Category Archives: Politics

#VanPoli | The Mayor’s Race | They’re Off and Running | Oct. 15, 2022

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A Better City, Ken Sim; NPA Vancouver, John Coupar; Progress Vancouver, Mark Marissen

The three men pictured above are running to be Vancouver’s next Mayor.

Ken Sim, the man pictured on the left, ran as the Mayoral candidate with the Non-Partisan Association in 2018, and came within a hair’s breadth of becoming Mayor, garnering 48,748 votes for 28.16% of the vote, but losing to the candidate backed by the Vancouver District and Labour Council, and longtime New Democratic Party Member of Parliament for Burnaby South, Kennedy Stewart, who won 49,705 votes, or 957 more votes than his centre-right rival, to become Vancouver’s 40th Mayor, and the only Mayor to win in Vancouver running as an independent.

In 2022, Ken Sim is running with the newly-formed A Better City municipal party, a breakaway NPA Vancouver centre-right civic party formed by Mr. Sim, and former, longtime President of the Non-Partisan Association, Peter Armstrong.

In 2020, the NPA Board of Directors was taken over by members who held far-right extremist views, causing NPA elected members to desert the party, both at Council and at School Board.

Ken Sim deserted the Non-Partisan Association soon after.

Here’s what Charlie Smith, editor of The Straight has to say about Ken Sim …

“Ken Sim wants to preserve single-family neighbourhoods, anchoring his rental housing policy on the creation of more secondary suites. If A Better City won a majority on Council, here’s what I think would happen: a rewriting of the Downtown Eastside area plan to make it easier to build condos, along with a clampdown on rezonings in neighbourhoods like Dunbar and Shaughnessy. A Better City might also try to undo a Vision Vancouver policy to turn First Shaughnessy into a heritage conservation area, which irritated the local homeowners.”

In other words, Ken Sim envisions a regressive, developer-friendly, back to the future Vancouver, which serves the interests of the wealthy and the well-to-do.

All of the above said, Ken Sim comes into the 2022 campaign for civic office as the best funded Mayoral candidate, with the strongest and most well-practiced behind-the-scenes campaign team of any of the Mayoral candidates running for office in 2022. Sophia Leung, a former federal Liberal Cabinet Minister, has set about to secure the Chinese vote for Mr. Sim in every neighbourhood across our city. With half a dozen or more serious-minded candidates running to be Vancouver Mayor next year, if Ken Sim can somehow manage to keep the 48,748 votes cast for him in 2018, 323 days from now Ken Sim could very well become Vancouver’s next Mayor.

John Coupar Running to Become Vancouver’s next Mayor | Photograph by: Wayne Leidenfrost, PNG

John Coupar is currently serving his third term as a Vancouver Park Board Commissioner, after having first been elected to Park Board in 2011. John (he’d want you to call him ‘John’) became Chair of Park Board in late 2014, when the Non-Partisan Association elected a majority to Park Board. John Coupar’s first act as Park Board Chair was to create swim sessions at Templeton & Lord Byng pools that would be open exclusively to members of Vancouver’s transgender and gender variant communities, an initiative for which they had lobbied.

In 2018, John sought the NPA Mayoral nomination, but lost out to upstart politico, Ken Sim, in a ballot-box stuffing venture initiated by then NPA President, Peter Armstrong, who bused in hundreds of ‘there only to vote’ NPA members at the June 2018 Mayoral nomination meeting.

In 2020, John Coupar was appointed the NPA Mayoral candidate for 2022, causing quite some consternation among NPA City Councillors Lisa Dominato, Colleen Hardwick and Sarah Kirby-Yung.

Now, John may be running with the NPA, Vancouver’s oldest and most successful municipal party, but unlike NPA Board members, John Coupar is not a far-right extremist. In fact, he is anything but. Still, according to the polls, the NPA has lost favour among the voting electorate. Hard to say what kind of money Mayoral candidate John Coupar will have to back his campaign for office, although word on the street has longtime NPA financier Rob MacDonald remaining loyal to the NPA.

