Vancouver needs homes. Local First Nations have plans on how to provide them.

Along a 5-mile stretch of Vancouver’s waterfront, where million-dollar homes enjoy views of ice-capped peaks and gleaming sky rises, three Indigenous-led housing projects are emerging in one of the world’s most competitive markets.

On one end, there’s leləm̓ – which means “home” – where 1,200 units are organized around street signs written in English and the Musqueam language. On the other, the Squamish Nation is building Sen̓áḵw: 6,000 units in perhaps Vancouver’s most coveted 10 acres of undeveloped land.

And in the middle sits the biggest – and most controversial – of all: Jericho Lands, a 90-acre development led by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations that will turn this low-density section of Vancouver into one of the most bustling.

When completed, the projects will provide bold visibility to Indigenous groups that have long gone unrecognized in cities across North America. But their leaders also recognize they aren’t just dabbling in real estate. They are reclaiming agency and space – and demonstrating new pathways to apply Indigenous knowledge on sustainability. That knowledge has been increasingly heralded as a solution to the climate crisis, and now valued as a better way forward for cities.

“We have a voice; we’re present now,” says Wilson Williams, elected councilor for the Squamish Nation, at a community center on their reserve on the north shore of Vancouver. “We’ve become leaders today in regards to the challenges we’re facing, [like] the major housing crisis in Vancouver.”

“We’re no longer out of sight, out of mind in our own village,” he says.

“Taking back their land”

The initiatives frame a stark juxtaposition. British Columbia’s Indigenous peoples saw centuries of dispossession as Europeans resettled them onto reserve lands mostly outside present-day Vancouver.

The Sen̓áḵw location, for example, is “the most heartbreaking land that was taken from our people,” says Mr. Williams. On the edge of the waterfront, this meeting place where beaver and salmon abounded was slowly expropriated amid construction of railways and increasing industrialization until the Squamish were put on a barge in 1913 and sent to existing reserves.

Since the 1970s, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh have variously been engaged in negotiations and lawsuits to reclaim reserve land illegally expropriated by the Canadian government. Sen̓áḵw sits on land returned to the Squamish in 2003. The three nations, acting in partnership as the MST Development Corp., and the developer Canada Lands collectively acquired Jericho Lands in 2014.

“There definitely has been a rise in nations taking back their land,” says Maggie Low, a professor of Indigenous planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

As developers, the Indigenous groups see an economic and social opportunity to address one of the city’s most pressing needs: a lack of viable housing. In September, one estimate found that by 2030, at its current pace of development, British Columbia will be 610,000 units of housing short of what would have been considered affordable a decade ago.

Both Sen̓áḵw and Jericho Lands will be significantly taller and denser – their biggest towers at 59 and 49 stories respectively – than the surrounding neighborhoods of mostly single-family homes. Together with Heather Lands, another collaboration between MST and Canada Lands, the projects on the rise are slated to add more than 18,000 homes, including thousands of social and affordable units, to Vancouver’s housing stock.

A sixth of Sen̓áḵw’s 6,000 units will be earmarked affordable. Of those, 240 will be set aside for members of the Squamish Nation. And between social housing and below-market units, 30% of the units at Jericho Lands will be designated affordable.

But the benefits extend well beyond housing, says Chief Jen Thomas of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation. “It’s also a great economic opportunity for our member-owned businesses,” she explains. “We have plumbers; we have cleaners. We have drywall companies. So they’re going to have procurement opportunities to work on all of these projects.”

Through the projects, the city sees a concrete way to advance its priorities on Reconciliation, the Canadian concept that frames the modern relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Vancouver’s government has been working closely with the First Nations and their co-developers on bringing the projects through the approval process, says Matt Shillito, the city of Vancouver’s acting director of planning.

“We’ve been looking at less traditional ways to approach a project,” Mr. Shillito says of Jericho Lands, “being more flexible in our typical city policies and bylaws, listening to the nations and their objectives for the importance of the site.”

The spirit of the longhouse

As developers of the largest projects currently underway in Vancouver, the nations have seized an opportunity to imprint their values on the city. 

Sen̓áḵw is on track to become Canada’s largest residential property to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, with thermal energy systems that recover heat from sewer mains. It will provide just 1,000 parking spots for its 6,000 units.  

Its 11 residential towers feature bold, rippling vertical axes, alluding to the area’s coastal forests, mountains, and Squamish longhouses – another nod to principles around maximizing community. 

“One of our values, actually, is the spirit of the longhouse, where if you want more people and more families to live in there, you just keep building out,” says William George-Thomas, cultural manager for Tsleil-Waututh Nation. “Now, however, that’s not a very modern concept. ... With all these skyscrapers and tall buildings, we’re turning it vertical.”

Plans for Jericho Lands have been guided by a “slow, store, restore, flow” approach to water conservation throughout the site, says Elisa Campbell, Canada Lands’ vice president for real estate. That means construction that works to replenish the watershed and offer spaces for “quiet moments of spirituality” by ponds and swales.

The new “nontraditional” library on the site will be styled as a “house of learning,” centering around oral history traditions rather than around the Western conception of “reservoirs of books,” Mr. Shillito says.

“We want to tell the story of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people,” says Mr. George-Thomas.

Building community?

The projects are not without opponents. Local groups such as the Jericho Coalition say the projects need to be smaller to mitigate environmental impacts, and that their societal impact is overblown.

“Reconciliation is being used as a way to paper over a kind of development greed and also the political need to show that they’re doing something about the housing crisis,” says Susan Fisher, a member of the Jericho Coalition.

Still, MST’s development strategy in Vancouver has received significant attention globally. The developers have been fielding calls from other Indigenous groups from as far away as Australia and New Zealand on how they’ve facilitated it, Ms. Campbell says.

They’re only getting started. MST currently oversees 160 acres of land in the Vancouver metro area. “We’re going to be part of the biggest Western developers across Canada within the next five, 10 years,” Chief Thomas says.

And as the first towers rise to meet the Vancouver skyline, they could serve as a global lesson on coexistence moving forward.

The projects are “actually helping to create more of a sense of community and understanding,” says Professor Low, “that we are all living on these lands, and there are ways to do that [that] support Indigenous sovereignty and that support the overall thriving of Vancouver, of British Columbia, of Canadian society.”