Honey . . . the moat's nearly done.

Comparison:

[Vancouver, BC . . .] has a formidable downtown skyline but, seen from the sky, the vast majority of the land is devoted to houses with moats of grass.

Binyamin Appelbaum in the New York Times writes about how one major North American city has, perhaps, found a way to create more housing. Yet he notes that Vancouver, BC may have created the conditions leading to their housing crisis by encouraging certain types of housing to the exclusion of others. Hence, his clever “moats of grass“ phrase. Know anyone who has been busy mowing their own moat? Do tell.

Context:

The biggest problem, however, is that Vancouver [BC] is a city of single-family homes. It has a formidable downtown skyline but, seen from the sky, the vast majority of the land is devoted to houses with moats of grass.

Citation:

Appelbaum, Binyamin. “One City Might Have Just Cracked the Housing Crisis.” New York Times, 15 June 2026. Web.

(Graphic image courtesy of GoogleLabs, June 2026.)