The Villages Plan - Not too late to speak out!

CC 214—latest draft of my remarks to City Council at the upcoming July 14th Public Hearing about the proposed Villages Plan

The 17 Villages Plan on Page 9 of the Report to Council

I have written about the Villages Plan five times since it was first sprung on Vancouver’s citizens more than a year ago by a planning department apparently so confident in its own vision and its own power that they developed it without any meaningful advance consultation with Vancouver’s existing 22 neighbourhoods.

At each iteration of the plan I urged and waited for a public groundswell of opposition, crying “This is NOT our city. This is NOT who we are. This is NOT how we do things. This is NOT democracy.” But what little consultation and presentation by planning staff that occurred happened in mid afternoon, or at dinner time, or in the heat of summer when thousands of Vancouverites were away—and no staff took any notes, or provided any feedback other than “fill in the questionnaire on ShapeYourCity.” Things remained quiet until the reasoned objections of a growing number of planning and urban design experts, as well as citizens’ cries, slowly began to build to this evening.

I know for a fact that you, members of Council, have received thousands of emails and letters objecting to this plan which will upend thousands of homeowner’s and renter’s lives, who your planning department calls “incumbents,” and literally freeze the future of hundreds of homes, forbidding their residents from refining their homes to add space for renters or family, from building a laneway for their own retirement, from even adding on an extra main floor room as their family expands.

I also know you have received not thousands but hundreds of emails from folks, some living in Vancouver, some not, who are cheering on planning’s efforts. Such is democracy, that they can say “we need more housing!”, or “existing homeowners have had it too good for too long,” or whatever. These folks are cheered on and in some cases funded by the likes of the Sightline Institute, a powerful American lobby group with hundreds of millions of dollars of funding from tech billionaires who think that “one size fits all”— and they know the size.

To those who think we need the Villages Plan, I ask: “Vancouver’s population is 700,000 on a good day—do we really need the 1.4 million additional residents that the built out Villages Plan would accommodate together with the Broadway Plan, the Jericho Plan and the other development plans of Vancouver’s already approved Official Development Plan?”

I hope this is not what you, the Council, meant to do, but must assume it is what your planning department wants you to do—to impose from the top down yet another massive density increase whether we citizens want it or not—to ignore most of our existing neighbourhood shopping high streets and their needs, while inventing or further densifying 17 new ones—to further upzone 14% of the city’s lots—that’s one in seven from Blanca to Boundary— to four, six or even eight storeys, all the while placing in limbo hundreds of homeowners, whose only crime is buying or renting a home near an arterial street, in many cases because the reduced cost of ownership or rent on a busier street was all they could afford.

Why can these hundreds not expand for their growing families? Why can’t they build laneways for their children or for themselves to downsize to? Why can’t they even add on an extra main floor room as their family expands? Why can they only wait until a developer acquires their home at a discount because continuous ground level commercial development, mandated for the 700 or so, is not what they want or need, rather what your planning department tells them is their only option.

This for the good of a “village”, NOT a neighbourhood, mind, that neither they nor their neighbours asked for, but a “village” invented mysteriously. I note in passing a four-storey development near my home that was completed a year ago, including residential above continuous ground level retail which the current zoning requires on that block, a fairly active block. A year after completion none of the retail has been sold or rented—how are we then to absorb the five miles of retail/commercial that the Villages require as a precondition of developing the 700 or so homes that can do nothing else?

As to what the Villages Plan presumes to replace: the Vancouver ODP document adopted by this Council has zero mentions by name of any of Vancouver’s 22 neighbourhoods. Is this Villages Plan the endgame, the final erasure of the city’s neighbourhoods, which have grown organically since even before the city was formed? For that is certainly what the Villages Plan will do, supplanting our existing high streets, with their struggles, replacing them with so-called “villages” built around intersections of mysteriously selected streets that might already host a few businesses, if at all. Does this Council want to be remembered as the Council that destroyed our neighbourhoods? That’s what’s at stake.

In conclusion, and to be clear, in the upcoming civic election in October I will not vote for any candidate or party that does not clearly oppose the Villages Plan. Don’t send it back to Planning for review, just to dust it off and bring it back if you are reelected. Don’t waste staff time and public energy and angst refining a plan foisted from above. Just bin it!

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If you feel the Villages Plan is a gross overreach by city staff and government, my suggestions:

1. Sign up to speak at the Public Hearing scheduled July 14th—that’s tomorrow—details are in my previous City Conversation. It’s still not too late!

2. Send to each Councillor and the Mayor a simple email¹ saying something like: “[your address]: Am I inside or outside the nearest village? Please explain your answer. I am confused and concerned that if this Villages Plan is passed, I will never again have the opportunity to speak to Council about what arises from whichever plan is approved.”

I hope to see you at the Public Hearing on the 14th. I am speaker #15 (in person). You can still sign up to speak. Bring a good book!

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This post is just under 900 words—somewhat more than the the 5 minutes citizens are allowed when they are allowed with less and less frequency to speak to the current Vancouver City Council, in their efforts to suppress democracy—some editing still required!. If you appreciated this post, please share to your social media and consider becoming a free subscriber to City Conversations at

Brian Palmquist writes in the ancestral 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. City 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 is threatening to write a book about how we can Embrace, Enhance and Evolve the places where we love to live. Some of its content may appear above.

1. The Mayor and Councillor emails are below— best to email or write individually—I intend to. The addresses are:

• Mayor Ken Sim: Ken.Sim@vancouver.ca

• Rebecca Bligh: CLRbligh@vancouver.ca

• Lisa Dominato: CLRdominato@vancouver.ca

• Pete Fry: CLRfry@vancouver.ca

• Sarah Kirby-Yung: CLRkirby-yung@vancouver.ca

• Mike Klassen: CLRklassen@vancouver.ca

• Lucy Maloney: CLRmaloney@vancouver.ca

• Peter Meiszner: CLRmeiszner@vancouver.ca

• Brian Montague: CLRmontague@vancouver.ca

• Sean Orr: CLRorr@vancouver.ca

• Lenny Zhou: CLRzhou@vancouver.ca