ideas for making public systems legible.
Civic intelligence, sector analysis and method, written around the decisions public records should help people make.
The price that never had to be argued
Repairing a fire-damaged school was priced at $8 million to $10 million in June 2023. The cost of holding the same buildings empty first appears in the 2025 cycle, at $65,000 a year. One figure had to be argued for.
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Published inputs, an unpublished model, and one number
A closure decision rested on a projection of 1,010 students at three schools in 2039. The three input series behind that figure are named in public.
The rent was set in a courtroom
A Vancouver school board and its lessee could not agree what one ground lease was worth. A court settled it on 20 December 2024, at $1.65 million a year against a claim of $9,611,250 or more.
One lease, one subsurface sale, ten years
Over the ten years to 2026 a Vancouver school district completed one long-term lease and one subsurface sale, and sold no whole school site. Two sites left the enrolling inventory, both by closure, and neither has been disposed of.
Four prices on one site
A Vancouver school board sold the parcel beneath one of its schools, kept the surface, rebuilt the school on it, and priced four separate things along the way.
Two instruments, and neither moved a whole site
Vancouver’s school district completed two land instruments in the decade to 2026. One sold the parcel beneath a school and kept the surface. One leased part of a site for 99 years and kept the title.
The state between two policies
A district has a policy for closing a school and a policy for disposing of land. The first ends at the closure bylaw. The second starts at a surplus resolution.
Six land files, two completed instruments
Across 2016 to 2026 the Vancouver School Board completed two land instruments, one long-term lease and one subsurface sale, and no outright sale of a whole site.
A motion can stop a subdivision
The Vancouver School Board authorised a surplus consultation on the eastern portion of the Graham Bruce site on 29 May 2023 and voted to suspend the subdivision on 25 September 2023.
Two published prices for one standing building
Two dollar figures stand in the public record for the vacant buildings at 3250 Kingsway: roughly $65,000 a year to hold them, and $8 million to $10 million to repair them.
The only instrument that runs a century
Over ten years the district completed one long-term instrument on a school site: a 99-year pre-paid ground lease on the south portion of the Sir Sandford Fleming site, for about $8.5 million.
Eight years past the published horizon
A closure decision was tested against enrolment projections running to 2039. The district's published long-range facilities plan runs to 2031.
A recommendation has no execution date
The Board approved the closure of Queen Elizabeth Annex on 6 June 2022 and declared the site surplus on 11 April 2023, recommending a transfer to the francophone school authority.
A site let go, and bought back thirty-five years later
Richmond let a closed school site go in 1990 at a valuation of $5.67 million. In 2025 the same district paid $60 million to buy it back. Both figures are public, and neither file contains the other.
The inventory that was spent
A district’s spare buildings are its ability to absorb change. Spent one at a time, for good reasons each time, they stop being an inventory and become a set of decisions nobody made together.
One school, three capacity numbers, one page
Renfrew Elementary appears in the district’s capital plan with three capacity figures and one enrolment. Every one of them is correct. Which capacity governs a $51.8 million request is nowhere stated.
To Be Decided
In 2019 the board put seven projects in a table. Six of them got a decision. The seventh got the words to be decided, and then the province changed the law around it.
The Villages Plan Did Not Pass. The Coordination Gap Did.
One city, three timelines. Downtown shows what happens after school pressure arrives. Rupert and Renfrew shows the pressure forming. Carleton shows what disappears when a public option is removed before the future is reconciled.
Vancouver Villages and School Capacity: What the Public Hearing Revealed
343 people spoke at Vancouver's Villages hearing; 2,245 opposed. Our data shows village catchments with over-capacity, seismically at-risk schools and an unmodeled CSF gap. We surface evidence, not recommendations.
The Hidden Housing Question: Is There Even Room at the School?
When families search for a home in Metro Vancouver, they check the commute, the walkability, the neighbourhood. Fewer check whether the local school actually has room for their kids. And across the region, that answer is increasingly no.
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