Is the city fixing its crumbling community buildings?
Community centres, libraries, pool houses — the ABC platform promised an 'Emergency Restoration Fund' for collapsing buildings. Here's the actual capital trend for community facilities.
On track
Capital spending on community facilities has gone up — $81M planned for 2025 versus $44M in 2021.
1The story
What we're trackingFix collapsing fields, parks, and buildings through an 'Emergency Restoration Fund'.— ABC Vancouver's 2022 campaign platform
In plain terms: These are the buildings your neighbourhood runs its programs in: community centres, indoor pools, heritage halls. This budget line covers renovating and replacing them, not staffing.
Green bars are the years after Mayor Sim took office (late 2022).
Sim took office Nov 2022 — compare green years to blue ones.
3The fine print
How we calculated this
We pulled every line item from the City of Vancouver's multi-year capital budget tagged 'Community Facilities' and summed the planned expenditures by budget year. This is the city's own forward-looking plan, not actual spend. The dataset covers 2023–2026; big projects land in single years, so the series is lumpy. Source: City of Vancouver open data.
City of Vancouver open data — Capital Budget (Community Facilities) · as of 2026-10-21 · Vancouver Promise Tracker — an independent look at whether local leaders deliver on their word.