2.5 Year Interim Broadway Corridor Plan Draws Criticism
 

The Article is here
https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/20...ing-group.html
and letter is here
http://udi.bc.ca/wp-content/uploads/...n-Broadway.pdf


The Urban Development Institute has written a moratorium to the city criticizing the Broadway corridor saying it doesn't make sense. I love their sarcastic criticism, pointing out that they have been urging for a plan since 2014. This is very funny to read as usually the UDI is very polite and professional. I also love how they point out that the city is only planning on an increase of 12,500 people, when 4x that amount was planned for Cambie. This interim plan calls for a 2.5 year halt on all permits except for "100 per cent social and supportive housing, community care facilities, 100 per cent below market rental housing or 100 per cent affordable student housing". Which is of course rare meaning there will be little to no development in the interim.

I have made this point before. It doesn't make sense to freeze permits on the Broadway corridor for two years from 2018-2020 when skytrain stations will be up and running in 2025. The article points out that it takes 3-7 years for new housing developments, some projects can , meaning many will not be ready in time for the skytrains opening. Its honestly going to be crazy to be building at the same time as the skytrain's construction as streets everywhere will be shutdown from the double whammy. Gregor Robertson said that the city had failed/errored when it did not develop high density around past skytrain stations and promised that Broadway would not repeat this mistake.

Another point the article makes is regarding the heavy DCE rates. The city needs to encourage increased density along Broadway, but with these DCE's building big is going to be much less profitable/desirable for developers. A note that much of Broadway is zoned for low-rise commercial which as you can imagine is not what you expect beside a skytrain station.

I personally don't believe the city can afford to two years for the plan to be finished before doing any development. Plans for towers around skytrain stations need to begin now for them to be complete when we need them in 2025.

I suspect this 2 year period could be shortened to a couple months and believe its because of the city's development office which is one of the slowest in Canada. http://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vanco...-november-2017
I think its wrong for a city that everyone agrees has a housing crisis to have the longest wait time to approve new housing.

Though I would prefer the city modify its interim policy, at the very least I think it should reduce its planning period from 2 years to 1 (or less!) so things can get started.


The below regarding the city's desire for increased DCE's is interesting as they are also saying they will allow very few strata developments if any at all. I love how they point out with more sarcasm that the city and public sector have been purchasing large swathes along the Canada line yet criticizing others who do it as speculators.

This is completely correct, of course, but Planning in Vancouver seems to act as an autonomous agency, analogous to a central bank, or the judiciary. Moreover, Vancouver's entire political class has been completely captured by the twin ideologies of bureaucratic supremacy and Vancouverism. Vancouverism, often defined in aesthetic terms, is more accurately understood as a process to produce a pre-defined outcome. The content of this ideology, that is, the outcome that it seeks to produce is the following: (1) it must reproduce the Planning Dept. itself, ie. it must ensure the maximum number of jobs and roles for Planning staff across the various points in the development process; (2) it must preserve the relative power of Planning to enforce its vision upon the city, this includes levers of pressure such as requirements for developers, and also veto points over projects, so that everyone (including elected officials) recognizes Planning's autonomy; finally, (3) it must ensure the Planning Dept.'s land use priorities are carried out (more on this below).

City Hall, regardless of party, has been unanimously willing to let Planning run the city. The party that presides over this system has been rewarded with money and praise from both self-satisfied locals and envious interested types elsewhere. These types are envious for various reasons. Some envy the cleanliness and order, some look at the towers and see a system for successful growth. Naturally, city bureaucrats in other towns look at the model and salivate at the thought of a similar figurehead role for its elected officials. Suffice it to say, there's a real incentive for city government to just roll on as it has.

But your article touches on the main problem with the current model.

For various reasons, people in Vancouver are only now coming to realize that housing supply constraints affect housing cost. It's well known in virtually every other category of consumer good but, for some reason, people in Vancouver assumed that the cost of housing was simply destined to rise, rather than fall or stay flat, that supply was just out there in the ether, detached from cost. They didn't understand that Vancouverism is also an economic system, the broad contours of which run as follows: Planning restricts development on all land in Vancouver, Planning allows a small percentage of the land to be built at greater than detached single family home density (developed by plans that it drafts), these massive constraints on development push housing costs high enough to warrant construction of towers (which are the most expensive possible building modality), the development players and incumbent landowners reap massive rewards, Planning captures a portion of those rewards in the form of property taxes and development fees, and this captured portion pay for the entire system.

As a result of the collective incomprehension about how Vancouverism worked, people worked themselves up into frenzied action against foreigners, the Chinese shadow market, and everything except for the source of the problem: Vancouverism.

