Focus needed on Vancouver’s future growth
Urban design: City’s next chief planner needs to understand pressures in an expanding market
Iwas recently invited to participate in a discussion to identify essential principles that have historically guided planning in Vancouver in the past and which can continue to guide Vancouver’s planning as the city soon welcomes a new director of planning.
The event was co-sponsored by the Vancouver City Planning Commission, of which I am a past member, and UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. About 80 people attended, many coming from planning and design professions.
Not surprisingly, given a number of people in the room had played influential roles in planning much of the Vancouver we live with today, participants were challenged to reflect on the past and share stories with features that highlight significant practices, lessons and values. We were asked to “examine the pool of lived experience and identify a set of planning principles that have represented us at our best and that have continuing value as we plan for the future of our city and its neighbourhoods”.
One speaker suggested we tell the incoming director of planning about the things on which we are not willing to compromise when it comes to planning our city. With such lofty talk, you can imagine where the discussion tended to drift. Much of it reinforced the mythology that threads through a narrative that some Vancouver planners and a small group of other urbanists adhere to. That narrative tends to claim that modern urbanism was born in Vancouver and our commitment to preserving our special healthy, equitable, nature-inspired lifestyle has us defending a set of principles on which no planner could ever compromise.
At the beginning, I felt as though this discussion was going to be like a lot of others, where we patted ourselves on our backs for developing what I call “the low-hanging fruit” over the last 30 years — brownfield sites that used to house industry and now house people and downtown neighbourhoods where there were no residential neighbours to resist densification. Thankfully, the discussion took on a realistic tone at the discussion table where I was sitting.
Rather than reflecting on where Vancouver had been, the participants at my table quickly zeroed in on future challenges. Someone identified that every challenge in Metro Vancouver stems from a common reality — that another million people are going to be pushing up the region’s population in less than 30 years and that we need to house them. It was quickly pointed out that Vancouver is committed to housing about 160,000 of that million by 2041. Those realities sharpened the focus of our discussion on how can that growth be allocated across the city and on how we begin planning for change in neighbourhoods.
It was refreshing when the discussion focused on the benefits of setting these quantifiable targets neighbourhood by neighbourhood so that citizens understand the obligations they have to plan for change in their neighbourhoods. When we are honest with citizens about the realities of inevitable change and define for them the magnitude of the challenge, it is much easier to engage them in a meaningful way to begin shaping plans collaboratively.
This whole discussion prompted me to think more about the kind of skills, experience and knowledge that the city should be looking for in candidates for the new chief planner it is about to hire. I haven’t checked back on anything I might have written before Brian Jackson was hired for the position from which he will soon retire, but it’s pretty clear to me what’s needed now.
Vancouver needs a housing planner. Not someone whose skills are in non- market or social housing. It has someone with that experience working on that sector. The fact is that 96 per cent of the housing in Canada always has been and likely always will be supplied by the free market. Vancouver needs a chief planner who understands that we need to let that market work quickly and efficiently to supply the housing Vancouver desperately needs to accommodate population growth.
It needs someone who understands that the city largely controls how quickly and how efficiently the market responds to the demand for housing we need. It needs someone who also understands that most of the new housing that will get built in Vancouver in the future will get built in existing neighbourhoods where housing already exists. It needs someone who isn’t afraid to communicate with and directly engage citizens and start by conveying the reality to them about the population they will need to accommodate.
Vancouver also needs a chief planner who will cut through multiple layers of old regulations, multiple layers of bureaucratic processes and dispel multiple myths to allow new housing ideas to turn into new housing for people.
Yes, the zoning for most Vancouver single-family neighbourhoods now allows for up to three dwellings to be accommodated on each lot. Vancouver’s new chief planner needs to make it easier for those three dwellings to be built. That person then needs to push the envelope further and entertain ideas for new dwelling types and new forms of tenure that might allow land in our existing single-family neighbourhoods to be used more efficiently.
That new head planner needs to coach the planning department staff to develop the skills needed to say “yes” more often rather than using their discretion to say “no.”
They need to feel safe in taking risks and in reaching outside of city hall to listen to neighbours and, yes, try to engage citizens in physical planning rather than simply offering to record their wish lists and vision statements.
When candidates for Vancouver’s new director of planning are interviewed, the first question they should be asked is do you know Vancouver’s share of the future population growth and how many people Vancouver has committed to house over the next 25 to 30 years? That’s where it all starts.
Another million people are going to be pushing up the region’ s population in less than 30 years and...we need to house them.