Ripoff Rezoning in East Vancouver's Norquay

BLOG POST posted on Juillet 11, 2011 by Joseph Jones

Developer Scams 12 Stories for 2699 Kingsway

Tomorrow is the day. The day I hand a two-page list of questions to Vancouver City Councillors about the literally shady proposal to rezone 2699 Kingsway, the famous old location of Wally's Burgers, that icon of the fifties Vancouver.

At a 12 July 2011 public hearing on the rezoning application. You get five minutes to speak. That amounts to 500 words if you talk really fast. One written page. (The questions are an appendix to the page I am going to try to put through my mouth.)

In July so far, I have put in more than a full work-week, ripping away at the scab of a Norquay wound that will not heal. They don't let you get at the information very far ahead of time. So here is a fast dig into one nasty case of the City of Vancouver's special abuse program for East Vancouver. Where Norquay sits at the geographic heart.

Start with sweetheart dealings that go back to the property owner's role in trying to "plan" the neighborhood back in 2006. Cut forward to a Norquay Working Group that never included enough developer interests to prop up the agenda of city planners. So planners terminated the community group and now do their own thing just with the developers. Recent evidence: the 52 comments collected at the City's open house farce obviously come from a collection of developer shills dragged in from outside the community to stuff the box.

I could go on and on — and I have, well over 5,000 words already up at Eye on Norquay, in two separate pieces. Still to come, my three-page submission to City Council. That's another 1,500 or so.

The bureaucracy is boring, the concepts are tiring, the prose is turgid. But the injustice is graphic. Let's keep the rest to three quick points.

One.  City planners love their vague perpetual talk about revitalization, which always translates into new construction — to increase rents and real estate prices, and to drive out existing residents and businesses. The community payback gesture attached to this handover of excessive height and density to the developer is  …  [drumroll]  …  $100,000 and change to attempt to mitigate the shadowing that the twelve-storey building will throw on an existing daycare immediately to the north. As one astute observer has remarked, the developer can toss off that cost from the sale price of less than one-third of one of the 129 units! With no development at all here, Norquay would be far better off.

Two.  All of the Norquay planning and policy says that new construction should provide one off-street parking space for each new dwelling unit. But those parking spaces really cut into developer profit. So this rezoning proposes a 10% reduction in parking requirement. Policy be damned when it comes to making a developer happy. By the way, community residents have consistently ranked on-street parking and traffic as major problems already.

Three.  The Urban Design Panel review of the project identified a handful of consensus key concerns. The most important two comments relate to the central public plaza, whose design
   •  Fails to orient to the street grid not perpendicular to Kingsway
   •  Plunks a garbage/utility room at the focal point of the public space
Vagueness in the City of Vancouver conditions of development means that the developer may avoid addressing these consensus criticisms made by the City's own review panel.

If you really want to upchuck about how the developer-planner-politician axis aims to chomp off a big hunk at 2699 Kingsway, dig into all the detail at Bad Omen and 2699 Kingsway. Bad Omen includes a list of four things you could do.