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#VanPoli | VOTE for Solomon Yi-Kieran | A New Generation Steps Forward in Vancouver

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At a time when municipal politics can sometimes look like an old person’s game, Solomon Yi-Kieran represents something Vancouver badly needs: a younger generation prepared not merely to complain about politics, but to enter the arena and try to change it.

Power structures across the country are often dominated by older cohorts, leaving younger residents feeling that the issues directly shaping their futures — from soaring living costs to climate resilience — are addressed with passive incrementalism rather than urgency. It is precisely why having young leaders come forward to run for elected office is so critical.

Young candidates bring a essential perspective to local government. They carry the lived experience of navigating today’s acute housing crisis, reliance on public transit, and the precarity of the modern economy. Rather than viewing policies through abstract statistics, young representatives experience the direct impact of municipal decisions every day.

At 20 years old, Yi-Kieran — who identifies as they/them — represents a rising generation of community organizers who refuse to wait on the sidelines.

Stepping up to bring that exact energy and perspective to local government is Solomon Yi-Kieran is running for Vancouver City Council with the The Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) in the October 17 municipal election. Still in their early 20s, they are among the youngest candidates seeking a seat on Council — and their résumé is already unusually substantial for someone so young.

Yi-Kieran graduated from Glenlyon Norfolk School in Victoria in 2023. While still in high school, they were accepted into Oxford University’s history and politics programme, but ultimately chose to attend the University of British Columbia.

At the University of British Columbia, Yi-Kieran is an Arts student studying History and Linguistics, with a particular interest in history and education. They have said their long-term ambition is to become a high-school history teacher.

Their political education, however, has taken place as much outside the classroom as inside it.

Despite their young age, Yi-Kieran already boasts a track record as a public advocate and student leader. Yi-Kieran has been deeply involved in UBC student politics, serving as a student senator and, more recently, as Vice-President External Affairs of the Alma Mater Society, representing more than 61,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

Yi-Kieran has advocated for improved accessibility and academic accommodations, recorded lectures, affordable student housing, greater financial assistance and more transparent university governance.

 

Their activism extends beyond campus.

Yi-Kieran has worked with the BC NDP, participated in campaigns involving affordable sexual-health services and humanitarian assistance, and organized advocacy for a federal Youth Climate Corps. That campaign ultimately helped secure $40 million for youth climate employment.

Yi-Kieran’s background in activism is rooted in tangible, grassroots organizers’ campaigns:

  • Public Transit Expansion: As AMS VP External, they spearheaded the high-profile campaign to extend the Millennium Line SkyTrain route directly to UBC, organizing rallies and leading a petition that gathered over 15,000 signatures to press provincial and municipal governments into action.

  • Student & Tenant Advocacy: They have consistently organized around tenant rights, pushing for tenant protections in student residence housing and lobbying for increased non-market and below-market housing options in the University Endowment Lands.

  • Climate & Youth Empowerment: Through coalition work with student unions across British Columbia, Yi-Kieran campaigned for the establishment of a national Youth Climate Corps.

Running on the progressive COPE platform, Yi-Kieran’s Council campaign focuses on systemic challenges:

  1. Housing Affordability & Tenant Protection: Expanding non-market, social, and co-op housing, alongside strong rent-control protections to keep renters from being priced out of Vancouver.

  2. Public Transit & Infrastructure: Accelerating major regional transit extensions like the UBC SkyTrain corridor and ensuring accessible, frequent municipal transit options.

  3. Climate Action & Green Jobs: Supporting local climate initiatives, including clean energy transitions and workforce opportunities for young people in sustainability.

  4. Labour & Accessibility Reforms: Championing worker rights, accessibility accommodations, and transparent civic governance that invites broader public participation.

Yi-Kieran’s campaign offers Vancouver voters a chance to bring a fresh, community-driven voice to Vancouver City Hall — one that understands the pressing realities facing the city’s youth, renters, and working residents.

Perhaps their most visible campaign has been the fight for a SkyTrain extension to UBC. As AMS vice-president external, Yi-Kieran spearheaded a petition that gathered more than 10,000 signatures and pressed provincial and federal governments to move forward on the long-promised project.

Now Yi-Kieran wants to take that activism to Vancouver City Hall.

There is a tendency on the left to approach issues on a macro scale, to fight for systemic change that makes a difference for the better in the lives of groups of our disenfranchised population, whose voices are neither heard nor respected.

Sometimes in such a circumstance, there is a tendency to lose touch with the individual needs of members of the community, of families, of Vancouver’s new immigrant or ethnic populations, of individual seniors and students.

