City of Vancouver ODP

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by LeftCoaster

He's really not though. He hasn't been an active developer or architect in any capacity for many many years. And even when he was, he wasn't blowing the doors off with any amazing projects.

He just likes the sound of his own voice and has an outsized ego.

I think he still has a consulting company. I believe he advises Austerville, so it's thanks to him that we'll have a new 2-storey grocers and drugstore on West Georgia.

[GenWhy?]

I don't know his involvement but there is another group called Smart Growth Vancouver that's hosting events on the west side that he attends with resident "build on derelict lots only" Larry Beasley.

"The charming neighbourhoods of Vancouver are under threat from a wave of redevelopment decisions reminiscent of the infamous "monster home" era of the 1990s. However, this time, the homes are even more oversized—reaching towering heights of four to six stories. "

I think this is like the upteenth group and petition and I'm personally glad they don't get that much traction but it does still impact housing affordability

[jollyburger]

Originally Posted by Changing City

I think he still has a consulting company. I believe he advises Austerville, so it's thanks to him that we'll have a new 2-storey grocers and drugstore on West Georgia.

The story in 2009 where Austeville (advised by Geller) wanted to be a mixed-use site with residential there.

https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showpost.php?p=4233187&postcount=3560

[GenWhy?]

So I first heard about Larry when I moved here and my office went to his book launch. I got a copy and was kind of 50/50 on the writing and the conclusions he was making in the book, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt going into his presentation alongside Ann McAfee, as I was unfamiliar with the process of City Plan in the 90s, but through work I was reading sections of it - which left me sad but not surprised at the level of "will not accept" for remotely minor neighbourhood changes.

So it's also not surprising to see such backlash on recent plans for retired planners, but still sad and unfortunate.

Larry really has some interesting takes (IMO) on the Villages plan

[jollyburger]

Here's his POV letter

Dear Mayor and City Councillors:

Re: Public Hearing on the Villages Planning Program – Rezoning and ODP Amendments

As a former City Official and long-time urban professional, with extensive experience in planning, zoning, urban design, and development management in the City of Vancouver and worldwide, and as an avid Vancouver resident, I am profoundly concerned about the current Villages initiative for which you are considering moving forward through your Public Hearing in mid-July. In my view, you stand to set off a serious misdirection that will have profound unintended negative consequences to the whole city and to individual communities, immediately and in the long-run, if this initiative goes forward as currently framed. It needs a collective community rethink of its many aspects.

I strongly recommend that you not approve the proposed rezoning and ODP amendments, and instruct staff to report back on programs of ongoing community planning to, first, fully realize existing Neighbourhood Centres and, second, identify potential future Village locations and confirm their patterns, forms, character, and intensities, in all cases through area-targeted intensive public engagement, spread over time and tailored to the timing of real demand, directly with the specifically affected citizens, property owners, tenants, retail interests, and their immediate neighbours, as well as the general public.

My major concerns are as follows.

I anxiously worry about immediate widespread destabilization of communities and individual victimization. While it may be well intentioned, such a City-wide blanket rezoning will lead to many spot real estate moves, randomly spread, destabilizing all around each one, but with little clustering of moves strong enough to create a new ‘place’. In some places, through speculation, land values will spiral up; in other places, through uncomfortable adjacencies, anxieties, frozen development rights, and market realities, land values will plummet. The result will be community displacements and victimization, physical blight, existing retail stress, and, ironically, a difficult and risky development scenario. With no coordination or focus to manage these random moves or concerns the unintended negative results are inevitable.

I worry that our existing Neighbourhood Centres, needing support and augmentation, will be profoundly damaged by new Villages priorities, even in the initial isolated moves. Fortunately, our city already has a city-wide spread of well-articulated Neighbourhood Centres clustered along and around organically evolving commercial high streets. Community planning over the next decade should be to reinforce and round out these existing community focal points – to expand, diversify housing types, add secure affordable housing opportunities, reinforce existing retail viability, augment services and facilities, and deal with localized special challenges. New Villages as currently proposed will only lead to hijacking of limited local demand which will diminish and cripple existing centres.

I worry that new Villages construction, even as isolated developments, will be detrimentally over-scaled and thus will overwhelm their existing community setting. To be expected are unneighbourly building relationships, discord among new and existing residents, and a fall in the quality of everyone’s liveability, with overshadowing, overviews, loss of outward views, loss of trees and an unnecessary sense of crowding. The development specifications are too high for a careful fit and too rudimentary for scaling down at the edges or varying for character.