In the months to come, VanRamblings will have a great deal more to say about each of the Vancouver Mayoral candidates running for election to Vancouver City Hall in 2022. Suffice to say for now that in order to break out of the right-of-centre pack, John Coupar’s best bet to become Vancouver’s next Mayor will be to run a tough, no nonsense Rudy Guiliani-style ‘law and order’ campaign, committed to hiring more police officers, cleaning up the streets (quite literally), and working to make Vancouver the safest city in Canada.

Whether 2022 Non-Partisan Association Mayoral candidate John Coupar has it in him to run that kind of successful campaign for office, only time will tell.

Longtime political strategist and the federal Liberal ‘operative’ who campaign-managed Stéphane Dion to victory as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, on December 3rd, 2006, Mark Marissen was also involved in his ex-wife Christy Clark’s winning campaign for office in 2013 as leader of the B.C. Liberal Party.

Make no mistake, Mark aims to win in 2022 & become Vancouver’s next Mayor.

Vancouver is a centre-left city.

In the 2020 provincial election, the B.C. New Democrats won every Vancouver riding, with the exception of the wealthy burgh of Vancouver Quilchena. Federally, the progressive and decidedly left-of-centre Justin Trudeau-led Liberal Party of Canada won every Vancouver seat, with the exception of the New Democrat-held seats of Vancouver East & Vancouver Kingsway.

In 2022, no Mayoral candidate identifying him/herself as centre-right has any chance of becoming Vancouver’s next Mayor (unless John Coupar goes for the gusto, and runs a ‘law and order’ campaign). Mark Marissen knows that well.

VanRamblings sees Mark Marissen as the high energy, strategically-wise, take no guff, entertaining Vancouver Mayoral candidate who’ll campaign from the left, and should he become Mayor in 2022, ‘rule’ from the centre (not to mention, in favour of the contingent of developers backing his campaign for office).

Seven months back, the folks at Press Progress published an article titled, Here’s a List of Vancouver’s Right-Wing Municipal Parties That Are All Currently At War With Each Other (the article is as relevant today as it was last spring).

Here’s their take on the shenanigans that is Vancouver right-wing politics …

“The city’s wealthy right-wing political class appear to have already decided on their winning strategy: Declaring war on each other. The city’s oldest municipal party, the Non-Partisan Association, is currently embroiled in an internal conflict between its elected caucus and far-right Board of Directors.

Meanwhile, the NPA’s former mayoral candidate (Ken Sim) is planning to run against his old party (with A Better City), and a Liberal backroom operative (Mark Marissen) has thrown his hat into the mayoral ring, too (with Progress Vancouver), for good measure. If you’re struggling to keep track of all this right-wing in-fighting, you’re not alone.”

We’re still 11 months away from Vancouver’s 2022 municipal election.

There’s lots to ponder about what’s going on at Vancouver City Hall and even more to reflect on in the days, weeks and months to come leading up to what may very well emerge as a crucially important Vancouver 2022 civic election, one that could set the course for our city for a generation, or more, to come.

#VanPoli | Vancouver’s Woebegone City Council | Election Day Oct. 15, 2022

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Vancouver City Councillors, l-r, Rebecca Bligh, Christine Boyle, Colleen Hardwick, Pete Fry, Adriane Carr, Mayor Kennedy Stewart, Melissa De Genova, Jean Swanson, Michael Wiebe, Lisa Dominato, and Sarah Kirby-Yung

Only eleven short months — or, 324 days — from today, about 40% of Vancouver’s exorcised voters will go to the polls to elect the candidates for office who will sit as Vancouver City Councillors from November 2022 through until November 2026.

Despite all their hard work, if history proves a predictor, a good portion of the smiling Councillor faces you see above will not be re-elected to Vancouver City Council, a cruel fate for those Councillors who’ve worked so hard to make our city a fairer and a better city, a home within which to reside, and to raise our beloved children.

In 2018 , after ten years in power, Vision Vancouver failed to elect / re-elect any Vancouver City Councillors. In 2014 , Vision Councillor Tony Tang was not re-elected to a second term. In 2011,  COPE City Councillor Ellen Woodsworth lost out to first time candidate, the Green Party of Vancouver’s Adriane Carr, who bested Ms. Woodsworth by a mere  87 votes. In 2008 , incumbent NPA Councillors Kim Capri and Elizabeth Ball were not re-elected to a second term on Council.

