It shouldnt surprise you to know another Vancouver neighbourhood is girding for battle with city hall.
The neighbourhood in this particular ruckus is GrandviewWoodland, the heart of the East Side of Vancouver. Its main artery is Commercial Drive, a thriving part of this city inhabited by small independent businesses serving families with mostly modest incomes or singles hipsters and counter culture practitioners who can still find affordable digs in houses divided into suites.
The battle is over the neighbourhood community plan. It has been kicked around for a year and a half now. It reached the point where the citys planning staff should have presented the community with options. Instead, a couple of weeks ago they published something called Emerging
Directions.
Before I get to that, let me make this point: Mayor Gregor Robertson and his crew regularly strike committees to fend off criticism including a recently created Engagement Committee for which they gave themselves great public pats on the back. But its just window dressing.
Once again they are failing to engage. Community consultation on development has been turned into a joke. Just ask the folks who tried to reason with the city on the 60 storey Marine Gateway at the south end of Cambie or those who thought reason would win out at the Rize on Kingsway.
While the Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood was quite willing to accept some density at Hastings and Commercial and at Commercial and Broadway, no one was prepared for what the city rolled out. The plan contained provisions for a 36-storey tower at Commercial and Broadway surrounded by 10 other towers of 22 to 28 storeys. To put that in perspective, the towers in Yaletown are about 22 storeys. The tower at Knight and Kingsway is 17 storeys.
The local community types were stunned. Grandview-Woodland Area Council president Jak King says it represents a shocking upscale of density. Towers were not even part of the discussion his group had with the city.
The plan will, as it stands, threaten the livability of an area King describes as an extremely successful single family neighborhood. He adds that all we can do now is write a note in protest but it wont do much good. Planners at the city are going full tilt boogie, as King describes it, to have their report in front of city council before the years end.
(I am informed that there has been more pressure than usual over this and the city may back off. But we will see.)
A week ago and not long after the city released the proposed plan, former Vancouver city planner Frank Ducote posted a brief observation and asked a question on journalist Frances Bulas blog site that frequently deals with development issues. During his tenure with the city, Ducote worked on its transportation plan and the redesign and preparation of guidelines for a number of neighbourhoods including Broadway and Commercial.
He said that 15 years ago when the Millennium Line was going in, council thought the area was ripe for densification but it would have been suicidal to try and impose those kinds of pro-development ideas then, completely against community values. Now he wonders rhetorically: Is this a community-based vision or one being imposed from above? A TransLink wet dream aimed at building population to make a new subway line from Broadway and Commercial out towards UBC more likely. I think we know the answer to that.
And we also should know we are a long way from days more than a decade ago of citizens driving the vision and community plan for their neighbourhoods. It is debatable as to whether those plans ever led to much that was concrete, but they were swept aside when Sam Sullivan became mayor in 2005 and introduced the top down strategy called eco-density.
When Robertson and Vision arrived on the scene, the push for centralized control over development and increased densification intensified. Whether it was spot zoning for rental housing in the West End or what we are seeing in Grandview-Woodland around transit stations, solutions were prescribed and city staff merely ticked the boxes to say they have engaged. But not really. And an increasingly cynical citizenry is on to them.
(Note: The Grandview-Woodland Area Council has called a public meeting for July 8 at 7 p.m. the East Side Family Place to discuss the Community Plan.)