I worry that new Villages, if or when they did happen, will not be fulsome and will all be the same. With the same FSRs and building development parameters applied everywhere, the results will be the same everywhere with no differentiation in scale, content, or character, reflective of existing local variations. Also, the necessary public investment in community facilities will never keep up with the wide and scattered demand for services, so many locations will be isolated and ill served. One-size-fits-all will only homogenize the great diversity which is at the centre of our city’s image, reputation, and diverse choices of living.

I worry that secure affordability will not be achieved in the Villages initiative. I do not see any provisions for securing affordable housing for middle-income families and no strategy for providing non-market housing options for lower-income people. Sadly, you cannot expect this to happen naturally, without proactive measures. Thus, we can expect no social diversity and no solution to the existing housing problem, which is not a lack of numbers of units but is a lack of the number of the right kinds of securely affordable units.

I worry that this whole initiative is too soon, too widespread, and too top-down. Housing projections indicate that we have enough zoned capacity for our housing needs for several decades, so what is the benefit of adding more general capacity through new Villages zoning, especially with the high probability of setting off land value increases through speculation, that actually forestall development? I see that there has been public consultation on the general idea of Villages but no community planning or public engagement in the specific areas identified for Villages, with the actual people who will be most directly or indirectly affected. Why setoff so many downsides and unintended consequences when there is no urgency? And why not have a bottom-up initiative, carefully paced over time, rather than a top-down imperative in one massive move?

There is no doubt that the general concept of clustered development is a good way to organize a city for convenience and efficiency – perhaps called Villages. There is no doubt that Vancouver already has a pattern of such clusters that we call by a different name, Neighbourhood Centres, with a combination of housing, commerce, and services (although some are not fully realized). I would even suspect that there are several more places where new clustering might start to make sense to fill in service gaps, especially coupled with a proactive affordable housing strategy.

So, how to move forward? I urge you to adopt the following strategy and instruct staff to bring back a work program, experienced staffing, budget, and overall sequencing for operationalizing this multi-faceted strategy over the next decade or more:

Abandon this current blanket Villages initiative.
Put all current civic efforts and funding into fully realizing the clustered communities within the framework of existing Neighbourhood Centres, through further publicly-engaged community planning.
From existing information and analysis, and more targeted community dialogue, determine if, in one or several currently isolated locations, there is the need and potential to soon consider new Villages, beyond the Neighbourhood Centres.

Initiate community planning, with citizens, organizations, BIAs, and specialists, in the highest potential location, to design a specific Village concept suitable to its setting, emphasizing uniqueness and character – establishing this as a planning model.

Establish a civic implementation arrangement for the new Village – as a proactive coordinating implementation model.

Annually assess new need and, when needed, initiate the next targeted community planning initiative following the adopted localized planning and implementation models, with refinements as needed (this would be expected to extend in prudent steps over several decades to come, always tracked with demand and need).

In all community planning and implementation for Villages and enhanced Neighbourhood Centres, require policies to achieve diversity of housing types, levels of secure affordability, and timely delivery of the full range of community services – and always to resolve suitable scale and fit appropriate and comfortable for the specific setting and population (with variations to be encouraged).

Doing all of this with your citizens will achieve the kind of objectives currently identified for Villages while carefully managing the unintended consequences for citizens, government, and the development community – achieving the kind of liveable urban system over time for which Vancouver is so well known, while really solving issues that still challenge us. Let’s not break our city down brutally, but evolve and cluster our city carefully and gently.

https://x.com/pmcondon2/status/2069180581192282403

[SFUVancouver]

So he highlights the importance of existing 'villages' evolving organically over time, but is concerned that new 'villages' will... evolve organically over time?

He simultaneously worries that the new villages will totally change neighbourhoods throughout the city all at once, but also the rate of change will be so gradual that there will be no coalescing of development and, instead, physical blight?

Is this not a case of framing one's enemy simultaneously as being impossibly strong and an existential threat but also weak and ineffectual? Nobody goes downtown anymore; it's too crowded.

[WarrenC12]

i anxiously worry about immediate widespread destabilization of communities and individual victimization.

lol.

[GenWhy?]

Thanks I couldn't get the text out of the letter! He's a part of this consortium of retired planners writing in pre-election.

I think (to really water it down to a few sentences) he praises the work he did with CityPlan and wants the City to do that over again. I sense that... if the general participating population decide against a decent amount of change, then the change shouldn't happen (which is more or less how the City Plan played out).

