STORY about HousingEnvironment posted on May 12, 2011 by Joseph Jones
Rounding Up the Herd ...
To Fabricate Policy for Vancouver Planning
We Just Met Up With City Planners
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Also in Environment:
Enhancing Community Plans is what Vancouver city planners call their recent invitation-only event. On 7 May 2011 from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm, they hosted an assembly at the Creekside Community Centre in the Olympic Village. (Back in early February, with only four days to go, planners pulled the plug on the same event, after months of preparation.)
Who was there and who was not was a function of who was asked to come and who managed to attend — or was willing to attend. Definitely not there: anyone from the Downtown Eastside, anyone from four (three east of Main, one west) of the nine community vision residential neighborhoods. The only Indigenous presence I could detect was someone from Aboriginal Community Policing. You start to get the idea already.
[ Personal aside. After pretty well deciding not to go, I caved — and showed up in order to network and observe and report. As anticipated, at the end I felt compromised by my very presence. City planning must have bit players for each new production of its farce of consultation, and I became one once again. ]
To the extent that the attendees could be controlled, a chart started off by assigning 74 persons to 12 tables, each managed by and reported back by a city staff person. A tightly-scripted agenda cycled participants through four sessions of theme discussion: Balancing, Engaging, Responding, Streamlining. (The end product, yet to come, and derived from what staff heard, will be a justification for what city planners have already decided to do. That's the drill.)
With respect to community planning, Engaging and Streamlining are fairly self-explanatory. Balancing referred to "global, regional and city-wide challenges with neighbourhood perspectives," and Responding had to do with how the city can "manage development pressures during plan-making and following plan approval, and also address high expectations regarding local amenities."
Where did all of this come from? A lot traces back to a motion approved by City Council on 4 November 2010 (Item 3) requesting that city planning staff report on
the implications of undertaking up to three additional neighbourhood planning processes, including potential impacts on finances, staffing, other ongoing planning processes, and/or changes to the process used to develop the additional neighbourhood plans.
A favorite word in the facilitator's opening remarks was faster. She was referring to the Streamlining theme, and how the City can do up local communities with a plan in shorter time with less staff and less expenditure. And faster is how the workshop ran, with the four succeeding sessions scheduled to drop from 45 minutes to 30 to 25 to 20. A cute homology.
In the background, social brush fires are popping out all across residential Vancouver, mainly sparked by out-of-scale tower proposals aimed at Chinatown, Marpole Safeway, West End, Shannon Mews, Mount Pleasant, and Arbutus Village. The Norquay precursor to this radical transformation, 2300 Kingsway, is now under construction.
A major complaint is that unwanted tall towers often contravene decades-old local area plans. Heading up the current list for redo, in order, are Grandview Woodland, West End, and Marpole. If the latter two already face explicit multiple tower incursions, imagine what must lie in wait for Grandview Woodland!
The City likes to try to maintain a façade of respectability, so it wants to update the older plans. Lots of them, fast. Then it can latch onto, and distort where necessary, policy that justifies the rezoning frenzy. (Never mind suppression of data that would demonstrate that existing zoned capacity is quite adequate.) After all, a tsunami of global capital is rushing toward the breakwaters of Vancouver, and has infinite lust for uninhabited concrete-and-steel safe deposit boxes in the sky. (Reliable informal report has it that a condo out at UBC is all sold and mostly uninhabited. Spooky for the few live bodies that rattle around the empty corridors.)
But guess what? Mount Pleasant just got a brand new plan. Now they get to fight about how that plan does or does not allow for a 26-storey tower. The sad fact is that even a brand-new plan only gets lip service, and becomes little more than a locus for city planner casuistry. Norquay got an unwanted plan in November 2010 and already has to fight creep on even that "plan."
Bottom line: Vancouver is broke. Olympic Village speculators want out. The fix? Simultaneously open up the entire city to speculator interests to juice up development fees and multiply property tax base. As the sell-out progresses, tune your ear to these keywords of misdirection: affordable, green, livable, sustainable.
Further Reading:
Next Community Plans (City of Vancouver)
An independent (no city staff here!) guide to High-Level Planning Initiatives has been put together by Grandview-Woodland Area Council.
The site for the Vancouver local of The Media Co-op has been archived and will no longer be updated. Please visit the main Media Co-op website to learn more about the organization.
Comments
More Planner Words of Misdirection
social mix
balance/healthy balance
inclusive/inclusionary
diversity
integration