From VanRamblings’ personal experience, we are here to tell you that in addition to working on a macro scale for systemic change, Solomon Yi-Kieran also connects — really connects — on a micro scale, that is, they see you, feel you, empathize with you, hear your concerns, and will work with you one-on-one to make the conditions of your life better, to work with you to resolve your issues of concern.

Something else to mention about Solomon Yi-Kieran, for which again we have first hand salutary experience: Solomon is kind.

Sadly, a commodity in short supply in politics.

In an era where political discourse is often dominated by divisiveness, hostility, and polarization, the concept of kindness might seem quaint or naïve.

When we examine the foundational purpose of politics — the organization of society for the common good — kindness emerges as a practical and necessary value.

At its core, kindness represents empathy, respect, and a genuine concern for others. When woven into the fabric of political practices, kindness fosters collaboration, promotes inclusivity, and enables the pursuit of justice and equality.

When you cast your ballot for Solomon Yi-Kieran this October, and when they are elected to Vancouver City Council, you will come to find that there is no stronger advocate for you on City Council than Solomon Yi-Kieran, whose boundless energy, heartbreaking intelligence, inspiring presence in your life, and dedication to improving the conditions of your life will always be the driving force and central feature of their time in municipal governance at Vancouver City Hall.

Their platform emphasizes affordable housing, rents, better and eventually free public transit, government transparency and accountability, and making Vancouver a city in which young people can afford to build a life. They have called for reviving the City’s Renters Office, and establishing a climate defense strategy.

 

Solomon has emerged as one of COPE’s leading voices opposing proposed artificial-intelligence data centres in Vancouver, calling for a moratorium until their environmental, water, electricity, employment and privacy implications are properly understood.

But Yi-Kieran’s candidacy is about more than any particular policy.

Canadian politics — and especially municipal politics — can become dominated by people who have been around for decades. Experience matters, certainly. But so does having people in government who will live with the consequences of today’s decisions for another 50 or 60 years.

Young politicians bring a different perspective. They experience the housing crisis as renters rather than homeowners. They depend upon public transit. They confront the realities of precarious employment, student debt, climate change and an increasingly digital economy firsthand.

Yi-Kieran’s campaign offers Vancouver voters a chance to bring a fresh, community-driven voice to City Hall — one that understands the pressing realities facing the city’s youth, renters, and working residents.

They also bring something politics desperately needs: a sense of urgency.

#VanPoli | The Villages Plan | An Open Letter to Vancouver City Council

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Open letter to Vancouver City Council on the “Villages Plan”
Patrick Condon, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia
UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan

Dear Mayor and Council,

I write to challenge key elements of Vancouver’s Villages Plan Programme.

Together with the recently approved Official Development Plan and Broadway Plan, the City is now granting private owners of more than 80,000 parcels the right to build roughly 700,000 new housing units.

This represents enough capacity to house an extra 1.4 million people — more than double Vancouver’s current population of 670,000.

At today’s 1% annual population growth rate, this single decision delivers over 100 years of future housing supply. Yet even the projects already in the approval pipeline (roughly 78,000 units) would satisfy 30 years of trend growth.

Contrary to this city’s long standing policies for new density approvals, this massive landowner entitlement is being provided free of charge, with no expectation of payment for these new land rights.

These land rights are worth many billions of dollars.

The City is giving them away for free in the hope that this will somehow make housing more affordable.

This is an odd notion for our planners to hold. If adding hundreds of thousands of new units to existing neighbourhoods truly lowered prices, Vancouver would have North America’s cheapest housing.

It has North America’s most expensive housing. (charts below)

It defies logic to expect an “unleashing of the housing market” — the primary justification provided for the Villages Plan — to produce affordable housing when we have spent decades trying to do just that. Vancouver has tripled its housing stock since the 1960s, all within a city where virtually every private parcel was in urban use. This is a higher percentage increase of infill development than that of any other North American centre city. If adding housing to existing city districts was the sure fire path to affordability we would have seen positive results by now.

Based on this evidence, it is clear: if affordability is the main justification for this plan, it obviously fails the test.

Massively over-zoning a city above reasonable expectations for population growth serves little purpose. The only purpose it serves is to support the false narrative that only “restrictive zoning” stands in the way of affordable housing. It doesn’t. It never has. It can’t.

The claim is false.

On the contrary, if any city proves that it is possible to use zoning as a positive public policy tool, it is the City of Vancouver. We tripled housing units city-wide. No other centre city did that — an unheard-of achievement.

While this sadly did not make the city more affordable, as we had hoped, it did make the city better. Much better.

