Douglas Todd: Pressure rising to kill Vancouver's 17 'villages' plan

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In the communitarian vein, the 30 Metro Vancouver members of Housing Reset, who include former NDP municipal affairs minister Darlene Marzari and retired city of Vancouver director of planning Ray Spaxman, say that “the current rushed timeline is completely unjustified.” The city’s massive villages plan is spelled out in a 329-page report released on May 26.

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“Thousands of city residents and business owners will come back from summer holidays and find that their properties have been rezoned, most having no idea beforehand of the proposal,” said Housing Reset. “Such surprises are highly unpopular, stressful and unnecessary.”

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Proposed locations of 17 new ‘villages’ in city of Vancouver. Most sites currently have only a smattering of shops. Photo by D. Todd

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What’s more, Housing Reset argues that more intense density is not even needed, particularly in this stagnant housing market in which the B.C. and federal governments announced buying up 2,200 Metro Vancouver condos that aren’t selling, with the intention of making them rent-to-own.

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The 30 Housing Reset authors argue the villages plan, by adding “nearly one million square feet” of retail floorspace, will foster uniformity and negatively impact many nearby commercial corridors, some of which already suffer up to 15 per cent storefront vacancy rates.

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“There is already enough approved development in the pipeline to meet future growth to 2050. The villages are not needed to meet this growth, nor will it be affordable. It will only create damage and dysfunction to the existing city fabric,” they say.

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In the past few years Vancouver councillors, of the right, centre and left, have pushed through many massive upzoning efforts — including in the Broadway corridor, the Rupert and Renfrew area, the Cambie corridor, and in 800-metre zones around transit hubs. That is in addition to citywide small-apartment (multiplex) zoning for most single-detached properties.

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Josh White, who has been the city’s director of planning for the past two years, issued a memo to city staff last month advising them on how to respond to residents — including at the Tuesday, July 14, public hearing. He said people “have several misconceptions” about the Villages Plan.

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“I worry that this whole initiative is too soon, too widespread and too top-down,” says Larry Beasley, former co-chief planner for Vancouver. Photo by NICK PROCAYLO /PNG

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White emphasized the vast majority of the land encompassed by the Villages Plan, which constitutes 14 per cent of the city’s properties, won’t necessarily turn into six-storey buildings with retail outlets on the ground floor. Instead, he said, most will “allow a full array of housing options that include single detached houses, duplexes, multiplexes (and) townhouses.”

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But Beasley — author of the book Vancouverism, an influential text in the world of urban planning about how to create dense, highly livable metropolises — worries that many villages “will be detrimentally over-scaled and thus will overwhelm their existing community setting.”

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The 17 new “villages” will also erode other existing neighbourhood centres, including their retail hubs, by “hijacking limited local demand,” he maintained. “Community planning over the next decade should be to reinforce and round out those existing community focal points,” Beasley said.

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“I worry that this whole initiative is too soon, too widespread and too top-down.”

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