In 2005, a year of change, COPE Councillors Dr. Fred Bass, Tim Louis, Anne Roberts and Ellen Woodsworth failed to gain re-election to Council.

COPE sweeps the 2002 Vancouver municipal election, electing 8 of 10 City Councillors, and Mayor Larry Campbell

The Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) swept the 2002 Vancouver civic election , winning 8 of 10 Council seats, 7 of 9 School Board seats and 5 of 7 Park Board seats. The Non-Partisan (NPA) was reduced to 2 Council seats, 1 School Board seat and 2 Park Board seats. Vancouver’s Green Party won 1 School Board seat.

Most political observers believe that 2022 will be a year of significant change at Vancouver City Hall, with the likelihood that come late in the evening of Saturday, October 15, 2022 change at Vancouver City will have been wrought.

Political pundits portend that Vancouver will have elected a new Mayor (we’ll write about those prospects on Tuesday and Wednesday), and a more activist Vancouver City Council, the members of which Council will dedicate themselves to serving the majority interests of residents throughout all of Vancouver’s 22 diverse neighbourhoods. Most particularly, renters, and those in search of, or requiring, affordable housing — defined as 20% below the median rate as determined by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, where a person would spend no more than 30% of their income to keep a roof over their heads. Construction that better and more honestly reflects the incomes of 90% of Vancouver residents, rather than the 10% of high income Vancouver residents,  current condominium, duplex,  and purpose-built rental construction accommodates.

“Come October 2022, I believe we’re going to see a revolution at Vancouver City Hall,” predicts Patrick Condon, the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. “Such a new, activist Council will approve sustainable low-rise and mid-rise wood frame buildings built on city-owned land, consisting mostly of housing co-ops that provide security of tenure, where seniors and diverse families will be housed, those individuals or couples earning the median wage of $50,000 – $63,000. Where no one would have to pay more than 30% of their income to live their home.”

Vancouver could very well be facing a major electoral change in 2022, as it did 20 years previous, electing a Mayor and Vancouver City Council of almost entirely newly-elected officials — dedicated to serving all of the diverse communities in neighbourhoods across our city, a Council committed to slow growth and gentle density, dedicated to affordable low-and-medium-rise wood frame buildings over podium and high-rise tower-driven plinth construction, as well as social housing that meets the needs of the many rather than the few, with new parks throughout the city, as well as more new and renewed publicly-owned recreation centres.

#VanPoli | Vancouver 2050 | The City of the Future

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A draft 30-year plan calls for limiting growth in Vancouver, and pushing new residents to the suburbs

All development decisions within the City of Vancouver that are currently being made by senior staff employed within the city’s Planning Department — currently slated to add more than 100,000 new residents to Vancouver, over the course of the next 30 years — is predicated on a rate of population growth that many commentators, and the most recent figures published by Statistics Canada, don’t jibe with population growth projections that are being made at Vancouver City Hall.

In an article published in The Vancouver Sun this past weekend, reporter Douglas Todd writes …

“In recent years about 12,000 more people have been annually moving out of Metro Vancouver for other parts of B.C. than have been moving into the metropolis. The vast majority of new arrivals into Metro Vancouver are foreign-born immigrants.”

Todd goes on to quote former provincial NDP MLA and current two-term Nanaimo Mayor, Leonard Krog.

“We have had lots of people from Alberta and the East cashing out and moving to Nanaimo — to get away from the crush and the smoke,” says Krog. “People are also fleeing Vancouver, and the Lower Mainland. Now it’s more common for people to ask why would you stay in the Lower Mainland when you can cash out on your $2-million house on a crowded Burnaby street, or $3 million Vancouver home and get a great $1 million home in Nanaimo?”

Krog says newcomers are pouring into Nanaimo for several reasons — affordable housing, less density, and a higher-quality lifestyle. “The strong overall shift of residents from other provinces, and from Vancouver or Metro Vancouver, to smaller B.C. cities, which have more young adults, is unsurprising,” writes Douglas Todd.

