Chinatown Updates Discussion

[VancouverOfTheFuture]

Originally Posted by osirisboy

i feel like if I was the developer I would be taking this to court at this point. This is reidiculous. And you're right this just sets a horrible precedence

And how can they reject this when they have approved a half dozen projects up the block?

they better sue the city. there was no reason to deny it. it fit everything that they asked for after deny the first plan that fit the community plan.

[Vin]

If they sue the City guess who ends up paying for the bill?

I would suggest a land swap, and then the City can leave that Chinatown lot as a dump like it has always been, or they can just turn it into a park. Maybe a new homeless tent city?

[SpongeG]

Should historic racism against Chinese-Canadians be enough to kill new Chinatown condo?

Vancouver's upcoming apology for past discrimination is rallying point for those opposed to the project
By Justin McElroy, CBC News Posted: Nov 05, 2017 7:00 AM PT Last Updated: Nov 05, 2017 7:00 AM PT

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/britis...ondo-1.4386459

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by Feathered Friend

Well, I was wrong... Apparently three of the four members of the DPB (Gill Kelley, Andrea Law and Jerry Dobrovolny) were willing to ignore their staff, the advisory board, and even the City's legal department and voted against 105 Keefer.

Truly a disturbing precedent for the City, when the rules are bent to accommodate those who behaved terribly and screamed the loudest. I'm not only worried for the future of Chinatown, which I think now is assuredly gloomy, but I am also concerned this behavior, and acquiescence to it, will spread to other neighbourhoods throughout the city.

Council made a mistake, but it was somewhat understandable as they did it for political reasons (being the political beast they are). I'm not sure what the two members of the DPB were thinking tonight. Score one for the 'looking good while throwing your staff under the bus' I guess. Will Beedie move ahead with yet another redesign as suggested by the board, or will they take legal action against a decision that has flimsy logic at best, only time will tell.

One closing thought, it is ridiculous that the West End is progressive enough to accept more height/density in order to create social housing and community benefits, while this neighbourhood (with its claim of social activism) rejects social housing and community space because of 3-5 extra stories. Imagine if all the effort spent fighting this one project was applied to lobbying higher levels of government to increase funding for low/moderate income housing?

Maybe I'm a cynic, but it feels like a good portion of this "movement" is made up of people using this as a political stepping stone or, alternatively, just a way to feel like they are part of a larger cause. Meanwhile, all the people in the area that are struggling to get by are being mislead. Then again, maybe time will prove me wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.

There's nothing inherently "progressive" about the West End that leads them to accept more density. It's just a more transient population without much of an organized voice.

Let's be frank, SSP tends to lean toward a pro-developer point of view that is not representative of the general population. It may come as a shock to many posters that developers are generally not that highly regarded by the population at large and probably even less so as the people see prices skyrocket with developers collecting the cash.

[cov]

Originally Posted by whatnext

Let's be frank, SSP tends to lean toward a pro-developer point of view that is not representative of the general population. It may come as a shock to many posters that developers are generally not that highly regarded by the population at large and probably even less so as the people see prices skyrocket with developers collecting the cash.

The general population also lowly regard lawyers, insurance brokers, and translink. Meanwhile many of us speak of Jennifer Lawrence and Ryan Reynolds in great regards. This doesn't exactly speak well for the people.

Regardless, yimbysm is increasingly in popularity as young people understand that investment in our urban centres is a necessity for improvements in standard of living for people in the future.

[officedweller]

If they follow the path of Concord Pacific with 58 West Hastings -
maybe they could sell or donate the site to the City for a community amenity contribution connected to another Beedie project.

But does Beedie have any other projects in the City of Vancouver that could come into play?

Alternatively, sell off the parcels piecemeal and they'll be developed with skinny 6 storey buildings.

[csbvan]

Originally Posted by officedweller

If they follow the path of Concord Pacific with 58 West Hastings -
maybe they could sell or donate the site to the City for a community amenity contribution connected to another Beedie project.

But does Beedie have any other projects in the City of Vancouver that could come into play?

Alternatively, sell off the parcels piecemeal and they'll be developed with skinny 6 storey buildings.

Yes please!

[jlousa]

This is even worse then the CP/Aburtus line fiasco. We have the city offering to buy the property from a legal owner, the owner refused and attempted to develop it within the current OCP with a rezoning and gets turned down, the owner then tries to develop it within the existing guidelines where no rezoning is even needed and is again turned down. This is a serious assault on property rights and all property owners should be greatly concerned.

[osirisboy]

Does bc not have a municipal board where these decisions can be appealed to?

