What if Vancouver Planning & Building actually Worked for Vancouverites?

City Conversation #81: How could a citizen-focused City Hall work for its residents? One example

September 15th 2022—a break from neighbourhood discussions to think about how easy it would be to have City Hall’s planning & building departments move from byzantine to transparent

 A somewhat illegible snapshot from the 443 rows + 40 columns in the Homes for Whom database—why is this hard to read but more transparent than all of City Hall?

“Dad, don’t you think folks are getting tired of your database” asked my son, looking over my shoulder. “Let’s face it—data is boring!”

I smiled at his generation’s rejection of numbers. “I agree,” I answered, “it’s not sexy at all, but numbers talk and in the absence of authoritative data, as the next civic election approaches, folks are increasingly listening and paying attention.”

He looked skeptical, so I continued. “For more than a year I listened to many citizens, journalists, social media folks and politicians complain about the impossibility of getting timely information out of City Hall’s planning and building departments.” He continued looking askance.

“So, Dad,” he interrupted. “How did we get here and how do we get out of this mess?”

“I think some of where the city is at is layered accidents, but some is also deliberate.” He waited for me to explain.

“In any bureaucracy there’s a tendency to keep adding layers of requirements. One small scale example and knock on effects—a few citizens build unsafe, illegal building bits, so every single project must be preinspected. As a result there are insufficient staff to examine and shut down illegal AirBnBs or similar situations. Or, an inspector or plan checker is fooled by an applicant or contractor, so a new rule is imposed on every project, no exceptions. After a while, nobody remembers why the new rule or requirement was implemented, but nobody has or will exercise the authority to revisit and refine.” He smiled at the examples he had lived vicariously through me.

“Then there’s the deliberate information hiding,” I continued. “At a certain moment, I feel the existing city administration, especially in Planning and Building, began to realize that although protection of privacy works well for them to muzzle citizen local neighbourhood complaints, it might be hard to implement for larger projects—instead they moved to hiding in plain sight.” Now he looked puzzled, so I continued.

“What better way to hide data than in plain sight,” I explained. “For two years now, city staff have politely refused to provide Council with basic aggregate data about planning and building.” He interrupted, “What do you mean by aggregate data?”

“City Council asked some simple, basic questions. What’s in the development pipeline, which is projects in the processes of rezoning, development permission and construction? What’s the city’s existing zoned capacity, which is how much more can be built within the existing zoning bylaws.” He gave me his  get on with it look so I did.

“Second question first. City staff shrugged, saying they could not possibly calculate existing zoned capacity because most of their records were old PDFs and they did not have staff available to do that work. I was sufficiently annoyed at this declaration that I took a run at it, identifying more than 11,000 potential new homes just in the commercial zoned areas of the city—in the end I identified at least 10,000 more homes than we need in the next decade, all based on a cursory review of publicly available documents.”

“As to the pipeline, city staff said they did not have a summary of what they were currently reviewing. Instead, they have a Shape Your City (SYC) website for each and every rezoning project in the city—but they’re not added up anywhere, apparently.”

A typical Shape Your City project website—this one doesn’t even have an image of what’s actually proposed

“How on earth can staff plan things like roads, sewers, schools, parks, etc., without knowing what’s been proposed where?” He looked incredulous.

“Well, I have heard from authoritative sources that there is an unshared pipeline available to senior staff and perhaps a few others—which is the real reason I developed the Homes for Whom database—to allow a non-insider to see what’s really going on. With help from lists of newly proposed spot rezonings kept by CityHallWatch (because the city keeps none), I methodically visited each SYC site and captured what data I could.” I paused, shook my head. “That in itself was a major effort, because there are no guidelines as to what staff include (or not) on a site. They usually have height, basic density and a general description of the type of housing—but even that’s vague, as they use interchangeably terms such as social housing, supportive housing, below market housing, market rental, rental, market, strata—I may have missed a couple. I had to open each of 390+ websites and read enough of their content to identify what’s actually being proposed for a site. And I’m sure I got a few things wrong.”

“So how would your database help all the folks who can’t find what they need—let me see, that would include City Councillors, ordinary citizens and data nerds like you—have I missed anyone?” he asked.

“Well,” I responded, “here’s what a relatively simple to build and maintain planning and building database could easily do:

• Identify which neighbourhood an existing or proposed project is in—no, they don’t do that now!

• Identify each project’s approval status, including when an application was made, what are the future milestone dates for public input, maybe with auto reminders, how long a development application is taking, when a building permit is applied for and how long it takes to get, and when a project is complete and ready to occupy

• Show all public questions and comments about an application, rather than the curated version that staff currently prepare

• Notify interested citizens such as neighbours and neighbourhood groups about new applications and the status of current ones, and any changes along the way

• Identify what’s proposed—not just height and density, but how many of what kind of home and what tenure—rental, strata, social, supportive, etc., plus any changes to any of those proposed along the way.”

“And how much, rather, how little of that does your Homes for Whom database do?” he asked, expecting a miserly response.

“My database can actually do all of those things,” I answered, somewhat smugly. “Some of the functionality has not been turned on, such as notifying interested neighbours, because I need permission for that sort of communications—right now I’m the only person who gets due date reminders. And some of the database content is incomplete because the city’s Shape Your City and building permits database don’t advise citizens about anything—not new applications, not changes to what’s in the pipeline, not approaching deadlines for commentary—nada. I have to go back to a site again and again if I want to see what may have changed.”

The city’s building permits database—entirely different from the planning site

He hesitated before asking, “So if it’s that easy that you can do a decent job as one private citizen, why hasn’t City Hall done this already?”

I paused to be careful about my words. “You’re assuming city staff actually want to share that information. Perhaps that’s why they refuse to acknowledge any of my data—presumably, if it’s not theirs, it doesn’t exist, so they can deny it or ignore it.”

“Sounds like the debate about the accuracy of your Broadway Plan models?”

I chuckled. “In the words of the villain of House of Cards, “you might well believe that, but I couldn’t possibly comment!””

The Time for Action will soon be too late

Please let me know what pre-election activities are happening in your neighbourhood—I will try to order my neighbourhood-based analyses to have maximum impact.

 TEAM for a Livable Vancouver is the only political party pledged to set aside the Vancouver Plan and the related Broadway Plan and bring back neighbourhood-based planning. Vancouver’s civic election is October 15th of this year. Lots more damage can still be done to our city before that date—and it will continue, and worsen, unless TEAM elects the next Mayor and a majority (6 of 10) City Councillors—less than 6 and not much will change for the better. A majority TEAM Park Board (4 of 7) will ensure our open spaces are integrated with the city rather than ignoring or fighting it. And our voice on the School Board will bring schools into sync with parks, open spaces and neighbourhood development.

If you are concerned that the City Conversations you’ve been reading are examples of what’s wrong with our city and want to bring back Vancouver’s livability, join TEAM and work with us to restore Vancouver as a place we can all afford to call home.

And please let me know what other subjects you are passionate about so we can have that conversation before election day, October 15th.

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Today’s question: Do you think City Hall should share its work with citizens? Why or why not? 

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Brian Palmquist is a Vancouver-based architect, building envelope and building code consultant and LEED Accredited Professional (the first green building system). He is semi-retired for the moment, still teaching and writing, so not beholden to any client or city hall. These conversations mix real discussion with research and observations based on a 40+ 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 “An Architect’s Guide to Construction.” He is also a member of team for a livable Vancouver, a new political party dedicated to restoring a livable Vancouver starting with the 2022 civic election. City Conversations are generally congruent with TEAM policy, so if you like the ideas that I’m writing about, please consider joining TEAM.