How was this 200 percent growth accomplished? By working with residents, not against them. Community planning with local communities was the means to this achievement. Planning with communities was not an impediment, as some now claim. It was the democratic path to a better city.

But sadly it is now obvious that our decades-long effort to encourage the housing market, in the hope that housing would stay affordable, has failed us. Given this evidence, it seems foolish to upzone so aggressively, hoping against hope that, in 30 or 40 years, housing will be more affordable.

Achieving durable affordability much sooner than this requires a major change in direction. We don’t lack housing; we lack affordable housing. Given this fact, we should follow a path that other similar cities have charted — one where the bulk of new housing built is affordable to average wage earners. This can be done by reviving the Vancouver tradition of building non-market housing at scale, largely financed through “land lift” taxes as applied in Yaletown.

Our own internationally famous False Creek South serves as a storied precedent. Service workers to business owners have found homes in that lovely, self-sustaining community.

The pattern is obvious. Reuse it.

Unfortunately, the Villages Plan moves us in exactly the wrong direction. It virtually rules out any form of land value capture tax, based on the mistaken fear that it would raise home prices. It won’t — and it can’t.

A properly designed land-lift tax simply reduces the inflated “land price residual” that now funnels unearned speculative windfalls into private pockets. A properly designed “land lift” tax channels those gains into public benefit — without increasing the price buyers ultimately pay.

I urge you to revise these plans by deeply involving residents from every corner of the city in a highly collaborative, bottom-up, neighbourhood-focused planning process. One that might arrive at much stronger inclusionary zoning requirements.

The people of Vancouver would rally behind such plans — plans that ensure that their sons and daughters, and the workers who keep this city running, can afford to live in the very neighbourhoods they serve and call home.

Do not pass this plan.

Let us turn instead to plans that are sustainable in scale, equitable in outcome, and shaped not for the market alone, but for the people who live and work here.

Yours truly,

Professor Emeritus Patrick M. Condon
University of British Columbia

More voices weigh in on ABC Vancouver’s Villages Plan development proposal

Steve Jedreicich — principal of Vancouver’s SJ Development Ltd., brings over 30 years of local urban planning and real estate consulting experience to the housing discussion —  weighs in on ABC Vancouver’s contentious Villages Plan proposal.

WBN News Vancouver publisher Karalee Greer’s published article on the impact of the Villages Plan development proposal currently before Vancouver City Council, in particular its impact on Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood. At present, well more than 1000 speakers are set to address the controversial Villages Plan proposal, in meetings that thus far have lasted well into the night at Council.

Randy Helten and Steve Bohus, the good, hard working, dedicated folks behind the informative CityHallWatch website offer a backgrounder on Vancouver’s Villages Plan proposal, suggesting the plan “was born in the USA.” CityHallWatch offers six more Villages Plan articles the site published in the months of June and July. Click on the multi-coloured links below to access the articles.

Yes, there are even more Villages Plan articles available to you.

As is his wont — and thank goodness for that — The Daily Hive’s well-respected, incredibly hard working urban affairs reporter Kenneth Chan, early in July, published a thorough and well-researched article on Vancouver’s Villages Plan proposal.

Well worth a read.

Building Needed Housing, Preserving Our Democracy

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Last evening, Wednesday, March 20th, 2024, the University of British Columbia sponsored a civic democracy workshop event at their Robson Square site, hosted by Dr. Patrick Condon, founding Chair of the UBC’s Urban Design programme, with UBC Professor Emeritus David Ley, TEAM candidate for Mayor in 2022 and former Vancouver City Councillor, Colleen Hardwick, and former Vancouver City Planner Larry Beasley the evening’s featured speakers.


Former Vancouver City Planner Larry Beasley, UBC Professor Emeritus David Ley + Colleen Hardwick

The first speaker of the evening was Dr. David Ley, a UBC Professor Emeritus in the university’s Department of Geography.

Sadly, a glitch in our recording of Colleen Hardwick’s address prevents us from posting our video of her contribution to the evening. However, the entirety of Ms. Hardwick’s historically relevant address on Wednesday evening may be found by clicking on the link to the full video covering the two-plus hours of the event.

The final speaker of the evening was Larry Beasley, introduced by Dr. Condon.

Video of the entirety of the evening is available by clicking on this link.

Autocracy and the End of Democracy — But Not Yet

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Scot Hein, retired senior designer, City of Vancouver. Adjunct Professor, University of British Columbia.

When Scot Hein spoke at last Thursday’s #KitsPlan Town Hall, held at the Kitsilano Neigbourhood House at West 7th and Vine, to discuss the Broadway Plan, and its implications for our beloved Kitsilano neighbourhood, he bemoaned the fact that in recent years citizens throughout Vancouver have been locked out of the decision-making process that affects the communities where they and we live.