I just can't see how this decision by council can stand. If a proposal meets all the guidelines and still gets rejected what's the point to all of this?

[csbvan]

Originally Posted by osirisboy

Does bc not have a municipal board where these decisions can be appealed to?

I just can't see how this decision by council can stand. If a proposal meets all the guidelines and still gets rejected what's the point to all of this?

It was a decision by the Development Permit Board, not council.

[VancouverOfTheFuture]

Originally Posted by jlousa

This is even worse then the CP/Aburtus line fiasco. We have the city offering to buy the property from a legal owner, the owner refused and attempted to develop it within the current OCP with a rezoning and gets turned down, the owner then tries to develop it within the existing guidelines where no rezoning is even needed and is again turned down. This is a serious assault on property rights and all property owners should be greatly concerned.

Originally Posted by osirisboy

Does bc not have a municipal board where these decisions can be appealed to?

I just can't see how this decision by council can stand. If a proposal meets all the guidelines and still gets rejected what's the point to all of this?

there has to be something. because you are right, if everything fits the rules set out and the people who only make decisions on if rules were met, say no. then wtf can happen next? this is just insanity. it has literally become a roll of the dice. "we followed all the rules, GIVE ME A 7!!! I NEED A 7" *gets a 4* "well crap, no housing today i guess; ill come back next month and hope i get a better roll of the dice."

Originally Posted by csbvan

It was a decision by the Development Permit Board, not council.

true, although council also said no, even though it met all of their revised guidelines to get rezoning. *sets new guidelines* *votes no when meets said guidelines* **project made to meet current bylaws** *votes on when meets current guidelines*

same stupid decisions going against the own rules, same city, same thing basically.

[mezzanine]

Originally Posted by osirisboy

Does bc not have a municipal board where these decisions can be appealed to?

I just can't see how this decision by council can stand. If a proposal meets all the guidelines and still gets rejected what's the point to all of this?

I feel bad for all the work done by people all for naught up to this point, but IMO this is a better decision.

Beedie was late out of the gate and by the time they had a proposal that didn't require a rezoning, other chinatown projects completed and have changed chinatown, IMO, more quickly and profoundly that I expected (and a lot of others too, I suspect).

Chinatown owns its existence due to exclusion by the greater society at large. Its site was land with the highest water table, closest to the then-industrial areas, ie, the worst area of a young vancouver. The most famous example of its built form, the sam kee building came about not due to fun and whimsy, but due to discrimatory attitudes at the time:

The unusual proportions arose from a dispute whereby the City had expropriated most of the lot for street-widening without compensating the owner, the Sam Kee Company, for the residue, believed to be unusable. This event has value as a gauge of the disrespect shown to Chinese-Canadians by the civic authorities; and owner Chang Toy's response in building on the much-reduced site is an indicator of the Chinese community's defiance to this discrimination.

Through its own efforts it also saved itself from destruction for freeway planning and its population of working class cantonese immigrants and other down-at-their-heels lower income groups are now ironically being threatened by an embrace by developers and the population at large.

I realize that you can't 'preserve' chinatown (last summer, I could still walk past tongs where you can see and hear older men playing mah-jong). But I do agree another look at the chinatown plan is needed. Beedie has also some some disingenousness - IIRC their prior proposals had social components, not out of pure charity but quid pro quo for more intense zoning. A prior proposal's social housing not only required a rezoning, the capital funding didn't come from the development, but from the province. By the time they had a plan that fit regular zoning, the political climate had changed.

The application for UNESCO world heritage status for vancouver's chinatown is interesting. It takes years for vetting to be done, but it would be interesting to see how it pans out. At the very least, I am glad vancouver is asking itself what its chinatown means to them.

[Marshal]

I only know about this project from you guys and the media. I haven't looked into it to know all the details. And, this stuff angers me so much that I don't want to know more. So, my views come from those limitations.

The two big instruments municipal governments have are the Building Code Bylaw and Zoning Bylaw. Both can be contested: Building Code issues can be appealed to the Building Appeal Board in Victoria. Zoning disputes can be appealed to the Board of Variance. Unlike the Code, zoning is a political animal to begin with. The Municipal Act specifies that zoning be concerned with orderly development (of land & structures), the control of populated density, regional planning as concerns livability, and the preservation of the value of property.

As you can imagine, if the Act itself defines zoning in such terms, it creates a lot of room for municipalities to fudge about, using equally subjective things like "the promotion and protection of community standards,' to push owners and developers around until they get what they think they want.

The property controls defined in the Municipal Act often impinge upon the Property Law Statute.