"I anxiously worry about immediate widespread destabilization of communities and individual victimization. While it may be well intentioned, such a City-wide blanket rezoning will lead to many spot real estate moves, randomly spread, destabilizing all around each one, but with little clustering of moves strong enough to create a new ‘place’. In some places, through speculation, land values will spiral up; in other places, through uncomfortable adjacencies, anxieties, frozen development rights, and market realities, land values will plummet."

I've found he's very much in favour of well-oiled plans like his Coal Harbour and Yaletown, but gets very micro (to an impossible level which yields poor results in a very in demand city) when it comes to the rest of the city. I may have my own biases showing but he contradicts himself routinely.

[jollyburger]

Originally Posted by SFUVancouver

So he highlights the importance of existing 'villages' evolving organically over time, but is concerned that new 'villages' will... evolve organically over time?

He simultaneously worries that the new villages will totally change neighbourhoods throughout the city all at once, but also the rate of change will be so gradual that there will be no coalescing of development and, instead, physical blight?

Is this not a case of framing one's enemy simultaneously as being impossibly strong and an existential threat but also weak and ineffectual? Nobody goes downtown anymore; it's too crowded.

From the implementation section of the draft plan.

Currently, most of the Villages consist of low-density housing, with predominantly singledetached homes, secondary suites, duplexes and laneway houses. As the Villages Plan enables the same type and scale of change across 17 Villages, it is challenging to anticipate where, and by how much, individual Villages will grow over time. Through the planning process several population growth projections were generated to inform certain aspects of the Plan, such as the appropriate size of mixed-use areas, or the anticipated needs for infrastructure. Based on these projections, the forecasted population growth across the 17 Villages is in the range of 34,000 to 37,000 people by 2050. The gradual and dispersed population growth will allow the City to monitor service impacts and help inform where improvements to existing amenities may be needed and where additional amenities should be considered over time.

https://syc.vancouver.ca/projects/villages/villages-planning-program-draft-villages-plan.pdf

Which is around 600 new units in each of these 17 villages or 24 new units per village per year.

[jollyburger]

Douglas Todd can't even spell his name correctly "Lewis Silberberg"

Here's the 2020 retail study of Vancouver

https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/city-of-vancouver-small-business-study-2020.pdf

Douglas Todd: Meet the man who knows why many Vancouver storefronts are in distress

Lewis Silverberg has studied every storefront in Vancouver. He says that over the decades he has walked by every one, making an inventory of each supermarket, hair salon, credit union and café.

Silverberg, 75, has come to know which retail blocks are a success, and which are struggling.

He knows where storefront vacancies are getting out of hand, where independent shops are dying, where look-alike chains are dominating and where to get a great gelato.

In the complex retail world of the city of Vancouver, there are many signs of distress.

Over the years the professional urban planner has advanced a simple theory: “What gives neighbourhoods their character are their ‘high streets,’ their shopping areas.”

But in Vancouver — where many citizens worry city council is overriding established neighbourhoods with one-size-fits-all retail upzoning — the relationship between the city’s unique communities and its high streets, a widely used British term, is in a state of anxious flux.

Where can we go for a grocer, a butcher, a baker? Where to head for a haircut or birthday balloons? Is a friendly restaurant or sidewalk café nearby? Can we walk to buy garden plants, a screwdriver or new glasses — not to mention, dare we dream, a book?

These days, for residents in many Vancouver neighbourhoods, it’s becoming harder to purchase things and services at land-based shops. There may be more fitness studios and big real-estate offices, but there are fewer independent electronic shops and clothing stores.

In the midst of the agitation, the City of Vancouver paved the way for last month’s opening of the high-end Oakridge Park shopping centre.

Councillors are also holding a public hearing July 14 to pursue their aim to create 17 new high-density “villages,” which would flood new retail space into neighbourhoods that already have troubled shops.

In a 2021 report on small business in Vancouver, Silverberg and a team tracked what was happening to shops in Marpole, Collingwood, Hastings North, West Broadway, South Granville, and Commercial Drive.

They discovered a seven per cent overall decline in a decade in active retail outlets. They recorded a 13 per cent decrease in independent storefronts; a 24 per cent jump in chain outlets and a 30 per cent drop in so-called “comparison-goods” retailers (such as furniture and apparel stores that battle with e-commerce). One of the few upsides was a 16 per cent jump in “food and beverage establishments.”

This year the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association reported on more trouble. Foot traffic in the city’s core dropped 18 per cent in 2024. In the Homer and Hastings streets area almost two out of 10 storefronts are empty. On downtown’s Granville Street retail vacancies run at a disturbing three in 10.

