STORY about HousingEnvironment posted on February 6, 2011 by Joseph Jones
Gentrification Bombards the Heart of East Vancouver
City Planners Terminate Norquay Working Group
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City planners came back to Norquay on 3 February 2011 after a three-month absence. Sudden diktat set a meeting for Chinese New Year. Once again, the majority of Norquay residents suffered crass cultural insensitivity.
When staff took their plan before City Council last November, they disparaged many of their own Norquay Working Group (NWG) as a vocal minority. Planner assertion of broader support had no data to back up the claim. The Vision-NPA Council responded with a knee-jerk jackbooting of the neighborhood. That ruthless vote to approve the plan in the face of strong opposition
- Assaults thousands of residents and hundreds of acres in the heart of East Vancouver
- Abuses immigrant cultures unwilling or unable to contend with government
- Disrespects long-term community residents
- Paves the way for senseless gentrification at little gain in density
- Aims to dispossess the balance of 32% low-income family already present
- Asserts that brand-new strata duplex or triplex construction will be "more affordable"
- Incentivizes developers to build out-of-human-scale shadow-casters
- Condemns Kingsway to become a canyonized stream of motor vehicles
- Aggravates Kingsway's existing north-south wall across the community
- Assumes that a "neighbourhood centre" can be manufactured from a dedicated truck route
- Unleashes counterproductive land speculation (and medium-term de facto expropriation through arbitrary property tax increase)
With their "revitalization" prescription already rammed down Norquay throats, why did city planners bother to return? The short answer that is that planners are forced to play out an ongoing charade of consultation. The "plan" itself requires further engagement with the neighborhood about three considerations – considerations that the community never saw, considerations that the NWG heard of only at the last minute.
Those considerations are for developers, not for the neighborhood. The City spent $10,000 to have a consultant tell them in October 2010 that developers needed more incentive. Results: New base height of eight to ten storeys stretching for a mile along Kingsway, and four-storey apartments scatter-gunned into single-family neighborhoods. Perhaps the only point of agreement among all of the NWG was desire for a human-scale neighborhood, not a sprouting of outsized condos. Bye bye to all that.
The main reason for the NWG meeting was to pre-announce more Norquay open houses (scheduled for February 19 and 21). As usual, none of the content for the upcoming open houses was prepared, or made available to NWG for review in any form. This will be the sixth set of open houses that the City has lobbed at Norquay since the March 2006 kick-off event.
The two-hour NWG meeting started out with mention of a three-point agenda: debrief on the November 4th plan at Council, next steps, retrospective on lessons learned. Present: three planners [two of them – Yan Zeng and Tai Lam – never seen before, the other – Neal LaMontagne – on the verge of departure after little more than a year] and nine NWG members. Lack of planner continuity became a matter of discussion. (City planning's frequent rotation of shock troops minimizes their battle fatigue. Meanwhile the unfortunate Norquay community is left to muster its own unpaid volunteers.)
One resident reported developers already knocking at his door, offering $1.5 million for an older house on a double lot. Current assessment: $1.1 million.
Lead planner Neal LaMontagne adopted a demeanor of pained gravitas and announced that planners do their job on Norquay to address a "profound affordability problem." (Never mind where density is already found and where it is not – consider this density map for all of Vancouver.) Planners only aggravate affordability by putting large swaths of real estate into play, letting land lift evaporate in frothy speculation, and then throwing life-preserver financial concessions to developers who jump in over their heads. This is Vancouver's big ugly secret: the City is a junkie for development fees and construction jobs, and the City will break into any neighborhood to feed its manic addiction. (What can affordability matter anyway, when offshore money is allowed free run to find a haven in unoccupied condos that serve as safe deposit boxes?) The word affordability in the mouth of any planner or politician is an automatic lie.
An all-too-typical rambling gripe session served its unstated function: eat up time, have a meeting, allow planners to tick off "met with the neighborhood" on their checklist. Quite a few experienced NWG members played a limited game, and said little or nothing. Of course, their warm bodies in the room were all that the City really cared about. Thus played out one more scene in the City's endless, meaningless farce of connecting with the community. Substance had nothing to do with the exercise – except perhaps to offer planners one more opportunity to pick and choose from whatever they heard, especially when it matched up with what they have already set out to do.
Some of the exchange covered the function of the open house tactic so favored by the City. The planner said: "I feel pretty good about open houses. … What do we do to make sure we're talking to everybody?" Open house events are a set-up to generate fraudulent soft data and enable the City to avoid the rigor and greater expense of legitimate social-scientific survey. Everybody that walks through the door of an open house gets counted as a statistic for broad community consultation. A one-sentence written comment from a naive resident or a self-interested property developer – "I like the plan" – weighs just as much as pages of informed and detailed criticism. One pro, one con. That is how the open house scam works. [Personal fantasy: A roving squad of 300 people shows up at every City of Vancouver open house and leaves 300 distinct brief written comments: "I do not support this planning."]
