Building a custom home in Richmond: flat land, flood levels, soft soil and the ALR

Most people who ask us about Richmond have watched us build on a slope. A Capitol Hill lot with a retaining wall and a height calculation, a Burnaby Mountain lot where the geotechnical report decides the foundation. Then a parent's lot in Richmond comes up, flat as a table, and the assumption is that flat means simple.

Flat means different. Richmond sits on the Fraser River delta, on Lulu Island and Sea Island, at an elevation the dikes hold the sea and the river away from. The ground is silt, clay and, in places, peat. The first question on a Richmond lot is how high the main floor has to be, the second is what the soil will carry, and only then does the zoning conversation start. This guide walks through what changes compared with a Burnaby build, with every municipal rule linked to the City page it came from.

Why build a custom home in Richmond instead of Burnaby?

People choose Richmond for the same reasons they choose Burnaby: it is close, established, and full of older houses on lots wide enough to rebuild on. The lots are flat, which means no retaining walls, no walkout basement designed around a grade change, and no argument over average grade.

The trade is below your feet. A Burnaby slope lot asks you to manage water running downhill. A Richmond lot asks you to build above water that would otherwise be there, on ground that moves under load.

The flood construction level comes first

Richmond's Flood Plain Designation and Protection Bylaw 8204 designates all land within the city as floodplain. Section 3.1 says a person shall not build the finished concrete floor, the underside of any floor system that flood water could damage, or the top of any pad supporting a room, below the flood plain construction level shown in Schedule B, where the building is or could be used as a dwelling. The level is measured in metres above the Geodetic Survey of Canada datum.

Section 3.2 gives three ways to get there: structural elevation of the floor system, adequately compacted fill under the building, or a combination. Section 3.4 adds that no area below the level may hold a furnace or other fixed equipment that flood water could damage.

There are exemptions worth knowing. Section 4.1 says that on parcels surrounded by a standard dike, and on Sea Island and Mitchell Island, the elevation rule does not apply to a renovation with no addition, to the portion of a building used as a carport or garage, or to farm buildings other than dwellings. Some areas carry their own rule: in Area A and in residential Burkeville the floor has to be at least 0.3 metres above the highest crown of any adjacent road, in Steveston Village at or above the fronting sidewalk, and in Terra Nova/West Cambie at or above 2.6 metres GSC. The City's homeowner permit guide also reminds owners to check the title for a registered minimum flood plain building elevation restriction before applying.

What this does to the design is the interesting part. Raising the habitable floor means the front entry climbs steps, or the driveway rises to a garage that is allowed to sit lower than the living space, or the main floor sits over a crawlspace designed to get wet. We wrote about the trade-offs in crawlspace versus slab from a Burnaby point of view; in Richmond the flood level often makes the decision for you. Get the number for the parcel from the City before the architect draws a section, because the section is drawn around it.

Soft ground, preloading and piles

The City of Richmond's Bulletin Building-12, revised in July 2025, is the soils rule for single and two-family houses, and it sorts lots into three kinds. An undisturbed clay lot with less than 15 cm of sand fill and firm bearing generally needs no geotechnical input. A clay lot that has been disturbed by demolition or excavation, has questionable bearing, or has been backfilled, needs an evaluation report by a geotechnical engineer. And a lot where peat is present needs a geotechnical report, confirmation of compaction, a foundation designed by a professional engineer, and letters of assurance.

Peat is the one that changes the schedule. It compresses under load for a long time, and a house set on it without preparation settles unevenly for years. The two standard answers are preloading and piles. Preloading means placing a large mound of fill on the building site, leaving it for a period the engineer sets, often months, while the ground beneath settles under that weight, then removing the fill and building on ground that has already done most of its moving. Piles carry the house down through the soft layer to something firmer. The geotechnical engineer chooses between them and monitors the settlement. The soil testing we describe for a Fraser Valley lot applies here, with the focus moved from drainage to bearing.

On a teardown-and-rebuild, the old house's demolition disturbs the soil, and under the bulletin that alone triggers the geotechnical evaluation.

On a Burnaby slope the geotechnical report tells you how to hold the hill back. On a Richmond lot it tells you how long to wait before you pour.

Icon Projects Team

Seismic and liquefaction, stated generally

Richmond Fire-Rescue's earthquake page explains the risk in the City's own words: the entire Lower Mainland is in one of the most seismically active regions of Canada, and during an earthquake, shaking can cause loosely packed, water-saturated sediments such as sand or silt to turn into a fluid mass. That is liquefaction, and delta soils are where it happens. The same page says computer soil models predict the dikes will sustain some damage but remain an intact barrier to flooding.

