Peter Waldkirch is a lawyer and housing advocate in Vancouver, BC.
Lucy Maloney (OneCity) brought forward a motion that directed staff to work on legalizing 6-floor apartments by bike routes and parks; I wrote about it here, but the point is I thought it was great. Vancouver desperately needs options for building low-rise apartments like these across the city, and legalizing…
Earlier this week I was walking through the Olympic Village when I noticed some leaflets put up on a development board. Turned out that some NIMBYs were opposing an elementary school, of all things. I did a TikTok on it that has got a lot of views (it’s embedded here…
Lucy Maloney, a Vancouver City councilor with OneCity, has a new motion coming up on September 17, 2025, that I encourage everyone to support: “Beyond Arterials: Creating More Housing Options on Low-Traffic Streets”. You can read a bit more about why this is important below, or CLICK HERE to go…
Yep, I’m taking the plunge and have signed up for TikTok. I’m @pwaldkirch. If you’re on it, give me a follow, and if you have any recommendations for good urbanism accounts there let me know! My second post there is doing surprisingly well and is getting (what seems to me)…
Stephen Quinn had me on to talk about some updates to the Broadway Plan that happened in December 2024, and it gave me a great opportunity to talk about some key ideas. Here’s a clip; the full interview is here. He introduced Abundant Housing Vancouver as a “pro-density” group, which…
It’s hard to link directly to clips of radio interviews, and the links seem to die/change often, so I’m going to start uploading some of my earlier clips to try to have ’em in one place. The topic of this one was the housing shortage generally. Listening to it, I…
I was on the Mike Smyth show (Robin Gill was filling in for him) this morning to talk about my recent op-ed, the appointment of Christine Boyle as the new housing minister, and provincial intervention in housing policy generally. I’m always happy when I get a chance to be on…
My latest op-ed for the DailyHive was posted on August 20, 2025. You can read it here.
Interventions by senior levels of government is a major interest of mine–I wrote a Master of Laws thesis on the subject, after all! The basic problem is that local governments have all the wrong incentives when it comes to housing: local voters are, pretty much by definition, people who have successfully found local housing; meanwhile, people who have been priced out of a given city don’t get to vote on the policies that have excluded them.
I’m doing an Internet!
Why start up a personal blog in 2025? The experience of Twitter going downhill drove home to me the importance of having an Internet presence that was under my control. I’m not planning on posting a lot here, but it seemed like a good idea to have a place where people can find my contact info, links to op-eds, and things like that.
