In 2024, the City of Vancouver quietly did something that most homeowners still don’t know about. They rezoned the vast majority of single family properties in the city — replacing the old RS zones most people had been in for decades — with a new designation called R1-1. Residential Inclusive 1.
It sounds like bureaucratic housekeeping. It is not. For Vancouver homeowners, R1-1 zoning changed what is legally possible to build on their property — in some cases dramatically.
What Actually Changed
Under the old RS zoning system, Vancouver had half a dozen different single family residential zones — RS-1, RS-1A, RS-1B, RS-2, RS-3S, RS-5, and others. Each had slightly different rules about what you could build, what secondary suites were permitted, and what the process was for adding a laneway home. The inconsistency was confusing for homeowners and created situations where two properties on the same block could have meaningfully different rights.
R1-1 replaced most of that. One zone. Consistent rules. And the rules are more permissive than what most of those old RS zones allowed.
What You Can Now Build Under R1-1
On a standard R1-1 lot in Vancouver, you can have:
Your main house. A secondary suite inside the main house — the classic mortgage helper basement suite. And a laneway home at the rear of the lot if you have lane access. Three separate living units on one single family lot, all as permitted uses under the zoning. No rezoning application. No variance hearing. No public notification process. Just a building permit.
For larger lots, R1-1 also opens the door to multiplex development — up to 6 units in some cases, depending on lot size and configuration. That is a conversation for another post. But the headline is: R1-1 turned a lot of Vancouver single family lots into significantly more flexible pieces of real estate overnight.
Why Most Homeowners Don’t Know This
Because the city did not exactly take out full page ads in the Vancouver Sun. The rezoning was announced through the regular municipal planning process — public hearings, council votes, planning department newsletters. If you were not paying close attention to Vancouver housing policy in 2024, you probably missed it entirely.
We talk to homeowners regularly who are genuinely surprised to find out that their lot qualifies for a laneway home under R1-1. They have been sitting on a property with lane access for years assuming they would need to go through some complicated approval process to add a second unit. They didn’t need to. They just needed to know the rules had changed.
What R1-1 Does NOT Allow
To be clear about the limits. R1-1 does not allow you to strata title your laneway home and sell it separately from the main house. The laneway home is legally part of the same property. You can rent it, house family in it, use it as a guest house — but you cannot sell it as a separate strata unit.
You also cannot build a second laneway home if one already exists on the property. And all construction — laneway homes, basement suites, new builds — still requires proper building permits. R1-1 removed the rezoning requirement. It did not remove the permit requirement.
How to Know if Your Property is R1-1
The fastest way is the City of Vancouver’s VanMap portal. Search your address, click on your property, and check the zoning designation on the right-hand panel. If it shows R1-1, you are in the new zone.
If you are in Burnaby or Richmond, the process is similar but the zoning designations are different. Both municipalities have been updating their single family zones in parallel with Vancouver. Give us a call and we can walk you through what applies to your specific property.
The bottom line is this — if you own a single family home in Vancouver and you have not looked at what R1-1 means for your property, it is worth 10 minutes of your time. You might find out you have more options than you thought.