There's a lot of this, yes. And the suburbs aren't necessarily very suburban: I live in a 30 floor condo tower in Burnaby, and within 2 block radius there's a dozen similar towers and twenty more 30-60 floor towers in various stages of zoning hearings (8) / building approval (7) / digging big holes (2) / towers going up (3).

There are two major phenomena at play in Vancouver:

1. Across Metro Vancouver, the supply of land for single family detached houses is very constrained; this is pushing prices of detached houses up dramatically.

2. The City of Vancouver proper is very hostile to development, due to a toxic combination of NIMBYism, height restrictions to maintain "view corridors" of the nearby mountains, and social activists who think that building more housing will somehow make housing less affordable.

But if you're willing to live in a condo and you don't mind living a 20 minute train ride away from downtown, the cost of housing is far more reasonable than hysterical media reports would have you believe; and unlike detached houses, prices of condos have barely kept up with inflation over the past decade.