Another oddity is that building permits are meant to be issued based upon satisfying the requirements of the Building Code + Amendments . . . unless it is combined with a development permit. (you can ask: is the combination to make it a better approvals process, or to muddy two things such that a municipality can muscle the applicant.)

Now, in this case, (not knowing this case in detail, this is opinion) if the latest proposal is based upon an application within the current zoning, there should be no way for the CoV to reject it. Which they have anyway. But what recourse is there? Here's where it gets maddening. They can't appeal to the Board of Variance, because there is no zoning issue involved. So, how can the city get away with it? The developer entered into a combined development-building permit process for the earlier proposals. Each proposal is not a fully separate entity. So, the city has the developer over a barrel. Even the latest version, with no challenges to the zoning, is part of an ongoing process that the developer signed onto from the start. The city has created a quasi legal space in which they are acting like they have both the jurisdiction and authority to decide on their own basis.

There is no appeal process within the Municipal Act for things like this. But there is an avenue open, and I dream of the day that some party takes it on. It is to take the city to court for overextending their legal reach. The Municipal Act does not envision this kind of power . . . I would argue that there is no support in law for this kind of decision making, and that aspects of Property Law contradict this exercise of control and power.

This drives me over the deep end, but as far as I know, out of fear for their business, no developer has ever, in the history of the universe, sued a City Hall.

[mezzanine]

the land is in a prominent area of chinatown (by the WW2/railroad memorial and the sun yat sen gardens, so i can see justification on the city's part. the CoV would be pushing their luck if they did this to other developments though.

I wonder how this will play out politically. Barring a rapid and profound real estate correction, i think many vancouverites will appreciate an example of some controls on development. i am unsure if it would be wise on beedie's part to sue the city as i suspect it will backfire tremendously wrt public opinion. At the current pace of development, if the land remains vacant for a prolonged period, it wouldn't be a large loss as change to other areas of chinatown will be inevitable.

People might be worried about further densification of other areas of vancouver based on this. However, more intense use of land will be inevitable and adapable if you take a longer view. changes happening to chinatown due to new development are happening rapidly and IMO not directly comparable.

Other former development-permit board members and lawyers also said that the board will have to be extremely cautious in its decision or risk a lawsuit by the developer.

The board does have some discretion in its decisions, they say. But, more typically, it is likely to require certain design changes to a building rather than rejecting it outright.

"If there's a staff recommendation for approval and everything is complying, it would be very unusual for them to reject it outright," said Michael Geller, an architect and developer who has been on the advisory committee to the board.

He said the board could set some conditions. However, most of the opponents didn't make arguments about the zoning or changes they wanted to see. They argued that the building should be rejected outright because the site it sits on is too important to the future of Chinatown.

Even when the board sets conditions, those can end up being challenged by a developer.

In a 2005 case that many lawyers look at, Vancouver was sued by a property owner and lost when it tried to get an oil company to remediate a street near the gas station it owned.

Imperial Oil argued, successfully, that the board had gone too far with its conditions.

"If they go overboard, the developer can challenge that. It's not absolute discretion," said municipal-law specialist Olga Rivkin.

On the other hand, she said, there is a grey zone in Vancouver's zoning bylaws. One section says the board has the discretion to refuse a project if it would "adversely affect public amenity."

That's not defined and there are no cases anyone can remember where that section was used.

"The board may consider the effect on public amenities, which may be significant," said Ms. Rivkin.

Mr. Spaxman, the city's planning director in the 1970s and 80s, has remained connected to Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside, sometimes as a city consultant, sometimes as a participant in community efforts to shape planning in the area.

He says the city made a mistake when it approved the overall plan for Chinatown in 2011 that allowed taller buildings in some areas, even though Chinese business groups had pushed for that and many other Chinese community organizations had supported it.

But, he said, the city never did a thorough study to look at the pros and cons of that plan. If that had been done, it could have identified the problems that emerged later.

The Beedie project became a target of opposition the last three years, after three condo projects were built on Main Street that many came to see as too big, out of keeping with Chinatown character, and not providing the kinds of community benefits people thought would come with development.

As well, a new group of young people, many of them second- and third-generation Chinese, has emerged as a force trying to save the traditional Chinatown that they remember.

The opposition has been successful in one way. City staff are working on modifications to the Chinatown zoning plan, something that even original supporters in Chinatown say is needed.

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/new...ticle36840400/

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by cov

The general population also lowly regard lawyers, insurance brokers, and translink. Meanwhile many of us speak of Jennifer Lawrence and Ryan Reynolds in great regards. This doesn't exactly speak well for the people.

