The Squamish Nation built 11 towers on land Vancouver's zoning couldn't touch

Along the Kitsilano shoreline in Vancouver, eleven residential towers are rising on a site squeezed between a bridge, the water, parks and expensive single-family homes — a cluster that looks like a second downtown packed into about four blocks. It feels distinct from the city around it because, legally, it is: the development, Senakw, is a reserve belonging to the Squamish Nation, and it is not part of Kitsilano or even Vancouver.

That status is the whole mechanism. Throughout Vancouver, zoning has historically capped the height and density of new buildings, often at single-family homes with yards — part of why housing is so hard to find. Reserves like Senakw are not bound by those zoning regulations, so the Nation can build density that no neighboring property could get approved, to the consternation of its wealthy NIMBY neighbors, who have no zoning lever to pull on land outside the city's jurisdiction.

The land itself was won, not bought. Senakw was a coastal village where Squamish people hunted and fished until 1913, when the provincial government forced the residents out and burned the village behind them. After what NPR calls a dramatic, underdog legal quest, the Squamish Nation finally won back 10.5 acres in the early 2000s — prime real estate in one of the world's most expensive cities, and the ground the towers now stand on.

Reserve land sits inside the city geographically but outside its zoning authority, so height and density caps that stop every neighbor never applied here.

Reclaiming land stolen in 1913 — including a village burned behind the evicted residents — gave the Nation both a prime site and its own jurisdiction.

Opposition from wealthy neighbors had no procedural handle: the hearings and height limits they usually rely on govern Vancouver lots, not the reserve.

The project turns a sliver of reclaimed land into dense housing at a scale the surrounding city had zoned away.

Jurisdiction is a design parameter: the fastest way around rules that block building is to build on land where the rules were never in force.

The eleven towers were under construction as of 2026, and NPR's Planet Money framed Senakw as possibly the most interesting real estate development in North America — a working demonstration with lessons for every city trying to lower housing costs. The episode was adapted from the Planet Money book chapter reported by Alex Mayyasi.