For a single house, the response is engineering. The BC Building Code 2024 carries updated earthquake requirements that apply to permits applied for on or after March 10, 2025. The geotechnical engineer's report classifies the site, the structural engineer designs the foundation and the frame to the code, and the preload or piles are part of the same conversation. The engineers do it for that parcel.

Dikes, pumps and where the water goes

Richmond's flood protection page describes the system: 49 kilometres of dikes holding back the sea and the river, and 39 drainage pump stations pumping rainwater out of the city, built to withstand spring freshets and king tides and to handle a 1-in-500 flooding event. The current focus is raising the dikes from 3.5 metres to 4.7 metres.

Two things follow for a builder. First, section 2.1 of Bylaw 8204 keeps fill and structural supports 7.5 metres from a dike right of way where a standard dike exists and 30 metres where one does not, so a lot backing onto the dike trail has a building envelope shaped by that line. Second, the City drains the island by pumping, which means surface drainage on a flat lot is designed to the City's ditches and storm system. The bylaw is also candid, in section 7.1, that the City makes no representation that a building built to the bylaw will not be damaged by flooding.

Richmond's permit process and single-family zoning

Richmond's Zoning Bylaw 8500 was adopted on November 16, 2009, and the Richmond Interactive Map shows the zone for any address. The single detached zones are in section 8.1, and for RS1 lots the rules that shape a custom home are these: one principal dwelling per lot; a maximum floor area ratio of 0.55 applied to the first 464.5 square metres of lot area plus 0.30 applied to the rest; a maximum lot coverage of 45 percent for buildings; a minimum front yard of 6.0 metres; interior side yards of 2.0 metres on lots 20 metres or wider, 1.8 metres between 18 and 20 metres, and 1.2 metres on narrower lots; and a rear yard of at least 6.0 metres, deeper on larger lots.

The provincial small-scale multi-unit housing rules landed here too. The City's housing legislation page records that on June 24, 2024, Council amended the zoning of almost 27,000 single-family and duplex lots, and the new RSM zones allow three dwelling units on a lot of 280 square metres or less, four on a larger lot, and six where the lot is within 400 metres of a prescribed bus stop and the owner meets the affordable housing condition. Steveston got an extension to December 30, 2030. A custom single-family home is still permitted in those zones; the multiplex option sits beside it.

On the permit itself, the City's building approvals page carries the application form for new single-family and SSMUH construction and the energy rule: since October 31, 2023, every new Part 9 residential building in Richmond must meet Step 5 of the Energy Step Code with emissions level EL-2, or Step 4 with EL-3, or Step 3 with EL-4. The homeowner permit guide lists the building inspection sequence, and it differs from Burnaby's: after the forms inspection there is a separate line for a survey certificate to be submitted to the Permit Centre, and an elevation and vapour barrier inspection before the slab is placed. We treat that elevation inspection as the field check on the floor level.

The ALR on the east side

Drive east on Westminster Highway past No. 6 Road and the subdivisions give way to cranberry fields. Richmond's agriculture page puts the number on it: 4,993 hectares, 39 percent of the city, is inside the Agricultural Land Reserve, farmed by 184 farms as of the 2021 census. A 2016 Council report on a subdivision along No. 7 Road describes the applicants as third-generation cranberry farmers in East Richmond, and the land as ALR zoned AG1.

A house on that land is allowed, and it is capped twice. The provincial Agricultural Land Commission limits a principal residence in the ALR to a total floor area of 500 square metres and no more than 1,000 square metres of fill for its construction, and it says local governments may further restrict residences through zoning. Richmond does. Under section 14.1 of the Zoning Bylaw, the house and its accessory buildings on an AG1 lot are limited to the lesser of the residential floor area formula or 400 square metres, inside a farm home plate of at most 1,000 square metres on lots of 0.2 hectares or more, at a maximum height of 2 storeys and 9.0 metres. A bigger house needs ALC approval.

If a family lot on the east side is the plan, confirm the ALR status and the zone on the Interactive Map before anyone sketches a floor plan. The ALR cap and the flood construction level together decide the size and the height of the ground floor.

