A couple of weeks back when arriving home from an afternoon all-candidates meeting, an old associate, decades-long City of Vancouver planner, and neighbour — knowing of my time on Vancouver’s Board of Variance, and my consuming interest in all things community planning — asked if he could speak with me for a few minutes about a concern he had respecting a recent community planning process gone awry.
The crux of the concern raised was this: the Grandview-Woodland Community Plan on which he and his City Hall colleagues had spent considerable time in consultation with residents on drafting and submitting to City Council, bore no relation to the finalized plan presented to Council.
Interference from the Mayor’s office, he suggested, as well as highly suspect and unilateral changes to the community plan had been made subsequent to the submission of the Grandview-Woodland Community Plan to the office of Vancouver’s recently-appointed General Manager of Planning and Development, Brian Jackson — including the addition of a mass of 26 – 40 storey towers at both Clark and Commercial Drives, along East Broadway, and mid-rise 8-storey multiple-unit residential buildings along the expanse of Nanaimo and Hastings Streets, neither of which was included in the original plan submitted to Jackson.
As per standard journalistic practice, VanRamblings set about to second-source the information provided to us above, when what should land in our e-mail inbox but a 1410-word Open Letter, titled Inside Story of a Botched Community Plan, written by housing, development and community activist Ned Jacobs, subtitled “How the Robertson administration has betrayed the public trust and is destroying community planning in Vancouver.”

Click here for the unexpurgated text of Ned Jacobs’ Open Letter to the citizens of Vancouver

The information contained in Jacobs’ letter, virtually word-for-word reflects the information that had been provided to me two weeks ago. Speaking with Jacobs on Monday afternoon, we discovered that his source was not the same senior city planning staffer who had earlier spoken to me.
Jacobs’ letter makes repeated reference to a Mayor Gregor Robertson / Dr. Penny Ballem (Vancouver City Manager) / Brian J. Jackson triumvirate who were involved in the drafting of, and inclusion in, a revised and substantively changed Grandview-Woodland Community Plan. In fact, according to the city planning official with whom VanRamblings spoke, Mike Magee, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, as well as several Vision Vancouver City Councillors, played a pivotal role in the redrafting of the community plan that would finally be presented to Vancouver City Council.
Note should be made that at the Grandview-Woodland all-candidates meeting last week, incumbent City Councillor Andrea Reimer told the crowd in attendance that neither she, nor her Vision Vancouver Council colleagues were aware of the contents of the Grandview-Woodland Community Plan prior to its initial presentation to Council.
The response of the crowd to Reimer’s statement was jeers, while the response of her fellow all-candidate panelists was, at best, querulous.
Councillor Reimer also set about to assure the citizens who had gathered at Britannia Secondary School, that she felt quite certain the Citizens’ Assembly created as a “new tool in the city’s public-engagement toolbox,” when it reported out, would not recommend, nor agree to, the mass of towers along East Broadway, between Clark and Commercial Drives, that had caused so much consternation among Grandview-Woodland residents.
Again the audience jeered.
Clearly, the residents of Grandview-Woodland — as is the case in neighbouhoods across the city, ranging from Mount Pleasant on the eastside to Dunbar on the westside, through to the West End, Yaletown and False Creek North in the downtown core, not to mention, Marpole — are unbelieving of a Vision Vancouver civic administration where honest, thorough, citizen-engaged consultation has been in short supply.
Time and time again, under Vision Vancouver, the city has failed to adhere to best practices in neighbourhood planning, most often defined as …

• An opportunity to involve citizens in considering their future that provides effective tools for examining their community;
• Collaborative citizen involvement in neighbourhood planning and development, and …
• Neighbourhood planning that brings together multiple city departments, community organizations, citizens, business improvement associations and related community stakeholders, and social service providers, who working together would seek to co-ordinate their collective efforts to ensure the delivery of a wide range of quality services at the neighbourhood level, so as to provide a more responsive, interactive environment for residents to express their concerns and needs.

