Just a thought, just a suggestion, folks in charge, but . . .
Now that we’re taxing foreign purchases of local property.
Now that we’re cracking down on the rogues in real estate practice.
Now that we’re considering a surcharge on the vacant house.
Now that we’re salivating about the prospect of infrastructure spending on transit.
Now that we’re anticipating a national housing strategy to lead us out of some of our woes.
Do you think we could have a plan?
Vancouver, unlike many adjacent communities and many counterparts nationally, hasn’t developed a comprehensive citywide development plan since the days of the original Pokemon.
Even back then, we did not anticipate the influx of interest from Hong Kong as it transferred control to China or the advent of an ultra-influential Chinese economy, or the long-term impact of hosting Expo 86 as Vancouver’s calling card on the wider world or the devalued Canadian dollar or the near-zero interest rates.
We didn’t think anyone would be a climate-change refugee because we didn’t know about climate change. We never anticipated anyone would want to demolish the Vancouver Special. In short, we didn’t know people would crave this city quite as they have or carve into it an often incongruent collection of condos in an often cryptic process that neighbourhoods and even the developers couldn’t decipher.
So in tech parlance: As we reboot housing, isn’t it opportune to create a new version of the program we all use to get us on the same platform? What’s there to fear? For years, the common complaint of the community has been about consultation. The consultation methods of the city government make divide-and-conquer look like the sharing-and-caring methods of Montessori. If there is a front-loaded query of the neighbourhood about how it can be developed, it’s often in the form of loaded questions. As in: is this plan excellent or merely outstanding? Do you believe that cycling is good for your blood pressure? Are you opposed to affordable housing?
If there is a public hearing about these developments, it’s often in the form of a we-can-tick-the-box-now event for council to validate the preconception. Two hundred people showed up, fulminated and were duly counted as consulted. Sorry, but 311 is about as accurate as open-line radio in gauging what we feel.
District by district, bit by bit, the Vision council presses new development upon the pastiche of more granular neighbourhood plans without any, er, true vision. The effect is to disjoint those who live here from those who wish others to do so. Mistrust and suspicion ensue about development indebtedness, block-by-block defensive behaviour plays out among the residents, and any bigger picture that might be pursued is lost as emotions come out sideways.
Even the recent citizens assembly in Grandview-Woodland – created when the first dog’s breakfast was tossed at the district and made the community hurl – didn’t particularly appease. And that was the best effort yet in eight years of governing, with a cohort that politically supports the administration and a hand-picked assembly. Just think how the rest of the city feels when the movie comes to a theatre near them.
I know someone who knows someone who knows a therapist who says there are three basic human needs: to be seen, heard and understood.
Can we really say in 2016 that our community is seen, heard and understood when it comes to how we are tackling the vexing issues of density and development as they conjoin with the preservation or evolution of neighbourhoods and their identities?
A citywide plan wouldn’t take long to hatch, and while skeptics claim it might stop a couple of things in their tracks, even that I doubt. It would help frame discussions with neighbourhoods and, ideally, generate that precious but presently missing buy-in. It would give all of us a blueprint instead of an encrypted message.
In a city with so much at stake in how it develops its next phase, we deserve to be on the same page.
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development