Here is what Scot Hein had to say on the matter of civic democracy …

“As little as 15 years ago, the City of Vancouver regularly engaged in a thorough, often years long, one-on-one, in-person consultation process with citizens, when the City worked toward developing community plans for the future of neighbourhoods across the City, be that in the Grandview-Woodlands, Riley Park-Little Mountain, Kensington-Cedar Cottage or Granville-Fairview communities, or any other Vancouver neighbourhood.

In recent years, consultation and community involvement in the development process in the City of Vancouver has devolved into a top down process, where the community is not — or rarely — consulted, but are rather called out to a community meeting, where white boards are placed on walls at a community centre, announcing the planners’ conception for the development future of a neighbourhood, a development fait accompli if you will, sans any meaningful engagement with the community, or citizens who live in one of the twenty-three neighbourhoods that are the heart of Vancouver.”

Sadly, as former Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick has often averred …

“The members of City Council have often expressed that organizations like the Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods, or the community resident associations who are members of the Coalition, are extra-legal forms of civic governance, unsanctioned and without mandate, that all civic authority autocratically rests solely and unabashedly with the Mayor and 10 City Council members.”


On February 13th, David Eby’s government launched the BC Builds programme to build rental housing for “middle-income earners”, geared towards  those earning between $134,000 and $284,000 annually.

Whether it’s Premier David Eby and his Housing Minister, Ravi Kahlon, or Mayor Ken Sim and the members of Vancouver City Council or, down south, Republican MAGA candidate for President Donald Trump, or in Canada should Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilevre form government following the 2025 federal election, for almost two decades now democracy has been in peril, where high-handed governments impose their will on an increasingly angry and woefully disenfranchised electorate, counterintuitively driving turn out down at the polls during the election period — only 36.3% of eligible Vancouver voters cast a ballot in our City’s 2022 municipal election — as more and more, decision-making is left to the elites.

The thrust of last week’s #KitsPlan Town Hall was to reverse the “trend” towards disenfranchisement, for the community to regain its collective power to influence change for the better, for themselves and their families, to demand a voice and input that would be incorporated into civic and provincial affairs decision-making.

While a diverse crowd attended the Town Hall — encompassing a broad cross-section of the Asian and other communities of colour and ethnicities who reside in Kitsilano, with a demographic representation of the parents of young families also voicing their concerns about the tower-driven Broadway Plan, and what it means for the livability of the Kitsilano neighbourhood — many of those in attendance were comprised of members of the seniors community, and were Caucasian.


An unrepresentative, selectively misleading photo of #KitsPlan Town Hall attendees, posted on X

The Abundant Housing, in-the-pocket of developers “We’ve never met a tower-driven development we didn’t like” naysayers posting on Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) cesspool were quick to selectively call out the attendees at the Town Hall as “universally white” and old. Of course, that was not the case, as we pointed out.

Of course, there was a big online hue and cry that referred to #KitsPlan Town Hall attendees as that most awful of things, a NIMBY (as in Not In My Back Yard). The NIMBY appellation is little more than untoward name-calling and a misrepresentation of the truth. Desiring to maintain a livable community — and an agreed upon and very much desired much more dense community that encompasses a variety of environmentally-sound housing forms — can hardly be called NIMBYism.

You know, too, there was a time in the not-so-distant past when younger members of our community valued those who comprise our seniors community, as elders possessed of wisdom, gained across a lifetime of activist community involvement.

Sadly, no longer it would seem. #FightAgeism and intolerance, VanRamblings says.

In fact, if you were to survey the majority of the seniors who were in attendance at the #KitsPlan Town Hall,  you would more than likely find an engaged population of longtime died-in-the-wool community activists, who throughout their lives have fought for a better, a richer, a more diverse and a more inclusive community, who are in point of fact situated on the progressive side of history, and after a lifetime of fighting for better, are unwilling to allow City Hall to steamroll over them and their families, their neighbours, their colleagues and members of the Kits community.

In the days, weeks, months and years to come, there will be more #KitsPlan Town Halls, next time and beyond — as the movement grows — in increasingly larger venues, as members of the Kitsilano community, in increasing numbers, rally in support of the preservation of Kitsilano as a livable, if increasingly dense, family neighbourhood, where all members of the community are valued, where we might live in harmony and good health, where we know our neighbours, where our streets are friendly and safe, where we know the shop keepers in our Kitsilano neighbourhood and enjoy the restaurants we have come to love, where Jericho and Locarno beaches and Spanish Banks are but a hop, skip and a jump away.