When Postmedia News asked the city for an update on these and related figures, a communications person said staff wouldn’t answer because a new “storefronts report” may go to council in July.

Since Silverberg hasn’t done comprehensive cross-city research himself in the past few years, he wouldn’t venture to say how retail is generally doing in the city. He did say, however, that some shopping nodes are doing well, while some aren’t. Specifics matter.

During a career in which he continues to consult for both government and private business, Silverberg can’t emphasize enough the many subtle differences, including word of mouth, that go into what makes one shopping district work and another fall flat.

Indeed, Silverberg has learned flourishing shopping districts are often confined to zones of just two or three city blocks. Whether around 41st Avenue and East Boulevard, Granville and Broadway, Commercial Drive and 1st, or Joyce and Kingsway, he can point to adjoining retail blocks — two of which are thriving and, immediately next door, two of which are stagnating.

Nevertheless, Silverberg has guidelines for success. A thriving neighbourhood shopping area almost always has to have a strong anchor tenant, he said, typically a supermarket.

And there is a need for a minimum surrounding population density, which he and colleagues calculated at about 40 people per square city block. Retail districts also need to be accessible by all modes of transportation, provide parking and have proactive business organizations.

While many residents are perturbed that Oakridge Park’s newly opened shopping mall focuses on the luxury market, with about a dozen elite jewelry stores, Silverberg visited it last week and didn’t come away riled.

He thought it was “beautifully done,” and will do better when anchor tenants arrive. They include a giant Safeway, a large B.C. Liquor Store, a public library and a community centre. And, he added, if Oakridge Park’s mall does poorly in years to come, the owner, QuadReal, can always “tweak” the retail mix.

Silverberg is more concerned about Vancouver’s villages plan, which envisions 17 new retail centres at street intersections where there are now a scattering of shops. He doesn’t understand the logic behind why the sites were chosen.

The plan, he said, appears to break the cardinal rule of retail planning: “Thou shall not create competition with existing neighbourhoods,” especially with established commercial centres. It’s far better to retain an existing store tenant, he says, than to find a new one.

A coalition of 30 prominent Metro Vancouver urbanists and scholars, known as Housing Reset, agree. Last week they issued a statement lamenting how the villages concept will add one million more square feet of retail space to the city.

“Many established neighbourhood/commercial corridors, all within walking distance from these villages, already suffer 10-to-15-per-cent storefront vacancy rates and thus will be impacted very negatively by this plan to add substantially more commercial shopping areas as competition,” said their public letter.

While the vibrancy of any retail district hinges on several factors, in the end Silverberg and his planning colleagues agree there is one fundamental test.

And that is to count the storefront vacancies in any commercial zone. If more than one in 10 is empty it’s likely that a shopping district is in serious trouble.

As Silverberg rightly says: “Everybody knows that, intuitively.”

https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columni...ny-vancouver-storefronts-are-in-distress

[Glow Fun City]

Maybe vacancy is so high because no one can afford rent? In that case, more supply could actually help.

[GenWhy?]

I like how buildings will both sit vacant and "flood" neighbourhoods with new construction:

"Councillors are also holding a public hearing July 14 to pursue their aim to create 17 new high-density “villages,” which would flood new retail space into neighbourhoods that already have troubled shops."

Rent and taxes too high maybe?
"And that is to count the storefront vacancies in any commercial zone. If more than one in 10 is empty it’s likely that a shopping district is in serious trouble."

Retail, like industrial, has it's net square footage rarely expanded with new construction. It's not rocket appliances to figure these things out.

[jollyburger]

They corrected the name but with no correction note at the bottom of the article which seems odd.

Too bad they left one misspelling of the name.

In a 2021 report on small business in Vancouver, Silverberg and a team tracked what was happening to shops in Marpole, Collingwood, Hastings North, West Broadway, South Granville, and Commercial Drive.

https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columni...ny-vancouver-storefronts-are-in-distress

[logan5]

These former city planners and city council member are full of crap. For years they would be on the Bula Blog begging the City for more human scale, Jane Jacob’s,eyes on the street, Haussmannian typology. This was the pinnacle of urban planning they said. Now they are getting what they have always wanted, but now “it’s too much, too fast”. Where have we heard that line before? These guys are nothing but nimby’s.

