How do people talk about new housing? Leveraging large language models and city council records to analyze housing supply narratives in Vancouver, CA
Vancouver faces strong housing supply pressure and a provincial target of 28,900 net new homes between October 2023 and September 2028, while provincial legislation is reshaping local approval processes, including limits on public hearings for policy-conforming rezonings. Rezoning applications generate varied public engagement records along the way — online feedback, staff referral reports, public hearing transcripts, and Council decisions.
Two gaps motivate the project. Public engagement is more than “who speaks”: the literature seeks to resolve the gap between procedural inclusion and substantive influence, and the key point is not only who participates, but how those viewpoints are understood, synthesized, and integrated into actionable policies and plans. And housing opposition is more than support versus opposition: existing studies examine whether people support or oppose housing and what shapes those attitudes, but less is known about how specific arguments are mobilized and how they vary across project types and locations.
Leveraging online feedback and LLM-based methods, we aim to better understand how communities think about new housing development, moving beyond “how much support or opposition” to examine with more nuance how different arguments are mobilized. Three questions organize the work: what topics Vancouverites raise when commenting on new housing proposals; which topics are most frequently mentioned in support and in opposition; and how topic–attitude patterns vary by project characteristics.
The sample covers 350 housing development projects — 95 low-rise, 124 mid-rise and 130 high-rise; 38 downtown, 228 at the urban fringe and 84 in near suburbs; 55 social housing projects and 295 non-social. Comments are classified with an LLM against a codebook built in three steps: theory-driven, grounded in existing literature and prior conceptual frameworks; data-informed, derived from reviewing and synthesizing public comments; and iteratively refined by combining theory with empirical patterns.
Across 17,792 comments, opposition centers on neighborhood character and scale, while support emphasizes housing need and affordability. Affordability appears in 70% of supporting comments and housing type in 52%; community and neighbourhood is raised in half of opposing comments and densification in 43%. Topics such as public safety and specific populations are highly contested — both supporters and opponents mobilize these arguments, but with distinct framing.
Next, we associate people’s arguments with Vancouver’s spatial characteristics, such as projects within transit-oriented areas or within the zones of city-wide development plans like the Broadway Plan and the Cambie Corridor Plan, and explore how local versus non-local commenters differ in their arguments on the same project.