“Nanaimo’s rapid growth of two per cent a year”, Krog says, “is a result of a ‘perfect storm’ of conditions, including the attractiveness of the region’s oceanfront, university, airport, nearby ski mountains, climate and a lower cost of living.”

“It has all been amplified by the pandemic,” he said. “COVID-19 is helping many across Canada and in other parts of B.C. realize they might be able to permanently work out of their homes. So why not do it in a place that is pleasant and somewhat more affordable?”

If as lawyer, writer, and and community organizer Daniel Oleksiuk writes on the Sightline Institute website that population growth in Metro Vancouver will occur in the Metro Vancouver suburbs, and not in Vancouver, and if Nanaimo Mayor Leonard Krog is correct in his assertion that rather than remain in Vancouver, families are instead opting to move to smaller, more affordable cities such as Nanaimo, how can the Vancouver Planning Department justify a growth strategy, population growth projections, and the consequent tower-driven densification projects they are currently presenting to the members of Vancouver City Council for approval?

At Issue: Form of Development, and the Livability of Vancouver

Artistic rendering of the Esso gas station site at 3205 Arbutus, redeveloped into a mixed-use building

A deep issue of concern that has arisen for many, as Vancouver’s  Planning Department presents their plans to City Council, is “form of development”.

For the most part, if you take a look at many of the projects VanRamblings wrote about yesterday, they adhere to the ‘development at all cost’ ethos of the now discredited former Vision Vancouver civic administration, who were roundly and wholly turfed from office in the 2018 Vancouver municipal election: a plethora of greenhouse gas-emitting podium and tower-driven developments — whether they be in the northeast “forest of condos” False Creek neighbourhood, the newly-reimagined Oakridge Centre or nearby Heather Lands development, or in the southern sector of the Grandview Woodland neighbourhood’s ‘Safeway site’.

The question must be asked: whatever happened to the notion of ‘gentle density’?

Why is it that rather than construct high-rise condominum towers all along the Broadway Corridor, from Clark Drive all the way out to UBC, could we not opt instead for the kind of low-rise building illustrated directly above, in the proposed, neighbourhood friendly project located at West 16th Avenue and Arbutus Street?

Artistic rendering of a planned, environmentally-friendly wood construction building

Perhaps of even more importance to the stewards of our environment who sit on Vancouver City Council, why not mandate that future home construction be built employing sustainable, carbon-storing cross-laminated timber —  glued at perpendicular angles to make thick beams, and clearly visible in columns, beams, walls and ceilings? Wood construction has proven popular across a broad section of our developer, architect and contractor communities, who see building with wood as a way to increase density at a lower cost, while reducing environmental impact.

Now, that would be an innovation for our Vancouver City Council to truly consider.

Rowhouses such as the ones above are common in many cities around the world, but not in Vancouver

And what of fee-simple row housing , which architect Michael Geller argues for in an interview conducted by Carlito Pablo, in the October 6, 2021 issue of The Straight?

“In a fee-simple rowhouse or townhouse, there’s nothing owned by the association. The owners own their roof, their windows, the land under and around their townhouse. That means the individual owners are responsible for taking care of any lawn, painting the outside, fixing leaks in the roof, and shoveling the snow.”

Whatever happened to the notion of human-scale, gentle density townhouse construction, all the rage 40 & 50 years ago? Why, in recent years, has townhouse construction fallen so out of favour, as podium and high-rise tower-driven plinth construction has become the greenhouse gas-emitting building forme de la journée?

Vancouver Co-Housing, located on 33rd Avenue between Victoria Drive and Knight Street

And what about co-housing in Vancouver, housing that is family-supportive, senior-friendly and energy-efficient? For instance, Vancouver Co-Housing consists of 29 privately owned, fully equipped homes plus 2 rental units, in addition to a large and beautiful common house and outdoor common areas. This vibrant community is located on East 33rd Avenue between Victoria Drive and Knight Street.

The homes range from studios to one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom units – all with their own kitchens. The common house has an area of 6,500 sq ft. and includes a community kitchen, dining room, and lounge; activity rooms for children and teens; office areas; two guest rooms; a yoga studio; and rooftop gardens. As well, there are ground-level gardens, workshops, plus a courtyard and play area that encourage year-round social contact. All parking is underground.

