Land Values: Is Vancouver’s Broadway Plan headed towards disaster?

Walking through a city neighbourhood that’s had life injected into it with new buildings, new parks, new public spaces and new art is an exhilarating experience. I’ve had many, running the gamut from North Vancouver’s hopping Shipyards/Lower Lonsdale to Steveston’s river boardwalk to Vancouver’s Olympic Village, with its cool little bridge, big public square and manufactured island. It’s not a phenomenon restricted to North America. I’ve seen similar in Montpellier, Valencia, London.

But I’ve had as many or more downer experiences in places where it’s obvious that little care was taken to make new building developments human-friendly. For years, that’s what several areas of Burnaby felt like, as the city allowed builders to slap up generic concrete towers along Lougheed Highway or near Metrotown, with little at the ground level to make these areas a place any sentient being would want to spend time in. I’ve seen the same grim result in suburbs of Paris, Barcelona, Toronto and many other places.

The lesson I’ve learned is that good city planning can produce real beauty and a renewed sense of possibility. And bad city planning, planning that is focused on only one narrow dimension within a complex, interlocking set of realities, can produce disasters. Tram lines ripped up in favour of road building. Poorer people confined to restricted neighbourhoods through zoning that rigidly separated “bad” apartment-dwellers from “good” single-family homeowners. Badly designed social housing that produced dangerous conditions. All supported, more or less, by a planning sector that thought they were making good, necessary, rational decisions.

Which brings me to Vancouver’s Broadway Plan.

When it first appeared on the horizon, it seemed like a welcome relief from Vancouver’s overly fussy approach of the past three decades, where every new building or tiny little area plan was caged in with a stack of prescriptive requirements. One local commentator recently called it the bonsai approach to planning. That approach hit its pinnacle in the late 1990s, as the city attempted to protect existing residents from too much change by regulating house design in some west-side neighbourhoods, along with the usual obsessive preoccupation with any number of details in all the forms of housing beyond that.

So it was time for a change. The city had been gradually loosening up, under pressure to produce more places for people to live and a greater variety of them. Laneways, duplexes and multiplexes were cautiously allowed in.

Then the real housing crisis hit and everyone started panicking. Spec taxes, vacancy taxes and limits on vacation rentals were brought in to try to stop the bleeding, with only slight effect. So, feeling the pressure from angry younger people who were completely shut out, planners and politicians started to focus almost solely on ways to generate the most supply.

The Broadway Plan is the most dramatic example of that big U-turn. And it has the flaws of a plan that was conceived in a panic and is focused on only one element of urban life.

I don’t think most people—even people who live within the plan area—realize how big a change it envisions. I’m guessing there’s a tendency to think, “Well, Vancouver has had lots of development before so this is just more of the same.”

It’s not.

The Broadway Plan envisions packing more people into long-established neighbourhoods in a shorter period than any other time in the city’s history, and doing it with a lack of attention to urban design or neighbourhood improvement that is a startling reversal of past practices.

The plan calls for adding 50,000 people to the 78,000 residents within the area’s 880 hectares. That same area currently has one of the higher population densities in the city, especially on the east end in Mount Pleasant, which added more people between the last two censuses than any area of the city besides South Cambie.

Even the West End—which was transformed from rich-person mansionland in the 1940s to something like what it is now, when about 220 high-rises went up between 1956 and 1972 before a new council shut down tower projects—only saw its population grow from 26,000 in 1941 to just over 36,000 by 1976.

Vancouver has seen big development and huge population increases in the past 30 years, but, except for the bits of stuff allowed along heavy-traffic streets, the biggest increases have been restricted to former industrial or otherwise vacant land—or, recently, shopping malls. That’s why places like the Joyce-Collingwood area, Olympic Village, North False Creek, River District and South False Creek have or will have some of the higher population densities in the city—higher in some cases than the West End overall.

Until the Broadway Plan, city planners plotted out relatively modest changes when looking to expand housing in older neighbourhoods, often concentrating it on traffic streets and the borders of the area. The West End plan for its 200 hectares, finalized in 2013, envisioned 7,000 to 10,000 people being added over 30 years—about a 20-percent increase in population from its current 47,000. In Grandview-Woodland, where a new community plan was approved in 2016 for that area’s 448 hectares, the concept is to add about 10,000 people over 30 years to the existing population of about 28,000—less than half of the increase that’s proposed proportionally for Broadway.

But it could have been OK, even good, if the Broadway Plan had included the best of the city’s former urban design and planning practices, without going back to full fussbudget mode. Instead, the city came up with what I call a math plan.

To all appearances, no one from the planning department so much as looked at the streets on Google Maps, let alone rode, drove or walked along them to get a feel for how to integrate the new housing into a current mix of low-rise apartments, duplexes and early- and mid-20th-century homes, many of them turned into multi-apartment rental housing. Instead, the goal was to maximize the number of new units per block and to try to solve the city’s affordability problem by weighting the system heavily toward one form of development: very tall rental towers where the developer must ensure that 20 percent of the units are set at below-market rates. That pretty much dictated one model: the 18-, 19-, 20-storey concrete tower that requires five houses or an older low-rise apartment to come down to meet both city requirements for frontage and the developer’s requirement for something that works economically, given the subsidy requirement.

It’s an approach to creating housing—a form of what’s called inclusionary zoning—that American pro-housing (aka YIMBY) groups have repeatedly said leads to less housing being built because the subsidy costs are so high.

There was no attempt by planners to ask for any kind of design that would fit into these older neighbourhoods. No requirement for any kind of street-friendly townhouses at building bases—the kind that former planner Larry Beasley forced developers kicking and screaming to do in the Downtown developments along Richards and Homer, for instance. Nothing except for a math-like prescription that towers had to be a certain distance apart and there couldn’t be more than two to a block. It ditched the previous principle that building sizes should be graduated. You don’t stick a tower next to a two-storey house. Even the province, with its new housing directives, has been more context sensitive, with building heights gradually stepping down in the circles it has designated for more density around transit hubs.

That means that six-storey rental buildings, the kind that are going up in the Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood or stretches of Fraser and Main, aren’t economically viable within the Broadway Plan area. They would have been, if the city weren’t trying to get a few heavily subsidized units out of every project.

In the end, it feels like the Broadway Plan was an attempt not at good urban design, but rather to solve all the flaws of the last 30 years of restrictions in one go and in one relatively small area. (I note that, for all of the scolding that questioners like me get about how there needs to be more housing around the new billion-dollar subway line, there are still several neighbourhoods in Vancouver and Burnaby, along the expensive old subway line, that are still surrounded by single-family houses and, in a few places, properties that resemble farms.)

For proof of how rushed the entire process was, you can walk down Broadway and find four-storey condo and rental buildings in the process of being built, because that’s all that was allowed when shovels hit dirt.

None of this is an argument to do nothing or even to do less when it comes to building housing.

This is a call to do it better— and without city planners and the city’s more militant pro-housing types denigrating anyone who suggests improvements as some kind of renter-hating, privileged boomer NIMBY. Yes, there are plenty of those kinds of people in town, people who object to five- storey apartment buildings when there’s one just like it across the street, who have poisoned the well. But there are also many who want all of Vancouver’s future residents to have the experience that current ones have, of living in a human-friendly, well- designed, socially connected neighbourhood.