Out of the few bits of solid information provided by the planners, only one seems likely to interest many outside of the Norquay area. The City is about to embark on an amenity and benefits strategy for Norquay (as directed by Recommendation C of the plan). Planners said they were not sure how such a strategy would work, since it's "the first time we've done this."
So Norquay becomes the subject of experiment piled on top of experiment. May this first-time experiment be too big to fail! Planner talk of need for amenity fund-raising sounded ominous. (Perhaps councillors could start off by putting on a bake sale for the Olympic Village, into which they have already channeled more than $150 million.) The Norquay community – a much bigger entity than that fabled runaway Olympic boondoggle – probably would be happy to shut up if allocated $40 million or so for a decent community arts centre on the city-owned 2400 Motel site. Planners themselves have demonstrated that Norquay is an amenity desert. Unlike Southeast False Creek, though, the area already has a lot of people and many buildings. (Trying to make something out of nothing does not come cheap. Why else did the City funnel more than $10 million into Woodwards?)
Near the end of the February 3rd session, one of the never-seen-before planners declared that the current Norquay Working Group is "over." The upcoming February 2011 open houses are supposed to feature sign-up sheets. (Maybe those will be less concealed than the ones in November 2008?) City planners say they anticipate "a new round of enthusiasm" for Norquay planning. Hardened veterans wonder where the old round of enthusiasm ever was.
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Comments
Another fantastic article!
Joseph!
Your articles are so amazing!
Thank you for keeping us all up to date with the goings on.
I really wonder if we just live in a society and community of criminals disquised as politicians.
Keep them coming!
Namaste
Tami Starlight - VMC editorial collective.
Telling it like it is
Change the name "Norquay" to the Cambie or Broadway Corridors, the West End, DTES, or Marpole, and the rest of these critical words remain the same.
This predation and single-minded effort to destroy century-old communities to feed a bankrupt city machine is coming to your neighbourhood, wherever you live. The Broadway corridor itself includes Grandview Woodlands, Mount Pleasant, Fairview, Shaughnessy, Kitsilano, and Point Grey.
Look at the mess they made of the East Fraserlands. What kind of affordable, walkable, complete community have they designed there? Do you wonder why you never hear anything anymore about this former industrial-zoned area of southeast Vancouver?
Will the same silence descend on "Olympic Village," now known as "Millenium Water" to spare the International Olympic Committee continued embarrassment? When even lower, fire-sale pricing this spring fails to move this albatross off the debt side of Vancouver's balance sheet, we and the world will wonder how Vancouver destroyed not just one but two waterfront developments, despite plowing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into them?
There is just one answer, one commonality here: Planning, poor planning.
Planning
Copy-we need to rail against the trolling for density planning practice in van. We need a mass demonstration by citizens to be held at public square, one year after the Olympic, yet to be built! Protest horse trading disguised as politicians mis-managing the bureaucracy- servicing developers re-selling the same horse, but the horse is dead- the state of non-planning in Van.
Well said Joseph. you have
Well said Joseph. you have clearly and comprehensively described the arrogant disregard of community objectives and values by this Vision Council.
After reading Newsletter #7 it id clear that Phase 2 of the Vision re-elction strategy is kicking in. To Backtrack, Phase 1 was/and is, because they haven'y quite finished in a few neighbourhoods, to ram through their agenda using their overwhelming Council majority. Phase 2 is to go back into neighbourhoods such as Norquay and set up a bunch of so-called 'local area planning committees'. The purpose of these is not to actually do any meaningful planning, but to keep citizens, read voters, busy until the election in November in the hope that these citizens will not realize they are being conned.
Look at the example of the 'Mayor's West End advisory Committee'. I am advised the chair, Clr. Reimer, doesn't know the agenda much less where the Committee is supposed to accomplish, 2 people have quit in disgust because they see the charade for what it is, they meet in secret, there are no proper minutes, requests for same and other information is ignored, etc. This committee is a complete sham and a farce. So far it has achieved nothing and is going nowhere. These proposed Norquay committees will be no different.
The commenters above about are also right on. But, the change they call for will only happen if those who have taken the time to become informed communicate what is really going on and the shortcomings to the larger population. It is also necessary to not become complacent. Over the next 8 months Vision and their politicized bureaucracy will be rolling out all kinds of goodies and busy work intended to lull the voter into thinking nirvana has been achieved. They work on the assumption that if we, Vision, say it is true, it is true. And, if we say it often enough it really is true.