A friend, broadcaster Jody Vance, swears to me she did not pull strings last week to get her issue heard on the local news. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had, though. I’m about to do the same.
Jody’s peeve was that she’d been trying and trying and trying to get a local park concession stand opened to sell hotdogs for her child’s Little League, mainly to raise funds but also to just feed hungry kids and parents. The city’s Park Board staff was sufficiently studying the matter as to make it a joke, so Jody tweeted, got on the news, and shamed them.
I’ve been coaching girls’ softball for a dozen years and briefly took on an executive role with the association. I love to help children’s sport because I remember how pivotal it was in my teens. It builds social and physical skills, gets young people away from the screen for a few hours at a time, and teaches much about life.
But as a city, Vancouver without question does a horrible job of supporting these activities. When our teams visit surrounding communities they find pristine fields of play, active parks that compel you to linger, and a culture of connection between sport and city.
In investigating this as a municipal candidate last election, it became evident that the City of Vancouver keeps our Park Board on a short leash with a meagre discretionary budget. The board, one of North America’s few remaining, can itself be dissolved with a simple 6-5 council vote. For as long as I’ve paid attention, the city’s control-and-command culture has treated the board’s work like an expense instead of an investment.
For such a beautiful city, we have failed ourselves in ministering to our parks.
We have lapsed into what Jane Jacobs warned of in her seminal 1961 work, The Death and Life of American Cities, in which parks are deprived of the vitality necessary to their success.
With a few exceptions – Stanley, Queen Elizabeth, Kits Beach, among them – they exude monotony as largely fallow fields. They lack diversity and activity, particularly culture. Rather than serve as walking-distance centrepieces of neighbourhoods, they serve as fleeting excursions. So much more could be done with them, and let’s hope this municipal campaign focuses properly on this fundamental.
Be real here, candidates: we are not solving the Vancouver affordability crisis any time soon, no matter the effort of governments to further transfer wealth through tax.
Our politicians and we citizens would be better off if the focus became the city’s achievable liveability instead of its elusive affordability. Six-figure houses are not coming back to Vancouver; five-star parks could, though.
To do that requires disruption – money to bring many more performances into the spaces on weekends, greater incentives for private but highly regulated investment in facilities, and perhaps (gasp) consideration of whether we might hive off (in a select few cases) some part of the space for much-needed housing that would pay for the park improvement. After all, in Jacobs’ landmark book she idealizes parks as places surrounded by, not distanced from, housing. If we will not invest in them, then let private enterprise pour funds into their thriving.
While we are at it, who was the genius that determined gravel fields in our schools encouraged play? Find companies that will put synthetic turf so we can encourage safer sport year-round. When children are done for the day, rent the fields to adults in the evening, and give the money back to the schools for their activities.
I know, I know, horror of horrors: an energy company or a developer might fix the field. Get over it. Kids are in need as adults act like kids over this; if you’re not prepared to successfully move public money into place, then let others do so.
We need leadership that will fortify the Park Board, whose recent 10-point master plan, titled VanPlay, is a monument of ambitious swagger without adequate coin to back it up.
Jody’s tweet begat a story which begat a Park Board decision to at last restore the tube steaks after a decade. We need to keep the grilling going, to push for what she did and get our parks into this century.