By working together, Vancouver Co-Housing members are able to share amenities common to a traditional home and reduce the size of their private dwelling.


A 2014 Global BC video, identifying Vancouver as one of the high-rise capitals of the world

On July 24, 2014, during the lead up to the Vancouver civic election that year, VanRamblings published a column titled At Issue: Form of Development, and the Livability of Vancouver, which quoted a 2012 study conducted by University of British Columbia Chair of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, Patrick Condon, addressing the question of how Vancouver might reasonably approach the reduction of energy use and consequent greenhouse gas production in the city by at least 80 per cent by 2050, and how that goal might be accomplished.

The answer: the construction of compact, low-rise structures across the city, along its arterials and throughout its neighbourhoods, as a greener, more workable, more energy-efficient alternative to the present form of high-rise development that so captured the imagination of Vision Vancouver, as seems to be the case with our present Council. That 2014 VanRamblings column is well worth reading.

The indefatigable Patrick Condon, future — and absolutely necessary — Vancouver City Councillor

Again today, VanRamblings will leave you with the words of Patrick Condon …

“While it is true that high-rises, when combined in large numbers, create GHG-efficient districts, the buildings themselves are not as efficient as mid-rise buildings.

“High-rises are subject to the effects of too much sun and too much wind on their all-glass skins. And all-glass skins are, despite many improvements to the technology, inherently inefficient. Glass is simply not very good at keeping excessive heat out, or desirable heat in. High-rises, according to BC Hydro data, use almost twice as much energy per square metre as mid-rise structures.”

“High-rise buildings built largely of steel and concrete are less sustainable than low-rise and mid-rise buildings built largely of wood; steel and concrete produce a lot of GHG. Wood traps it. Concrete is 10 times more GHG-intensive than wood.”

Patrick Condon argued with heart and with purpose in 2014, as he does through until today, for the construction of thousands of primarily mid-rise wood frame mixed use commercial / residential buildings on Vancouver’s arterial streets.

And, most importantly, Patrick Condon argues for the retention of existing neighbourhood quality, and the supply of sufficient units to house the burgeoning wave of our elderly population, housing for young families, housing equity, and neighbourhood preservation, through the gentle infill of existing residential streets.

#VanPoli | Housing & Development | Making The Vancouver Plan Irrelevant, Pt. 2

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On Monday, VanRamblings wrote about The Vancouver Plan, a visionary document destined to inform growth in our city over the next 30 years.

A core issue of concern VanRamblings explored was how, months in advance of the publication of The Vancouver Plan, Vancouver City Hall’s Planning Department has set about to place before the members of Vancouver City Council several massive redevelopment projects — including, two weeks ago, a revisioning of False Creek South — the 32 hectares (80 acres) of city-owned land situated between the Granville and Cambie street bridges, on the south shore of False Creek, that proposed to triple the number of homes on the site.

And, last week, The Broadway Plan, a massive development plan for the Broadway corridor, extending from Vine Street to the west, 1st Avenue to the north, Clark Drive to the east, and 16th Avenue to the south, came before Council, a proposal to build dozens of 30 to 40 storey towers surrounding the areas adjacent to future Broadway Millennium Skytrain stations — at Main, Cambie, Oak, Granville and Arbutus streets, and when the Skytrain extension to UBC is approved, at Macdonald, Alma and Blanca streets, with the shoulder areas adjacent to the areas surrounding the stations, extending from 1st Avenue to the north and 13th Avenue to the south, set for a mass construction of 20, 25 and 30 storey towers.

Given all of the above, as founding chair of UBC’s urban design programme, Patrick Condon, wrote in response to yesterday’s VanRamblings column …

“What’s left to plan?

Who voted for more unaffordable condo towers?”