Generally, best practices neighbourhood planning involves a years-long process that encourages citizens, through workshops and task group meetings, to become involved in neighbourhood planning — not unlike Vancouver’s successful Gordon Campbell-Ann McAfee-inspired City Plan process of days gone by, a planning process that engaged all sectors of the community in what was most often a years-long effort that encouraged a broad range of citizens to become involved in their neighbourhood planning, a truly democratic and citizen-engaged community visioning process.
During the course of the present Vancouver civic election campaign, NPA mayoralty candidate Kirk LaPointe has talked about reinstating City Plan.
Vancouverites are well aware that with a Vision Vancouver administration at City Hall, and a development on speed ethos driving development across the city, that citizen-engaged neighbourhood planning processes in our city have become nothing more than a nostalgic, warily abused & hoary fiction.

Update: For further insight into the botched Grandview-Woodland Community Plan, it’s worth reading the commentary of Scot Hein — the City of Vancouver’s Senior Urban Designer at the time the Grandview-Woodland process was tabling built form — his team “… absolutely did not support towers outside the focused “Safeway Precinct,” he writes.
Here is Ned Jacobs’ Open Letter, posted to VanRamblings, and others …

Continue reading Grandview-Woodland: Inside Story of a Botched Community Plan →

We live in a complex, too often cruel world.
On the evening news, we listen to reports about the ongoing negotiations to free the 200 Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped six months ago by Boko Haram, followed by a report interviewing a young Kurdish father who, despite not being paid for six months by a corrupt Iraqi government continues his fight against the extremist ISIL forces in order that he might “protect my family from harm, my wife and my young daughters.”
We blink, our eyes water, we know we are powerless to do anything to change the cruelest of circumstances occurring across our globe.

Vision Vancouver’s cruel, utterly failed promise to end street homelessness in Vancouver

Where and when do we possess the agency to help make this a better, a kinder and more just world, where children will awake each morning and know that this will not be a day of hunger, where shelter will consist of more than a blanket and a mat within a bedbug-infested hostel, where the needs of our families will be prioritized over the pecuniary demands of developers dedicated to ensuring the re-election of a government whose sole grievous purpose is to line their own pockets at the public expense?
Charity, as you have heard throughout your life, begins at home.

Tomorrow, the advance polls in the 2014 Vancouver civic election open, giving us the opportunity to make a difference, to improve the lives of all those who live around us. Advance polls will be open 8 a.m. thru 8 p.m., Tuesday, November 4th thru Monday, November 10th, and again on Wednesday, November 12th, at any one of the following locations:

• Vancouver City Hall, 453 West 12th Avenue, at Cambie
• Kerrisdale Community Centre, 5851 West Boulevard
• Killarney Community Centre, 6260 Killarney Street
• Kitsilano Community Centre, 2690 Larch Street
• Roundhouse Community Centre, 181 Roundhouse Mews
• Sunset Community Centre, 6810 Main Street
• Thunderbird Community Centre, 2311 Cassiar Street
• West End Community Centre, 870 Denman Street

Collectively, on election day, Saturday, November 15th, those of us who live in Vancouver have the opportunity to return democratic governance to City Hall and our Vancouver Park Board, where human-scale over highrise development once again becomes a priority for our elected officials, where our community centres will once again receive the funding and supports necessary to meet the needs of our community, and where our parks might once again be transformed into green oases rather than the increasingly desecrated, untended to lands that has become the case under our present shockingly unjust and self-serving Vision Vancouver civic administration.

