Bitcoin beats Broadway

CC# 144—City Council cuts off speakers against "turbocharging" the Broadway Plan while allowing extra speaking time for Bitcoin promoters.

Four and Five towers per block on Hope Street, Brisbane Australia

The remarks below were (mostly) delivered to Vancouver City Council at a public meeting yesterday. At the beginning of the meeting, the Mayor flipped the agenda so that proposed Broadway Plan amendments went from the top to the bottom of the agenda, requiring 139 registered speakers to completely rearrange their work day in order to be heard in the evening (until 11pm as it unfolded) rather than starting in the morning. Instead, Council focused on the Mayor’s proposal to study the use of Bitcoin for city finances. Some 30 speakers were in favour of this—several were allowed to speak longer than the three minutes allotted to the rest of us. Read on to see how the Broadway Plan amendments played out.

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“My name is Brian Palmquist. I am an architect and a Vancouver resident, speaking in opposition to these proposed amendments to the Broadway Plan.

In the three minutes allotted by this Council to me to explain my objections to the amendments proposed in the week old 350-page report before you, I can only focus on one of my many areas of concern about these amendments. I will focus on Figure 3 on page 6 of the report, which illustrates where limits on the number and height of towers are proposed to be removed.

Figure 3 — All the hatched areas will have no limits on the number per block or height of towers.

If adopted by Council, these proposed amendments will result in as many as 180 blocks¹ in the Broadway Plan area that resemble this picture, taken by me about a month ago in Brisbane, Australia, a city Forbes business magazine describes as “severely unaffordable.” The rental vacancy rate in Brisbane is less than 1% and those few rentals available are advertised this way: “Room in two-bedroom apartment, $700 per week.” And $700 per week per room is the low end of what I found and what’s emerging in Vancouver at projects like the “affordable” new rental at Larch and Second Avenue.

Most of what you see in this photo has been built in the past six years, not 30 as suggested by city staff, so development can occur long before results are understood. There are five towers along this block of the ironically named Hope Street, many more behind, consistent with what the proposed Broadway Plan amendments permit. And yet the Brisbane vacancy rate is still less than 1% and the city is “severely unaffordable.”

All of this will be likely in Vancouver if Council adopts these proposed amendments. Photos are more realistic than city staff’s aerial isometrics.

To those who argue that the amended Plan includes minimum separations between towers, I will note that there are already several proposals under the Plan that violate the Plan’s so-called minimum separation and height guidelines, NOT requirements, without any mitigating circumstances, just the proponent’s desire to build more, higher, wider and closer.

These proposed Broadway Plan amendments would remove the limit on the number and height of towers per block in more than one-third of the blocks in the Broadway Plan area—that’s more than 180 blocks—way more than the province’s dictatorial Transit Oriented Areas require. Even more to the point, the proposed amendments would permit this appearance continuously along Broadway for 13 blocks west of Oak all the way to Vine Street as well as several multi block segments east of Cambie Street. Those potential high-rise walls are what you are really voting on today. Those walls may take a while to appear, but with 60% of the Broadway Plan’s original home targets already in play in 2 years rather than the original Plan’s estimate of 30 years and in the clear absence of enforced planning rules, this will be the result, and sooner rather than later. This wall in Brisbane only took 6 years to build.”

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This was the place where the meeting Chair, Councillor Lenny Zhou, interrupted me and prevented me from completing my remarks. When I noted that I only needed 20 more seconds to finish, which was the extra time he had allotted to several pro-Bitcoin speakers earlier in the day, he turned off my microphone.

Below is the paragraph I would have concluded with:

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“I ask that you set aside this report and pause implementation of the Broadway Plan pending more comprehensive public and neighbourhood engagement instead of this “one size fits all – badly” approach. In the words of Martin Luther King, Junior, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” There is no light on Hope Street and there will be none ever again along and around Broadway if this report is approved. Please pause the Plan.

Thank you.”

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City Council reconvenes at 6pm today (Thursday) for debate and decision around Broadway Plan amendments. You can listen and watch from this link.

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Brian Palmquist writes on the traditional, ancestral and unceded lands of the Musqueam people. He is a Vancouver-based architect, building envelope and building code consultant and LEED Accredited Professional (the first green building system). He is semi-retired, still teaching, writing and consulting a bit, but not beholden to any client or city hall. These conversations mix real discussion with research and observations based on a 50-year career including the planning, design and construction of almost every type and scale of project. He is the author of the Amazon best seller and AIBC Construction Administration course text, “An Architect’s Guide to Construction.” A glutton for punishment, he recently started writing a book about how we can Embrace, Enhance and Evolve the places we love to live.

1. I counted the area of hatched blocks on Figure 3.