Before her election to Vancouver City Council in 2018, and throughout her campaign for office, and every day since her election as a City Councillor,  Colleen Hardwick has hammered home two informed, salient points …

1. The population growth figures employed by the City’s Planning Department that are a determinative factor in development planning in the City of Vancouver are based on flawed data, arising from one immodest year of population growth in our city, the fiscal 2016 – 2017 year. Before that fiscal year, and each year since, population growth figures in Vancouver, as determined by both the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the Pacific Regional office of Statistics Canada, have dwarfed that one unique year in the current millennium;

Reliance’s Burrard Place project, a three-tower development at Burrard and Drake

2. The City of Vancouver, the office of the City Manager, and the Director of Planning have become far too reliant on the Community Amenity Contributions developers must pay in order that their projects will receive approval from the City’s Planning Department. As an example of monies paid in CAC’s by a developer, when Reliance Properties made application for a three tower mixed use development at Drake and Howe / Burrard — now known as Burrard Place — Reliance Properties paid the City of Vancouver $46 million in Community Amenity Contributions.

Given the affordable housing shortage in our city, you’d think that the civic government of the day — Gregor Robertson’s Vision Vancouver — would allot a portion of that $46 million towards the construction of affordable housing. Instead, the then Mayor declared that there was NO affordable housing shortage in the West End (CAC monies must be dedicated to serve the interests of the neighbourhood where the large scale development project is to be built).

Another salient point informing decision-making by senior members of Vancouver’s Planning Department: in point of fact, the very employment of the excluded / non-union white collar staff at City Hall — to whose numbers, 1100 new staff have been added over the past decade — is almost entirely dependent on extracting from developers as much money in CAC’s as possible.

As VanRamblings promised yesterday, today we’ll present more massive developments slated to be built, or currently under construction, in our city.

Artistic rendering of the Sen̓áḵw redevelopment at the south end of the Burrard Bridge in Vancouver

The Squamish Nation’s Sen̓áḵw Indigenous redevelopment of their 11.7-acre reserve at the south end of the Burrard Street Bridge promises 6,000 homes will be built within 11 towers housing 15,000 residents, consisting mostly of rental housing — a 50-50 partnership between the First Nations and local developer Westbank — forming a new skyline in the Kitsilano neighbourhood, the tallest buildings, two 56 storey condo towers. As the project is being built on Indigenous lands, the sole involvement by the City of Vancouver respects a negotiation with the Squamish Nation on hooking up to the city amenities, and addressing issues such as the provision of schools, and transportation.

A rendering of the proposed buildings to be constructed on Point Grey’s Jericho Lands

Another  Indigenous land development within the City of Vancouver will occur on the 90-acre Jericho Lands — a largely undeveloped site bordered by West 4th Avenue to the north, Highbury Street to the east, West 8th Avenue to the south, and Trimble Park to the west.

The sprawling, hillside site, a former military base and home to the West Point Grey Academy, is owned by a partnership of three local First Nations — Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, collectively known as the MST Development Corporation — and the federal Crown Corporation, Canada Lands Company. As the First Nations purchased the Jericho Lands, development of the site falls under the jurisdiction of the City of Vancouver’s Planning Department, who will be intimately involved in the project’s development.

Construction on the Jericho Lands site will begin in 2024, with a completion date of 2050. Although the Jericho Lands site is five times the size of the Sen̓áḵw development, the Jericho Lands project envisions 10,000 new homes and 25,000 residents. West Point Grey is currently home to 13,000 residents — the Jericho Lands development will triple the number of residents who will call Point Grey home.

November 2021 artistic rendering of the Broadway Commercial Safeway redevelopment, Vancouver

Over on the east side of town, in the Grandview Woodland neighbourhood, there’s the redevelopment of the Safeway site, next to the Broadway Skytrain station, just east of Commercial Drive. Heights ranging between 24 and 29 storeys above the podium’s retail plinth are, as can be seen in the graphic representation above, planned for the site. The project is a partnership between Crombie REIT and … wait for it, wait for it … leading luxury developer, Ian Gillespie’s Westbank Corporation, which has engaged its usual architectural design firm, Perkins & Will.

A massive redevelopment of the Norquay ‘Village’ Neighbourhood — which community activist Joseph Roberts writes about frequently on his Eye on Norquay website — has been underway for more than a decade. Roberts writes, the redevelopment plan for Norquay went “against what renters and homeowners want to see happen in their neighborhood.” The Norquay neighbourhood densification redevelopment will more than triple residential population of Norquay by 2030.

