Embracing Citizens and our City

CC #143—My remarks at yesterday's rally. What comes next?

More than 500 citizens rallied yesterday to pause the Broadway Plan—image by David Fine

My remarks yesterday:

The Broadway Plan was passed by Vancouver City Council in the summer of 2022. It covers about 500 blocks, from Vine Street in the West to Clark Drive in the east, and from 1^st to 16^th Avenues north to south. Now Broadway is actually a renamed 9^th Avenue, so the Plan spans from 8 blocks north of Broadway to 7 blocks south—a huge swath of the city that’s home to a large percentage of the city’s affordable rental housing stock. It’s also home to many affordable strata buildings, but their future is determined by their resident/owners rather than their landlord. That matters. The Plan is touted as a 30-year plan that will add 30,000 new homes to the city. Remember those numbers—30,000 homes over 30 years. And by the way, no new schools, community centres or parks are planned for the Broadway Plan’s 500+ block area. None!

I and many others here today tried and did manage to participate in one or more of city staff’s curated zoom meetings about the Broadway Plan with the public—attendance was limited in number but not in participation—many attendees were from outside Vancouver, even outside Canada. Audience questions were only seen by city staff, who decided which to answer. Timing was usually during dinner. No neighbourhood associations were invited until a token meeting at the last moment of consultation. This may explain why more than 200 folks spoke against the Plan when finally permitted during the lengthy public hearing. Regardless, the Plan was passed by City Council in June 2022 and came into force that September—just over two years ago.

When the Plan was finally published in detail, I read it carefully and worked with Stephen Bohus to model what it meant—more than 500 towers by our conservative estimation. We were heavily criticized at the time by the then-mayor, by the development industry, even by architects.

And yet, after just two years into this so-called 30-year plan, Stephen and I have sadly been shown to be correct, with more than 90% of the first 100+ proposed rezonings located in exactly the places and at exactly the heights we predicted. That means two-thirds of the thirty-year plan’s home construction targets are in play in just two years—that’s 20,000 of the Plan’s 30,000 homes in two years rather than 30. What a bonanza for developers, what a tragedy for the affected neighbourhoods. And still no parks, no community centres, no schools in the mix.

But it gets worse. City staff are about to produce an “update” to the Plan in which they will apparently recommend that the two towers per block in the original Broadway Plan that we modelled to criticism and disdain be expanded to four or even five towers per block. The illustration below shows what four or five high-rises per block looks like in Brisbane, a city I recently visited, described by Forbes business magazine as “severely unaffordable”—high-rise windows facing walls at most 20 feet away. It ain’t pretty. It ain’t spacious. And it sure ain’t affordable.

Four or five towers per block in Brisbane, a city with a 0.98% rental vacancy rate

The province has exacerbated these conditions with adoption of its Bills 44, 46 and 47 which mandate ever higher density largely at the cost of affordable rental and ownership homes for folks who are not wealthy and have spent their adult lives living in and contributing to the Vancouver that is now imperilled by the unsupported and unscientific claims that “If we build it they will move right in.” There are no peer-reviewed scientific studies that show how building higher and denser improve affordability—none in Canada; none in the US; none in the UK; none in Australia or New Zealand—none anywhere in the English speaking world. But there are peer-reviewed studies showing the reverse, where density and height detract from affordability and livability.

The latest example of how “If we build it they will move right in” is working out is at Larch Street and 2^nd Avenue in Kitsilano, a heavily government subsidized private development of rental homes that’s 40% empty months after opening, possibly because the spaces are so small and the rents are so high. Welcome to the Broadway Plan’s future for you.

And have no doubt that with exploratory drilling already happening along Broadway west of Vine Street, there is every intention by government to expand the Broadway Plan out to UBC despite no economic case for a SkyTrain expansion there. In which case, say goodbye to the rest of Kitsilano. Unless we pause the plan.

The recently blocked-off steps to city hall are a metaphor for the effect of these bills and Vancouver’s Council—to block any critical public input to a spreading pox of spot rezonings that are already destroying neighbourhoods, evicting long-time residents and threatening all of the existing community amenities that used to be funded by modest redevelopment. The long-established principle that “Growth pays for growth”, which gave us the parks, schools and community centres in Coal Harbour and False Creek North, for example, is gone. Now it’s us who pay for the cancerous growth that profits the few at a cost to the many. We pay in lost affordable homes, lost dignity, lost community.

There are alternative solutions that some of the following speakers will touch on. Many of these solutions have been successfully implemented elsewhere and here in Vancouver in the past. They lie in our own recent history of affordable rentals, co-operatives and even strata projects, forgotten or never learned by the current generation of politicians and city staff. The adoption of alternative solutions will require bold leadership that we currently lack. We must demand that the Broadway Plan NOT be expanded as proposed by city staff, rather that it be paused until the real harms contained in it have been not only addressed, but resolved for the benefit of you, your families, friends and neighbours. We can do this and we can do this better by working together.

Thank you for being here today, for listening and for caring about this city where we love to live.

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I was the first of several speakers at the rally. Please refer to CityHallWatch for transcripts of other presentations and details of the emergent “Broadway Plan Action Group” (BPAG) —please get involved for the sake of our city.

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The post above is 1018 words, about a six minute read, twice as long as what the Vancouver City Council now permits for public presentations at its meetings.

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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.