Surrey’s 2050 community plan projects 1 million residents

Where will Surrey be in 30 years? The City of Surrey’s draft community plan sets the blueprint for the future.

Surrey 2050 projects one million residents by 2050, making it B.C.’s most-populated city. The draft plan, released in late February, is an update to the existing official community plan, PlanSurrey 2013. It highlights growth and development for the city, with policies on housing affordability, climate change, and transportation.

Metro Vancouver adopted its regional growth strategy, Metro 2050, in February 2023.

“Municipalities are required to update their community plans once the Metro Vancouver regional growth strategy is adopted … and align with the regional growth strategies,” says Preet Heer, the city’s community planning and sustainability director.

With the regional strategy, provincial legislation was amended to include housing needs reports, which require municipalities to update official community plans to reflect those changes. The draft plan must be adopted by June, as per the provincial legislation.

Five priorities are highlighted in Surrey 2025: housing for all, a vibrant downtown, a thriving economy, livable neighbourhoods, and a healthy natural environment.

Heer says the plan’s development included more than 300,000 public interactions.

“We really wanted to understand what had changed since the last update,” Heer says. “We started honing in on a theme about where we have gaps within our current policy structure or land-use framework, and use the guiding vision we got from the community and other stakeholders to help shape some of those policies.”

Despite the public engagement figures, some residents said they were not consulted nor informed. 

“We did not have any consultation with regard to 365 pages worth of documents, that affects our traditional territory shared with other coastal First Nations,” Semiahmoo First Nation band coun. Joanne Charles said at a March 9 public hearing, the Surrey Now-Leader reported.​

Heer says while the plan is a high-level guide that influences city regulations and policies, it does not result in immediate change for the community.

“[The plan] is really providing a guiding framework from which other things and other actions and strategies will evolve,” Heer says.

The existing plan has more than 600 policies, while Surrey 2050 has about 200. Heer says cutting policies was not about having “less guidance,” but removing redundancies from PlanSurrey 2013.

“I would describe it as making sure what’s in there really has a purpose,” she says.

New policies were also added, including for housing and climate change. PlanSurrey 2013 never had a dedicated housing chapter.

“We were trying to address the whole spectrum of housing, from non-market [and] affordable to market housing,” Heer says. “We’re looking at all the components of that, including rental and rental redevelopment.”

The Surrey 2050 draft was approved by Surrey city council following the public hearing and will be reviewed by the Metro Vancouver board. Couns. Mandeep Nagra and Linda Annis voted against it.

“[Metro Vancouver] reviews it with an eye for looking at how it aligns the regional growth strategy — they call that the regional context statement,” Heer says.

While the plan has not been adopted yet, Heer hopes the framework will guide Surrey’s future growth.

“We really wrote this as a future-looking document, because we know the city is going to reach a population of one million pretty soon. We wanted to make sure this document responded to how we’re going to manage that growth.”