The skyscrapers that NIMBYs and zoning couldn't stop

What It Covers

The Squamish Nation, an indigenous group of ~5,000 people near Vancouver, reclaimed 10.5 acres of ancestral land in 2003 and leveraged their sovereign status to bypass Canadian zoning laws, building 11 skyscrapers with 6,000 rental apartments — a case study in what unrestricted urban development can achieve.

Key Questions Answered

• •Sovereign Land as Zoning Exemption: Indigenous nations in Canada are not bound by municipal zoning laws on reserve land. The Squamish Nation used this exemption to build towers up to 60 stories in Vancouver, where over half the city was previously restricted to single-family homes — a legal pathway unavailable to conventional private developers.
• •NIMBY Asymmetry Problem: Economists identify a structural political imbalance where concentrated, vocal minorities block housing projects that would benefit a diffuse, unrepresented majority. In Los Angeles, this slow permitting process accounts for roughly one-third of total construction costs, per a recent MIT and Princeton working paper on pre-permitted land pricing.
• •Permit Value Premium: MIT and Princeton researchers found that developers in Los Angeles pay approximately 50% more for land that already holds approved permits. This quantifies the hidden cost of neighborhood opposition and bureaucratic delay — hundreds of thousands of dollars per project — making regulatory certainty a measurable financial asset worth pursuing.
• •Seven-Generation Planning Framework: The Squamish Nation evaluated their development through an indigenous stewardship principle requiring decisions to benefit descendants seven generations forward. This long-term lens pushed younger council members to reject a modest 1,500-unit mid-rise proposal in favor of a 6,000-unit high-density project generating sustained, multigenerational rental income.
• •Speed Through Sovereignty: Three of eleven Sanak towers reached near-completion within three years of breaking ground in 2022 — a pace described as unusually fast for Vancouver. Removing neighbor veto power and litigation risk eliminates delays that typically inflate costs and timelines, demonstrating that regulatory friction, not construction capacity, is the primary bottleneck in urban housing development.