An autumn day at Trout Lake Park, in the heart of the Kensington-Cedar Cottage neighbourhood

And, the area bounded by Victoria Drive on the west, Nanaimo Street on the east, 12th Avenue on the north, and Kingsway on the south, in the Kensington-Cedar Cottage neighbourhood, the very heart of east Vancouver,  where the urban park and Trout Lake is located, is set for massive densification that will more than triple the number of residents in the neighbourhood over the course of the next 20 years.

Ian Gillespie is also the developer behind the redevelopment of the Oakridge site.

  • 2,600 homes in 19 towers will house nearly 6,000 residents;
  • A workspace for 3,000 creative professionals will be created;
  • More than 300 stores will feature the world’s most distinguished brands;
  • Oakridge will be home to one of Vancouver’s largest community centres;
  • Oakridge will be home to Vancouver’s second-largest library;
  • A nearly 10-acre rooftop park made up of six integrated smaller parks will be built.

   The Heather Lands 8.5-hectare (21-acre) development, situated between West 37th and 33rd  avenues, and bounded by the lanes behind Willow and Ash streets.

Nearby is the Indigenous-owned Heather Lands development, the 21-acre site the subject of a rezoning application to the city, is a comprehensive planning site overseen by the City of Vancouver’s Planning Department. 2,600 rental homes will be constructed on the site, ranging from three to 28 storeys.

And let us not forget, either, the first of many development applications to be made by Concord Pacific on the currently undeveloped northeast portion of offshore billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Expo lands, where a permit has been applied for to build a mixed-use commercial and residential community.

The current application proposes a maximum floor area of 181,625 sq. m (1,955,000 sq. ft.) and building heights of 89.9 m (295 ft.). on the 10.28-acre site, once known as the Plaza of Nations, where construction of a variety of terracing buildings of up to 30 storeys is planned, and set for approval by the Planning Department at Vancouver City Hall, and our current City Council. The Plaza of Nations redevelopment is expected to house 20,000 residents.

Artist’s conception of the new Northeast False Creek neighbourhood Vancouver is planning for

The new northeast waterfront False Creek neighbourhood will be housed in a forest of highrise condos that stretches from the Plaza of Nations on the west, to Carrall Street on the east. The plan includes taking down the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, which will be replaced by an expanded street network. Three acres of waterfront park will be added to the neighbourhood. By the time the plan is completed in 2038, Creekside Park will be expanded by another eight acres.

The tallest site will be at Georgia and Pacific, where the city envisions a 425-foot tall building, which probably means 46 or 47 storeys.

In an article published in The Vancouver Sun on October 30th, Elizabeth Murphy, formerly a property development officer in the City of Vancouver’s Housing and Properties Department, as well as for B.C. Housing, wrote  …

“Vancouver continues arbitrary citywide re-zonings without neighbourhood context. The Vancouver Plan just implements the previous Council’s initiatives, without any meaningful planning process. To achieve positive outcomes for the citizens of Vancouver that avoid negative impacts on the climate, affordability and livability, growth needs to be managed very carefully.

The city must first consider the broader consequences of growth. Council asked for transparent data to recalibrate the housing targets that are currently almost three times what can be justified by census population growth of about one per cent per year.

After a decade of record amounts of rezoning and development, Vancouver is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world. Spot rezonings, land assemblies, displacement, speculation and land inflation are significant contributors to our current malaise.

Going forward, in order to be a livable, affordable and sustainable city, Vancouver must build for actual needs, in a scale and location that suits each neighbourhood, with meaningful community input, supported by affordable transit, and community amenities.

The indefatigable Patrick Condon, one of — if not the — most important voices on urban development and the livability of Vancouver, as a city for everyone, here and across the Metro Vancouver region

We’ll leave the final word to UBC professor of all things good, Vancouver’s beloved commentator on development across our city, Patrick Condon …

“Providing affordable housing is the existential need in our city. Our service workers, many of who are our sons and daughters, are being forced out of this city in droves. This Trojan Horse of the proposed rental bylaw changes at City Hall will mainly benefit the land speculator, whose pockets are already stuffed to overflowing. We need to put the interests of citizens first, over the interests of speculators and developers, and those who mean ill for our city.”