STORY about Housing posted on July 21, 2010 by stimulator
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside Plans Its Future
Photo by Tami Starlight
Also posted by stimulator:
Also in Housing:
The Downtown Eastside, one of Vancouver's 23 neighbourhoods, released its own grassroots vision, Assets to Action, at a press conference on 20 July 2010. The self-directed process that resulted in this vision statement involved 1200 community residents over a period of two years. An intensive working group review capped off a series of workshops, a questionnaire, and community mapping.
Since Vancouver adopted CityPlan in 1995 as its guide to the future of city planning, nine residential neighbourhoods have been subjected to an official planning exercise called community visions. The resulting documents are supposed to inform subsequent implementation of the visions.
A city map locates 19 future "neighbourhood centres" that those visions are supposed to spawn. That same map also does a strange thing with the Downtown Eastside, blacking it out and declaring that this one neighbourhood alone is a target for "other initiatives."
An inkling of what those ominous "other intitatives" might amount to surfaced in the recent Historic Area Height Review. The title is telling. When a gentrification agenda seeks to attack a vulnerable area, what else is there to consider but how many new towers can go how high in how many places? Developers and planners alike seem fixated on expensive view cocoons embedded in vertical gated communities. Surrounding social impacts be damned, when such big money is at stake.
This kind of city planning is not about ecology or density – or even about the Sullivanesque fusion trademarked as EcoDensity™. After all, the Downtown Eastside already consumes very little, recycles a lot, favors walking as a transit mode, and houses a great many people. (Just take a look at the City of Vancouver's own population density map to see who is already "green" on that parameter – and who is not.)
The eight existing official community visions go heavy on things – like how much and what kind of new things (aka housing types) developers can use to take out the already-built neighbourhoods. The visions also say precious little about tens of thousands of existing residents, and what kind of social impacts a deliberately accelerated redevelopment will have.
Carnegie Community Action Project and the Downtown Eastside chose to base their vision on people – the people who live in the neighbourhood right now, and what those people want and need. What a revolutionary concept! Something has gotten stood on its head here.
This grassroots vision for the Downtown Eastside makes Vancouver's existing official community visions look like top-down junk. And lately the City of Vancouver has been disrespecting even its own junk.
In the face of a development tsunami that is poised to swamp all Vancouver neighbourhoods, especially those on the East Side, the Downtown Eastside has just launched an exciting new initiative.
Watch to see how the City of Vancouver responds to this vision.
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Action item: Email or phone a city councillor (or all of them) and ask why the City of Vancouver Planning Department has put all of the community vision committees into a never-ending review and cut off their budgets.
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