Ideas for making public systems legible.
Civic intelligence, sector analysis and method, written around the decisions public records should help people make.
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.
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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.
Vancouver Villages & School Capacity
An interactive look at how the City’s 17 new villages will reshape neighbourhoods and schools.
What 304 Submissions Reveal About Vancouver’s ODP, and What They Don’t
We reviewed every submissions ahead of Vancouver's 30-year Official Development Plan to understand what residents, organizations, and experts were actually saying, and where the public record remained incomplete.
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