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VANCOUVER — After nearly two years of work, the city's EcoDensity plan comes closer to reality with city council's public hearings on the initiative this Tuesday. Opponents have already planned a demonstration at the steps of City Hall ahead of the hearing. Many are angry homeowners who want to keep their streets and backyards as they are by blocking new infill and laneway development, and staunching the upward pressure on house assessments and taxes they feel will come with ever-higher housing densities.
Rallying in favour of the scheme is a potent alignment of sustainability advocates and the city's powerful real estate development community.
In the last few weeks I have sat in on some of the city-sponsored EcoDensity workshops and watched ordinary citizens struggle as city staff led them through the "EcoDensity Charter" and listed off the "EcoDensity Initial Actions." Participants were bombarded with way too much informational nitty gritty.
Since there is much to assimilate here, an opinionated guide and critique of portions of this massive initiative might help scare out the real issues lurking in the verbiage.There is little here a guilty SUV-driver or even a Northern Alberta oil sands operator could not sign on to. Being a generic credo of sustainability, the EcoDensity Charter should pass, but some of us would have preferred fewer, tougher calls to direct action. The Vancouver Public Space Network has published a useful critique (www.vancouverpublicspace.ca) of how the scheme has been watered down.
The "Initial Actions" are where the action is. Most of the 21 initiatives are incentives and regulatory streaming towards more energy efficient buildings — both private sector and public. I heard some at the workshops express worries about using bonuses of extra density to encourage even more carbon-neutral, ultra-green projects. The concern is that this will make new constructions elephantine while diminishing the usefulness of existing bonuses geared to the preservation of heritage buildings and the generating of new community amenities like arts centres and day cares. But the bonuses discussion may be academic, as bonuses only really work in boom times: Winnipeg cannot fund its livability with density bonuses, and we may not be able to do so indefinitely.
A significant proportion of Vancouver's new housing and workspaces can be painlessly introduced into all neighbourhoods by building mixed-use mid-rises along arterial streets. The EcoDensity Initial Actions propose a review of zoning laws along arterials after heights and densities were foolishly reduced in a recent revision. The zoning laws will also be tweaked to make it easier to build in residential laneways and to encourage secondary suites. Both initiatives will make more efficient use of existing land and infrastructure, creating modest housing that will permit seniors, students and immigrants to reside in neighbourhoods where they have recently been priced out.
Most of these areas are on the Westside, a hotbed of resistance to EcoDensity and currently one of the city's least-dense areas. The city plan studiously avoids dealing with such neighbourhood discrepancies. This is, I think, a strategic mistake; planners should have clearly stated that all areas of the city must do their bit for EcoDensity. The model for this is the current proposal to build 12 social housing projects on city-owned land around the city, which has met with surprisingly mild reaction.
The most harmful EcoDensity Initial Action is number 12 — a proposal to lift height limits in Gastown, Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside. Included at the last minute to speed approval for pending condo tower proposals, it will add heritage and urban design ruin to the social tragedy prevailing there.
But standing back and looking at all 21 proposed initiatives, what is remarkable is how modest they are. Council and city planners have chosen a wide range of actions that could be implemented quickly — revisions, tweaks, small carrots, nominal sticks. Vancouver Planning director Brent Toderian has spent much of his time at public meetings reassuring audiences that EcoDensity changes will be gradual and restricted by "the usual challenges of trust, resources and politics."
While there are lots of pretty background pictures on the website (www.vancouver-ecodensity.ca), the published "Actions" are policies without direct visual illustration — baffling in this era of optics, and for an inherently spatial topic. Vancouver's policy wonks still reside, it seems, in a Victorian salon of quill-penned generic assertions.
I knew our planning department had a major communication problem on its hands when a smart and savvy granny at one of the EcoDensity workshops asked me, after hours of reading and talk: "What's a granny flat?" This is too bad, because fear of the unknown has been exploited by opponents of the initiative. "Oh, there's nothing wrong with that!" said the relieved and house-proud oldster across the table, after I sketched her a quick diagram. There are many more like her, and I cannot but hope that much of the current opposition will similarly melt away once Vancouverites realize just how modest and incremental the EcoDensity package really is.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of the EcoDensity proposals is they claim to deal with nearly all current challenges before the city, not just sustainability. Planning director Toderian projects a large image of a brightly-coloured children's tricycle when setting out his intentions. The two rear wheels of the EcoDensity trike are labelled "affordability" and "livability," with the big wheel out front bearing the words "sustainability." At every session I attended, I was impressed by citizens pointing out that the "affordability" wheel is undersized and a little wonky; there is little here that will make housing cheaper within city boundaries or stop the slide of its downtown and Westside districts into an exclusive resort for the wealthy.
Something truly visionary could have been proposed — say redeveloping the entire Arbutus corridor as a high density, affordable linear development — but EcoDensity's vision is tempered by short-term political pragmatics. Everyone knows what happens when one of the rear wheels of a trike is undersized — it goes around in circles — and my sense is that Vancouverites will be struggling with the affordability issue for decades.
Nonetheless, city council would be foolish not to pass the Charter and all but number 12 of the Initial Actions. EcoDensity should be supported, in my opinion, not because, but in spite of, the way it has been written and presented. Personally, I will hold my nose and give it the thumbs up. Then I'll hop on my EcoDensity tricycle and peddle off into what I hope is the long arcing pathway of sustainability, all the while hoping the wheels don't fall off.
