Vancouver city staff are determining how to draft a citywide land-use plan, which politicians and past directors of planning are insisting is sorely needed.
CityPlan, Vancouver's only previous planning document mapping out a framework for future citywide development, was approved 17 years ago. Critics have blasted it for being far too vague to be useful.
"CityPlan was extremely flexible, so it provided no clarity," Brent Toderian, principal of Toderian UrbanWORKS and former city planning director, told Business in Vancouver. "There was clarity on general concepts such as having different kinds of housing types, but CityPlan didn't speak to things such as density."
Toderian, who was fired as Vancouver's planning director in January, wants a city plan that clarifies where density should be increased, what forms it will take and why increasing density is important.
He said city staff initiated the groundwork last year to produce a new citywide land-use plan. But Toderian now questions whether the city's planning department has the "resources, talent and interest" to pursue the plan, now that it is led by acting director of planning Kent Munro.
He said staff have stitched together neighbourhood plans to try to get a sense of what a city plan would look like, but the resulting patchwork quilt lacked a broad city vision.
"We're one of the only major cities in North America that has never had physical, three-dimensional plan for change," Toderian said.
The political will to create such a plan is strong.
Vision Vancouver councillor Andrea Reimer and Non-Partisan Association councillor George Affleck both told BIV that they support creating a citywide land-use plan. Affleck said it might quell much of the community anger that accompanies rezoning hearings, regardless of whether they're in Mount Pleasant, Yaletown or the West End.
Political support for such a plan is great news to other past Vancouver planning directors. Larry Beasley and Ray Spaxman both told BIV that CityPlan is so old that it has lost its value.
For example, one of CityPlan's principles was to increase housing variety and affordability.
Spaxman pointed to Mayor Gregor Robertson's recent task force on affordable housing as evidence that CityPlan's strategies for affordable housing have not worked.
"It's tough to draw up a plan that says we'd like this to change as follows in the next 15 or 20 years," he said.
"Some of the area plans do that, but few have the strength of purpose to do much about it."
Drafting a plan with strong enough language to direct density and land-use across the city can be political suicide, which is why politicians tend to shy away from doing that, said former city councillor Gordon Price.
"The moment you propose allowing the bulldozing of mass blocks of the city for townhouses or mid-rise development – wow!" Price said. "Good luck on that."
Toderian agreed that getting community buy-in for change might be difficult, but the key is to educate and engage residents and then to ask appropriate questions. He said the city flubbed on that front when it did its community vision plans.
The city's nine community vision plans cover specific neighbourhoods such as Dunbar, Hastings-Sunrise and West Point Grey. They were created out of surveys that the city mailed to residents.
Toderian said the surveys asked residents if they supported row housing in their neighbourhood but did not say where those homes would be. "If I was asked if I supported row housing but not told where it would be, I also would have voted no," he said.
Embarking on a citywide plan also provides another opportunity, said Affleck, who was engaged in the CityPlan consultation process in the early 1990s.
"The process is about exciting people about Vancouver. It's about everything the people of Vancouver care about. Let's put that into the plan," he said. "Maybe we could bring the Grizzlies [National Basketball Association team] back. Let's just put things out there." •