Obviously, in the context of unaffordability, a 2 year housing moratorium is completely absurd. In the context of Vancouverism, it makes perfect sense.

Of course, sweeping the system away isn't in the cards. The provincial government could fix all of this by banning the city from zoning under 6 stories, and allowing those to be built as of right if they meet certain conditions (say, no parking, certain percent affordable). This would tank the land values in some neighborhoods, lift them in others, and unleash a massive building boom city-wide that would at least keep property values from increasing, and would very likely push them down. But this won't happen.

But at least people should be working not to make it worse. Hopefully Vancouver's new government will clip Planning's wings and start getting serious about the crazy growth restrictions. 75% of Vancouver's land is restricted to single family detached housing. Even just getting multi-story zoning in half of it would have a dramatic effect on affordability.

Wow this was interesting to read. Given that vacancy rates are so low, yet our population is rising around .5% each year, it makes perfect sense that our supply constraints are causing prices to rise.

Does the City Council/Mayor not have more power/control over planning then you describe? I thought they were directing things so I was surprised when you said they were detached.

Of course the UDI don't like waiting for a plan to be completed before their members are allowed to submit projects. They're a trade organization for developers - that's obviously the position they'll take. But without a plan, how would developers know what to submit - what density, what mix of units? And without a plan, how could the City know whether to support or recommend changes to any applications?

It makes sense that the City wouldn't start a plan until the finance was finally in place for the transit - it's been many years since the idea was supported, but the current state of the 99 B-Line shows it would be unwise to add significant new density along the corridor until the transit is close to completion. The transit is a 100+ year investment - waiting a couple of years to get a coherent picture of development, and testing the level of support or opposition from existing residents seems like a good idea.

The UDI seem to misunderstand that the 12,500 more people anticipated to add to the corridor is under current zoning - the whole point of the plan is to increase that number, just as the Cambie Corridor Plan did.

The extra two years to complete the plan might actually not add any time to the development timeline. If the new plan allowed higher density developments to be submitted under new zoning, rather than having to go through a rezoning, then it could shave a couple of years, extra expense, and a public hearing from the process. That's how the West End Plan is working - where the new zoning on Davie, for example, allows those higher density new towers like Jervis or the Safeway replacement, but only if non-market housing is part of the project, or the building is 100% market rental. That seems to have worked really well, and already created over 1,000 new rental units in a very few years.

The City of Vancouver has only 5% of Metro Vancouver's land area, but it has 26% of the Metro population. In the past 5 years (2013-2017) CMHC data show over 30,000 housing starts in the City of Vancouver, 27% of the Metro Vancouver starts,. Despite all the growth in Surrey, Burnaby etc., the City of Vancouver is contributing more than might be expected. The next highest municipality was Surrey, and there were under 20,000 starts there.

The mayor and council has all the power they want to exercise, but for a variety of reasons, all parties (NPA/COPE/VISION) have chosen not to exercise that power, to preside over the current system and let Planning run the show. Some of the reasons: it's a well oiled machine that sees developers pop money into campaign accounts, the system gives incumbent home/land owners massive (and growing) property values and this is very popular, the beneficiaries of system vote disproportionately, the current system keeps most neighborhoods completely free of intensification and this is popular with incumbent residents whether they own or not and, overall, the negatives of Vancouverism are not well-known because of short term thinking and a very low level of economic literacy among even housing activists.

The zoning system (which isn't just heights, but also parking minimums, minimum setbacks, minimum open space, etc.) - that is, the artificial land shortage that anchors the current system - forces most development to be expensive concrete mid/highrise and, thus, to come to market as condominium, so it's necessarily expensive. If land were cheaper because there were no artificial land shortage, then 'mom and pop' developers could buy a Vancouver special in southeast Vancouver, tear it down and throw up a parkingless 6 story woodframe building that could house 30-50 people. Rinse and repeat across the city to finally arrest the upward spiral of housing costs.

It would take a crusader to have any hope of doing this at the city level - all the incentives run the other way - but from the macro perspective of the province, housing costs are genuinely knee-capping provincial growth.

It will be interesting to see who makes up the mayor and council this time around. It's the first year that big money has been locked out of the campaign.

To provide a brief and highly simplistic comment, council and mayor do have levers over the planning and transportation department, but council and mayor take direction from the general public and community plan consultation exercises. Thus, we get Grandview-Woodlands. True, a more "aggressive" council and mayor could make some more dramatic changes, and lots are coming down the pipe, and more on the table in this election, but proposing a by-law change to allow 4-storey rentals with minimal parking in an RS neighbourhood is a hard political game to play.

I think the pressure if finally here that people are considering it a new reality.

Democracy and community consultation stinks at times, and people usually need a crisis to move an inch on well-needed policy. We're getting there.