What stays the same as a Burnaby build

A Richmond custom home answers to the same provincial rules. It carries the same 2-5-10 home warranty: two years on materials and labour, five on the building envelope, ten on structure, mandatory for every home built by a licensed residential builder. On delta soil that ten-year structural coverage is the reason the preload and the piles get done properly. It is built to the same BC Building Code, and the custom home process we run in Burnaby runs the same way here, with the geotechnical engineer and the flood level moved to the front of it.

So the order of operations on a Richmond lot is: pull the flood construction level and any elevation restriction on title, confirm the zone and the ALR status on the Interactive Map, get the soils evaluated the moment the old house comes down, and let the engineer tell you how long the ground needs before the concrete truck arrives. Do those four things in that order and Richmond is a good place to build a flat, quiet, well-founded house.

Frequently asked questions

What is the flood construction level for a house in Richmond BC?

It is the elevation, in metres above the Geodetic Survey of Canada datum, below which the City of Richmond's Flood Plain Designation and Protection Bylaw 8204 says a habitable floor cannot be built. The level is set area by area in Schedule B of the bylaw, and all land in the city is designated floodplain. You meet it by raising the floor structure, by building on compacted fill, or a combination, and no furnace or fixed equipment susceptible to flood damage can sit below it.

Does a garage in Richmond have to be above the flood construction level?

On parcels surrounded by a standard dike, and on Sea Island and Mitchell Island, Bylaw 8204 exempts the portion of a building used as a carport or garage from the elevation requirement. Renovations without an addition are also exempt. Some neighbourhoods have their own rules, such as Burkeville and Area A, where the floor has to be at least 0.3 metres above the crown of the adjacent road, and Terra Nova/West Cambie, where the figure is 2.6 metres GSC.

Do I need a geotechnical report to build a house in Richmond?

It depends on what the lot is made of. Richmond's Bulletin Building-12, revised July 2025, says an undisturbed clay lot with less than 15 cm of sand fill and firm bearing generally needs no geotechnical input. A clay lot that has been disturbed, excavated or backfilled needs an evaluation report by a geotechnical engineer. Where peat is present the City requires a geotechnical report, confirmation of compaction, a foundation designed by a professional engineer and letters of assurance.

What is preloading and why do Richmond builders do it?

Preloading means placing a large mound of fill on the building site for a period of months so that soft, compressible ground settles under that weight before the house is built, then removing the fill and building on ground that has already done its settling. A geotechnical engineer decides whether it is needed, how much fill and for how long, and monitors the settlement. It is one of the tools, alongside piles, for building on the peat and soft clay that sit under parts of Richmond.

Is Richmond at risk of liquefaction in an earthquake?

Richmond Fire-Rescue's own preparedness page explains that during an earthquake, shaking can cause loosely packed, water-saturated sediments such as sand or silt to turn into a fluid mass, and that the whole Lower Mainland is in one of the most seismically active regions of Canada. The same page says computer soil models predict the dikes will sustain some damage but remain an intact barrier to flooding. For a single house, the geotechnical engineer assesses the site and the structural engineer designs the foundation to the current BC Building Code seismic requirements.

How is Richmond protected from flooding?

By a perimeter dike system and pumps. The City of Richmond reports 49 kilometres of dikes holding back the sea and the river and 39 drainage pump stations pumping rainwater out of the city, designed to withstand spring freshets and king tides and to handle a 1-in-500 flood event. The City's current focus is raising the dikes from 3.5 metres to 4.7 metres. The flood plain bylaw is explicit that the City makes no representation that a building built to it will not be damaged by flooding.

How big a house can I build on an RS1 lot in Richmond?

For single detached housing zoned RS1, Richmond Zoning Bylaw 8500 sets the maximum floor area ratio at 0.55 applied to the first 464.5 square metres of lot area plus 0.30 applied to the rest, with one principal dwelling per lot and a maximum lot coverage of 45 percent for buildings. For RS1/F and RS1/G lots inside the Agricultural Land Reserve the house is capped at the lesser of that formula or 400 square metres. Use the Richmond Interactive Map to confirm the exact sub-zone for a given address.

Can I build a custom home on ALR farmland in Richmond?

One principal dwelling is permitted on an AG1 lot, but its size is capped. The Agricultural Land Commission's provincial rules limit a principal residence in the ALR to a total floor area of 500 square metres and allow local governments to be stricter, and Richmond is: on AG1 land the house and its accessory buildings together are limited to the lesser of the residential floor area formula or 400 square metres, within a farm home plate of at most 1,000 square metres on lots of 0.2 hectares or more, at a maximum height of 2 storeys and 9.0 metres. Anything larger needs ALC approval.