Yes indeed. There are Vancouver Specials in the surrounding municipalities as well (I used to live in one).
This is somewhat aspirational, but I live in Vancouver and if/when we get PR, we'd like to buy a home and possibly want to renovate.
Condo living (or in local Canadian "Strata Living") has been a very mixed experience for us.
I'm interested to see what happens in the next couple of years — Ken Sim (Vancouver's new mayor) had significantly improving permitting speeds and decisions as a key plank in his platform. I'm curious to see how he and his party are planning to follow through on that.
It's nice to say, but I heard a consistent response from the Vancouver subreddit every time this has been brought up that permitting speeds in Vancouver have been more down to how hard it is to hire/train/retain code inspectors, than down to how many red-tape policies they need to evaluate a plan against. Even with a permanent budget increase for hiring code inspectors, given the training time, you wouldn't expect to see the effects within Sim's tenure. So it's questionable what he's actually planning to do here.
(One thing I personally think could help is to get major property developers to peer-review one-anothers' work for its adherence to code; or even to require, as a condition for allowing such firms to do any development in the city at all, that said firms loan some of the talent that would normally be designing to code to instead sit on the other side of the table as code-inspection attachés — like a very domain-specialized form of jury duty. Most large development firms are already experts in local building codes, given that they have to design to them; so why not use that existing talent base?)
I'm not sure about that. I'm sure there's a bit of both but Vancouver has remarkably complex (and often unique to Vancouver) policies for pretty much everything to do with real estate.