Six land files, two completed instruments

Public argument about school land assumes a good deal of it is moving. A decade of Vancouver board records says otherwise, and no single document in that decade says so.

The count.

Across the ten years from 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 school site. Two sites left the enrolling inventory in that period, both by closure, and neither has been disposed of¹.

Those four figures are the piece, and everything below shows the files they come from.

The six files.

Two readings that need correcting.

Lord Roberts Annex did not leave the enrolling inventory. Only the subsurface parcel was sold, the surface was retained, and a replacement school stands on the site¹. Counting it as a site disposal overstates what the record contains.

The 2016 closure round produced no closures. The Board suspended the process on 3 October 2016 and none of the eleven schools identified were closed by 30 June 2017².

Both corrections move in the same direction: the ten-year record contains fewer completed disposals than a summary reading of it would suggest.

What the completed instruments carried.

Three files carry consideration figures, and they are of three different kinds.

The Lord Roberts Annex items total $73 million, and up to $75 million with the playfield contribution³. Adding the Fleming consideration gives $81.5 million to $83.5 million across the ten years⁴, none of which relates to an outright sale of a whole school site. The Kingsgate figure is an annual rent and sits outside that addition.

On the Fleming parcel, the City of Vancouver referral report dated 2 September 2025 describes an estimated total of 87 units in six storeys, with 20 per cent of the residential floor area secured below market, on a site area of 2,396.6 square metres, and names the landowner as the Board of Education of School District No. 39 (Vancouver)⁵. The dated chain behind that instrument was read in this series on 7 September⁶.

On Kingsgate Mall, the court set the land value at $20 million at a floor space ratio of 1⁷.0 and the rent at $1.65 million a year, against the district’s claim of more than $9,611,250. The district had claimed $49,883,770.06 in arrears⁸. The rent set is 8.25 per cent of the land value set⁹. The original date and term of that lease sit outside the record read.

The state each site is in.

Six files, five distinct states, and one of them repeated. Closed and held is the state two sites are in, and it is the state with no instrument attached and no date by which one is expected.

No register carries these six files.

No consolidated register of the district’s disposals and long-term leases is published. The table above was assembled file by file, from board records that do not reference each other¹.

The district’s Long Term Planning page states, in the conditional future tense, that when the results of Land Asset Management Studies identify opportunities to generate new revenues through the lease or disposition of surplus land holdings, the District will develop a Land Asset Strategy. No such document is linked, named, versioned or dated on that page, and two indexed addresses for it return a not-found response¹⁰.

That requires a correction to an earlier piece in this series. On 24 August this series described the district as maintaining a land asset strategy¹¹. The record read at origin shows a stated intention to develop one when studies identify opportunities. The same piece carried a banner figure of six sites released one at a time, and described that figure as illustrative pending the counted record. The counted record is above: six files, two completed instruments, and no outright sale of a whole school site.

The state with no entry.

One state a school site can occupy has no entry in this record: sold outright, with a private building standing on it afterwards, and no public option remaining to price. Across 2016 to 2026 there are no such entries.

A named case outside this window has been put to this series, concerning a downtown school site said to have passed into private ownership decades ago. The title chain, the parties, the dates and the consideration have not been read. Nothing about that case is asserted here, and it prints as an open gate¹². Until the chain is read at the land title office, the terminal state stays uncounted, and this piece describes the five states it can evidence.

The count covers 2016 to 2026 and one district. A file that never reached a public board record would not appear in it, and the absence of a register is the reason the count had to be assembled rather than read. Every dated entry above is available to be checked against the record it cites.

A standing disposal register.

One row per site, with the instrument, the dates, the consideration, and the current state, updated when a board decision changes any of them.

Every entry in such a register already exists inside a board record. What does not exist is the row that holds them together, which is why a ten-year count requires six files, three bodies and a court decision to assemble.

A register decides none of that. It settles what a district is holding on the day somebody asks, without six files and a court judgment to get there.

Every figure above carries its source and every calculation is shown. Start with the school nearest you.

Further records read for this piece are set out in Sources.¹³¹⁴¹⁵