There’s just no other way to say it: in Vancouver, we have a godawful, undemocratic, secretive, oppressive government at City Hall & Park Board, dedicated to meeting the needs of their developer funders over your needs. Vision Vancouver has not earned and does not deserve your vote.
Over the course of the past 6 years of Vision Vancouver’s term in power …

• Our parks have become overrun with invasive species;
• Highrise-driven “town centres” were approved in far too many of our neighbourhoods, and many, many more are on the way in every neighbourhood across our city, if Vision Vancouver is re-elected;
• More homeless than ever sleep on our streets;
• Children go to school hungry because our current Vision Vancouver civic administration refused to fund children’s breakfast programmes when a cruel provincial government withdrew funding;
• A war on cars has driven the price of parking and fines (the latter now without benefit of appeal) into the stratosphere, in order to fund bike lanes through parks, along our foreshore & through our green spaces;
• Gentrification takes place in our most livable neighbourhoods, where affordable, market-driven rental accommodation has been replaced by condominiums marketed to offshore buyers;
• One community cinema after another has closed its doors (The Ridge, The Hollywood Theatre), while The Pantages Theatre, The Centre for the Performing Arts, and the Playhouse Theatre are no more.

Whether it’s the failure to protect the arts, rampant tower-driven densification in our neighbourhoods (you think it’s bad now, just elect a majority Vision Vancouver administration, and I promise you won’t recognize the city you love, nearing the end of their next term), children going to school hungry, clogged thoroughfares, pitiless bus service, underfunded community centres, Vision Vancouver has failed us, all of us.
The time has come to give Vancouver’s cruelest, most-serving of developer’s interests municipal administration the heave-ho, to send a clear message that the enough is enough.
When you head to the polls, no matter for whom you choose to cast your ballot, make sure of one thing: do not cast one vote for a Vision Vancouver City Councillor, and not one Vision Vancouver Park Board candidate deserves a checkmark beside her or his name. We must take our city back.
Do not vote Vision Vancouver.
Preserve what is good about our city, invest in our city and in Vancouver’s future as a city of livable neighbourhoods, and love the city we all call home. At the advance polls, or on election day, cast your ballot as you wish — but please, please, do not support Vision Vancouver at the polls.

Last Candidate Standing | Sunday, Nov. 2nd | 149 W. Hastings, SFU GoldCorp Centre | 2 til 5pm

In 2011, in a Vancouver municipal election campaign event organized by the Vancouver Public Space Network and UBC’s School of Architecture & Landscape Architecture, featuring live indie music between rounds, and an unusual round-robin-meets-applause-meter debate style — hosted by Steve Burgess, the panel of judges including CBC’s Theresa Lalonde, VPSN chair Alissa Sadler, UBC professor Matthew Soules, and The Tyee’s David Beers — independent candidate for Council and Occupy Vancouver’s Lauren Gill won the “sweaty, irreverent” and often raucous event. Said Gill …

“My power and your power lies in the streets, and it lies in holding the politicians accountable and attending City Council hearings. We are the people who hold the power in this city. You see that at Occupy Vancouver — they haven’t moved in yet. Why? Because we hold more power than they do.”

Well, here we are in 2014, and the Last Candidate Standing debate is upon us, once again. This is going to be one of the standout events of the current election season, and Sunday afternoon, from 2pm til 5pm, at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre (in the Woodward’s building, 149 West Hastings, at Abbott), will be the place to be. Come one, come all. See ya there Sunday!

Certain to be the 2014 Park Board all-party candidates debate, all you have to do is take a gander at VanRamblings’ Save Kits Beach coverage (read on down), and you’ll know what Vision Vancouver is in for Monday evening.
It ain’t gonna be pretty.
In preparation for Monday evening’s debate, on Saturday afternoon some scalliwags (or should that read community activists of conscience) laid a tarp through Kitsilano Beach, as a reminder of the horrendously wrong-headed decision Vision Vancouver initially took to run a 12-foot-wide asphalt bike freeway through Hadden and Kitsilano Beach parks.
You think the residents of Kits, or residents anywhere across the city for that matter, have forgotten what Vision almost foisted upon us within one of Vancouver’s most beloved parks? Not on your life.
C’mon along to the Billy Bishop Legion on Monday evening.
The beer is cheap, the community space is cozy yet surprisingly spacious, and VanRamblings can all but guarantee that Monday’s Park Board debate will be one of the highlights of Campaign 2014. If Vision shows up.

Photos of Saturday afternoon’s Kitsilano Beach Tarp Event available here.