[jollyburger]

I mean look at his book review about some hybrid laneway house architecture in 2024

We might think of how gentle densification can be further expanded with the low impacts of BAAKFIL, at the block or even neighbourhood level. For mid-scale in all suburbs, we might think about how considerations of removing land from the development proforma could open up vast parking lots in shopping malls for housing, or how better design sculpting might resolve rude adjacencies for neighbours. These politically acceptable low- and mid-rise innovations might stave off the need for more and more high-rises, now being pushed in some Canadian cities at almost any location, even if isolated or harshly impactful.

https://www.canadianarchitect.com/book-r...-professionals-and-the-housing-industry/

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by Glow Fun City

Maybe vacancy is so high because no one can afford rent? In that case, more supply could actually help.

And yet we have lots of vacant storefronts. Who are the landlords sitting on empty ones in South Granville or West 10th? Maybe it is time to revive that idea of taxing those vacant units at a higher rate.

[Feathered Friend]

Group Seeks City-wide Help in Stopping Villages Plan
Posted on July 1, 2026 by CAROL VOLKART

A small community group with big ambitions has launched a grassroots battle against the Villages Plan, which urban experts have warned could destabilize communities, create winners and losers and cause urban blight without producing affordability.

“We hope this is the beginning of a city-wide movement,” said Smart Density Vancouver’s Elaine Stevens as passers-by checked out the group’s information booth at 33rd and Mackenzie on June 26. “We’re making contacts all over the city.”

The group’s June 26 and 27 information booths on Mackenzie were aimed at making that as easy as possible. Laid out on a table were copies of seven pre-printed letters opposing various aspects of the plan for residents to sign. There was a step-by-step instruction sheet for how to write to council online. There was a 4,000-plus signature petition to sign. And there were stacks of flyers for concerned citizens to distribute through their own communities.

Perhaps its most visible effort is the thousands of colourful flyers that volunteers will pop through Vancouverites’ mail slots. After a first run of 1,000, Smart Density had another 5,000 printed. Stevens said 1,000 of that second batch were dispersed over the weekend, and the group continues to ask for volunteers to distribute them throughout the city.

When triple the expected crowd of about 60 showed up, the meeting had to adjourn outside. MC Marisa Thomas, a former Global TV reporter, grilled ABC councillors Lenny Zhou and Peter Meiszner (who introduced the motion for a review) about multiplexes and the reason the review was needed before a feisty and angry crowd.

Although the focus of the meeting was multiplexes, the Villages Plan soon arose as an even hotter topic, as some of the audience members had just learned the plan would effectively freeze their properties...

Reverberations from the June 10 Smart Density meeting reached even into City Hall, where general manager of planning Josh White referred to it in a June 23 memo to the mayor and city council.

The memo noted that “questions and comments” were coming in from the public on the Villages Plan, and that Zhou and Meiszner had shared some of them in “feedback from a neighbourhood meeting.”

The memo said staff wanted to address “several common misconceptions” that had arisen about the plan. Some people have incorrectly been told that all parcels in the Villages Plan must be four to six storeys with ground floor retail when they are redeveloped, it said, but in fact this applies to less than four percent of the properties in the village

In a similarly scathing message to Mayor Ken Sim, Thomas urged a halt to the Villages Plan, saying it takes the mistakes of the multiplex policy and puts them on steroids.

Urban experts with “hundreds of years of design experience” have called a code red on the plan, she said. “Even as a non-design expert, this entire report is lazy, lacking in detail and completely misrepresents what communities want.”

Vancouver’s former co-director of planning Larry Beasley foresees a future of discord, destabilization, victimization and physical blight if the Villages Plan proceeds.

https://dunbarnews.ca/group-seeks-city-wide-help-in-stopping-villages-plan/

The Villages Plan is scheduled for the July 14th Public Hearing, and the usual people who oppose this type of thing are once again organizing to make their voices heard.

For those who are curious, here's the meeting agenda where you can view the staff report, send in your thoughts, or register to speak.
https://council.vancouver.ca/20260714/phea20260714ag.htm

[GenWhy?]

"Vancouver’s former co-director of planning Larry Beasley foresees a future of discord, destabilization, victimization and physical blight if the Villages Plan proceeds."

Oh Larry. Great prose, though. Stick to books.

[logan5]

Over the decades, practically every land use policy that affects the West Side gets protested. We know these people have zero interest in any kind of change, no matter how much public consultation is done. Any kind of density is beneath them, and should be reserved for the east side. Full steam ahead with the Villages Plan!

[jollyburger]

They should pretend it's an anti-AI data centre meeting and they would get more people.

"NO DATA CENTRES IN DUNBAR"