Regardless, yimbysm is increasingly in popularity as young people understand that investment in our urban centres is a necessity for improvements in standard of living for people in the future.

I didn't say it was fair, I just pointed out SSPers tend to have a rosier view of developers and their intentions than the general (aka voting) public. YIMBY is a cute phrase, but as we've seen it doesn't lead to affordability.

Sounds like the city needs to go back to the drawing board with the Chinatown plan and either bring these groups onside or make it clear they won't bow to this kind of pressure. Did you know Chinatown is a federally designated National Historic Site? Given that fact there should be far more "curating" going into what development looks like.

[rofina]

Originally Posted by jlousa

This is even worse then the CP/Aburtus line fiasco. We have the city offering to buy the property from a legal owner, the owner refused and attempted to develop it within the current OCP with a rezoning and gets turned down, the owner then tries to develop it within the existing guidelines where no rezoning is even needed and is again turned down. This is a serious assault on property rights and all property owners should be greatly concerned.

Well put.

We somehow politicized property rights. Very dangerous precedent.

How can you turn down something that required no rezoning and conforms to all guidelines?

How does this affect the market value of the land for Beedie?


EDIT:

Also - how do you even achieve further clarification on what would pass? I just completely don't understand how this can be.
Forget zoning, codes, OCP's. Consult a group of random 100 strangers to figure out what you can actually build?

This is crazy.
What can you build here if something that's tailor made for the zoning is turned down?

[Alex Mackinnon]

I can't help but think that Vision and Friends have just left a giant turd for the next city administration to clean up.

I wouldn't be surprised if Gill and Dobrovolny are fired right away if Vision loses it's majority. Rightly so.

Whatnext, you get nothing but lost value from all parties if the bloody city can't even make up it's mind about zoning. The city should rightly be on the hook for the cost of all these proposals and interest costs. Lost profit is also probably going to be an issue.

We're a city whose CACs bring in what, $300M a year? This just shows everybody that we don't have our shit together. We can't write plans, make city plans, or stick to them well enough for anybody to plan based on them. Vancouverism at its worst.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by Alex Mackinnon

I can't help but think that Vision and Friends have just left a giant turd for the next city administration to clean up.

I wouldn't be surprised if Gill and Dobrovolny are fired right away if Vision loses it's majority. Rightly so.

Whatnext, you get nothing but lost value from all parties if the bloody city can't even make up it's mind about zoning. The city should rightly be on the hook for the cost of all these proposals and interest costs. Lost profit is also probably going to be an issue.

We're a city whose CACs bring in what, $300M a year? This just shows everybody that we don't have our shit together. We can't write plans, make city plans, or stick to them well enough for anybody to plan based on them. Vancouverism at its worst.

Oh, I agree the city looks like its in disarray over zoning after this. That's why i said they've either got to lay down the law, or come up with a new overarching plan everybody buys into.

[mezzanine]

Originally Posted by Alex Mackinnon

I can't help but think that Vision and Friends have just left a giant turd for the next city administration to clean up.

I wouldn't be surprised if Gill and Dobrovolny are fired right away if Vision loses it's majority. Rightly so.

Whatnext, you get nothing but lost value from all parties if the bloody city can't even make up it's mind about zoning. The city should rightly be on the hook for the cost of all these proposals and interest costs. Lost profit is also probably going to be an issue.

We're a city whose CACs bring in what, $300M a year? This just shows everybody that we don't have our shit together. We can't write plans, make city plans, or stick to them well enough for anybody to plan based on them. Vancouverism at its worst.

it's one site, of special prominence in Chinatown.

vision may be past its expiration date for a lot of folks but they picked a good hill to fight on IMO. if vision does lose in the next election, who would want to go up against older, poorer Cantonese immigrants, other lower income groups in the area and 2nd and 3rd generation chinese-canadians who are very, very organized? if Vancouver becomes more expensive and exclusive how would the chinatown decisions look at that point to the public?

I suspect beedie could have built their on-side zoning proposal if that was the initial proposal from the start, but in 2017 Vancouver, I am disappointed many folks are putting more trust in private developers than the flawed, messy, imperfect but public and vital civic process, especially for a unique and historic area like Vancouver's Chinatown.

[officedweller]

I don't think that historically, it was a special site in Chinatown, was it?

I think it has only become a special site because of the open space provided by the plaza,
which is a result of the diversion of Keefer St., the monument and the garden and traditional building to the west.

The site is across the street from a massive parkade.
If the site had been of special significance, surely, the community would never have allowed a parkade to be built there.

... and remember, that the downtown streetcar is slated to plow right through that area on Columbia St. headed to Gastown.
Will that be allowed?