Plan to open up more of city to medium density creates storm
Dan Fumano
The Province
As next month’s municipal elections draw closer, debates around development are a common theme throughout Metro Vancouver.
But the nature of the debate varies by municipality, as each faces its own unique challenges. On the North Shore, the focus is the effect of growth on traffic. South of the Fraser, municipalities are struggling to develop without sprawling into rural lands. In Vancouver proper, there are fears of densification leading to the mass bulldozing of residential neighbourhoods.
It’s been seven years — and two mayoral terms — since all 21 Metro Vancouver municipalities unanimously adopted a regional growth strategy calling for 500,000 new homes by 2040 to accommodate the one million additional people expected to arrive in the region.
It took almost four years of work to build a common vision among all the municipalities, said Heather McNell, Metro Vancouver’s director of regional planning.
“It’s a very high bar when it comes to a shared vision,” McNell said.
While Metro Vancouver works to accommodate tens of thousands of added residents every year, the challenge isn’t unique. According to the United Nations, virtually every country in the world is becoming increasingly urbanized, and “these trends are changing the landscape of human settlement.”
Many goals of Metro’s 2040 plan are on track: By the end of 2016, the region had added 70,000 housing units, an increase of about eight per cent since 2011. And 98 per cent of that development was inside the “urban containment boundary,” meaning not on rural or agricultural land.
“That’s a great coup,” McNell said. About 80 per cent of Metro’s growth in the period was through redevelopment and densification of existing properties. About 20 per cent was construction on previously undeveloped lands, but still mostly within that urban containment boundary, she said.
That compares with the Greater Toronto Area, where it’s a roughly 50-50 split, McNell said, or Calgary, where only 25 per cent of growth is through densification and redevelopment and 75 per cent is on undeveloped lands.
While it’s natural for residents to push back against development, urbanists generally agree that fighting sprawl is necessary.
Andy Yan, director of SFU’s City Program, said the Vancouver region has, generally, done an admirable job of “keeping that serpent of sprawl in check.”
“By containing yourself, you’re able to maximize your infrastructure spend,” Yan said. Containing sprawl not only “improves your ecological footprint,” he said, but also “keeps a good fiscal house in order.”
Vancouver
“‘Vancouverism’ is an internationally known term that describes a new kind of city living,” the city’s website proclaims. “Vancouverism means tall slim towers for density, widely separated by low-rise buildings.”
But while that describes the glass towers for which the downtown core is famous, most of Vancouver’s residential land has, for decades, been zoned exclusively for suburban-style single-family houses.
Now that could be changing. And depending on who you ask, it’s either a radical measure that will ruin the city or a long overdue attempt to make it more equitable.
In June, Vancouver council launched a housing policy called Making Room, seeking to provide more housing options in residential land zoned for so-called “single-family houses.”
It will mean exploring changing zoning across most of Vancouver’s residential land to allow medium-density options, including fourplexes and four-storey apartment buildings, housing types urban planners sometime call the “missing middle” between single-family homes and highrises.
Citywide zoning changes resulting from the policy will be decided by those who are elected next month — June’s council vote directed city staff to report back with “specific recommendations for change by June 2019.”
But Vancouver’s current mayor and council are considering “quick-start actions,” most notably opening nearly all of the city’s single-family zones to duplexes. Council is expected to vote on that shortly.
The plan has already drawn debate, as illustrated by a pair of recent Vancouver Sun commentary pieces. In July, a private sector project manager, Elizabeth Murphy, likened the proposed zoning changes to a “Chainsaw Massacre,” writing: “Demolition of our character neighbourhoods will escalate with proposed policies to rezone the entire city.” Days earlier, housing activist Reilly Wood wrote: “For Vancouverites already comfortably housed, preventing neighbourhood change is often more important than making room for newcomers. But for the rest of us, Making Room is essential and not remotely radical.”
This tension is likely to be reflected in election debates. By Wood’s estimation, “Making Room is about to become the biggest issue in Vancouver’s October election.”
The large field of candidates for Vancouver mayor this year have a range of opinions on Making Room. While some support the plan’s direction, none of the candidates newly seeking office said they’d support it next week if they were on council.
Independent candidate Kennedy Stewart said he favoured deferring a decision until after the election.
“We shouldn’t be afraid of things like duplexes in single-family neighbourhoods,” Stewart said. “But the public needs to have confidence that this plan will boost affordability and not fuel speculation. That’s why I think changes this big should be left to the next mayor and council.”
The Non-Partisan Association candidate, Ken Sim, said he wouldn’t support the amendments before council next week because he believes “the process is flawed,” although he said: “More density is crucial as our population grows, but we can do that in a way that strengthens our city instead of dividing our neighbourhoods against each other.”
Independent candidate Shauna Sylvester also said she couldn’t support Making Room as it is, adding: “This policy will only increase supply and wealth for landowners but does not actually help those in need of housing without those affordability mechanisms, which I have included and addressed in my housing platform.”
The only sitting councillor running for mayor, Coun. Hector Bremner, won’t comment on how he plans to vote on the matter before Tuesday’s public hearing. But he voted to move forward with Making Room in June, and its direction is largely consistent with his message about increasing housing supply, including, in his words, “a plan to take the lid off Vancouver’s exclusionary zoning.”
Asked recently if he supports the Making Room plan approved by the Vision-majority council, he replied: “Given that it’s what I ran on in (last year’s byelection), yes. I’m glad Vision sought to adopt this approach, even though they opposed it initially. However, I fear that this is more of an attempt at politics than actual policy making.”
Other mayoral candidates oppose Making Room. ProVancouver’s David Chen said his party opposes the plan, “as it creates an open season for developers and in the absence of a city wide community plan, it unleashes uncoordinated development.”
Coalition Vancouver’s Wai Young called Making Room “a reckless plan,” saying it “will drastically and forever change the character of the vast majority of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods.”
Such criticisms of liberalizing zoning in single-family neighbourhoods sound “very familiar” to Dan Bertolet, a Seattle-based researcher with the Sightline Institute, a public policy think-tank.
“To characterize it as a developer giveaway, it’s discounting the fact the city needs more homes,” said Bertolet. Some U.S. cities have toyed with the idea of unlocking single-family zoning, he said, and “in general, urbanists see that as a really important piece of helping to create more equitable cities over the long term, sort of undoing the mistakes of the past when cities locked down huge chunks of their land for single-family houses only, thereby making sure the only kind of housing is relatively expensive.”
In a recent article for Sightline, Bertolet wrote: “If Vancouver’s elected officials can weather the inevitable political storm and put an end to restrictive single-family zoning, their city will set an example for cities throughout North America.”