Vancouverites say they want vibrant, walkable neighbourhoods. So why is the 'villages plan' so controversial?

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Jagger is in her 70s and takes care of her adult daughter, who has developmental disabilities. She had considered potentially building a laneway house on her property at some point, where someone could live and also help around the home. But, she says, the new changes would prevent her from building a laneway house.

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“I understand the city has to change, it has to grow. We wall want vibrant, wonderful, walkable neighbourhoods,” Jagger said. “I just hope they can come to some sort of decision to make things a bit more flexible, so that existing homeowners aren’t punished. … To not lock them down, to freeze them.”

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Michael Geller, a long-time architect and planner in Vancouver, has never met Jagger, but knows “a lot of other people who have exactly the same concerns.”

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Geller says he is “completely supportive of the idea of introducing community retail” and adding new, denser housing types to these neighbourhoods.

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“I agree entirely with the objective,” he said. “But this just doesn’t make sense. The real concern I have is what does it do to those 520 properties. … You’re freezing all these properties.”

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Bryn Davidson, whose company Lanefab specializes in medium-density residential buildings such as multiplexes and laneway homes, is also broadly supportive of the villages plan.

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“It’s a shift 50 years in the making,” Davidson said. “For the last 50 years, we have put single-family character as the top of our planning priorities, and we’re now at a point in history where we really need small-lot apartment buildings to be part of our communities again, like they were a century ago.”

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But he also thinks “it’s a problem to rezone in a way that doesn’t allow the existing residential uses to continue — so if you live there, you can’t build a laneway house, or if your house burns down, you can’t rebuild the house.”

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By the city’s calculations, only four per cent of the properties in the villages plan are on future high streets and face this kind of rezoning.

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But, Davidson says, this issue “has become the centrepiece of a lot of the opposition … and it’s creating a lot of conflict for the plan in general.”

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“I think that that’s a problem, but I think it’s fixable,” Davidson said.

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In a memo last month to the mayor and council, Vancouver’s chief planner Josh White seemed to open the door to potential tweaks to address this issue. White’s memo acknowledges public concerns about how the rezoning could affect properties on future high streets, and advises the mayor and council that if they choose, they can respond by proposing amendments to the plan based on what they hear at the public hearing.

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Council may want to tweak the plan, but it’s also possible they may punt it back to staff for more work, especially considering how close it is to the October municipal election. ABC Vancouver ran and won a majority on a largely pro-development, pro-business platform in 2022 and supported most development proposals in their first three years in office. But more recently, as the municipal election date approaches, ABC’s majority has declined to approve some more controversial proposals, including a Strathcona tower complex and a West End hotel.

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The villages public hearing begins Tuesday evening. But with more than 170 people already registered to speak as of Monday afternoon, council is unlikely to reach a final decision this week on whether to approve the plan, reject it, tweak it, or ask staff to do more work and report back next year, and let whoever sits on the next council decide.

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