Land Values: Vancouver’s new head planner Josh White has a massive job in front of him

Josh White’s face remains scrupulously expressionless when I ask how he’ll deal with a city where the last two heads of planning left, um, abruptly after they were perceived by Vancouver’s influential developer cabal and, ultimately, their political masters as not getting things done fast enough.

“People have been welcoming, but I know that comes with expectations. People want action, they want change. That’s why I’m here,” says White in a resolutely can-do tone. The 42-year-old started his job as Vancouver’s “general manager, planning, urban design and sustainability” on May 1, after the previous director, Theresa O’Donnell, departed last September following a little more than two years on the job. Her predecessor, Gil Kelley, exited in May 2021 after about five years. (To round out the picture, Brian Jackson, before him, quit after three years amid much criticism from former planners about his work. And Brent Toderian, the city’s last hire from Calgary, was fired by Vision Vancouver six years into his tenure.)

White knows he’s been hired to work a few small miracles. Boost housing production, even though builders are putting projects on hold because everything from interest rates to the cost of materials is working against them. Fix the planning department’s dysfunction, even though it appears intractable to many, with its lack of any unified strategy on how to get things done: a place where junior planners in particular struggle to figure out where the ship is headed. Create new urban villages around 26 commercial high streets in Vancouver, a massive job that will require piles of staff work at a time when the city is struggling with budgets and tax increases. Densify around the city’s ridiculously sparse SkyTrain stations, such as at Nanaimo and Renfrew, while figuring out how to get a billion dollars’ worth of required sewer and water lines. Coordinate city policies with the new directives on housing coming from the province at a rate of one approximately every 10 minutes. Try to keep everyone in this perpetually malcontent city happy. And do it all immediately, if not yesterday.

And he’s coming from… Calgary. The land of endless spreading suburbia. The place where it took years to come up with a policy to allow basement suites anywhere without having to go through an individual rezoning for each one. A city with a downtown that has the country’s most serious office vacancy problem, to the point that it is paying owners to convert or demolish buildings—unlike in Vancouver, where downtown, in spite of its rising vacancy, remains the least stressed in Canada. And a place that has a very different city hall culture from Vancouver’s. In Calgary, development approvals are made through what’s called a “corporate decision” model, where key bureaucrats meet and jointly agree on required changes. A world away from Vancouver, where applications get passed around from department to department and everyone insists on getting 100-percent compliance with each group’s particular mandate. Calgary is a city that gives out customer-service awards to planners—a mind-bending idea for Vancouver.

But the Calgary-born, University of Toronto-trained planner does seem like he’s going to be able to bring something different from anyone else who’s taken on the role over the last half century in Vancouver.

White, Calgary’s co-chief planner and director of regional and city planning for the last two years, came to Vancouver fresh from one of the most contentious public hearings his home city has ever seen. Almost 750 people showed up over five weeks to oppose or support the plan to introduce “missing middle” forms of housing throughout the city. (It passed.) So he’s got experience dealing with a riled-up public and a council anxious to do the right thing without committing political suicide.

But, more interestingly, White has a different kind of background. Many have noted that he has worked as a planner for private-sector companies and they’re encouraged by that. Vancouver development consultant Tegan Smith checked in with local builders who said they were encouraged by what they’ve heard about his history. “His efforts in Calgary to bridge relationships with industry players and tighten up the approvals process have been commended, signalling hope for similar improvements in Vancouver,” she wrote in a recent post.

But there’s more. White, while he was working for a private company in Toronto, decided to donate volunteer time to a neophyte mayoral candidate in Calgary who he thought could bring a fresh approach—Naheed Nenshi. He ended up contributing four of the 12 “better ideas” for Calgary that Nenshi campaigned on in 2010. Then he got hired as a strategic advisor in Nenshi’s office for five years,  before going back to the private sector and then back again to the city as a planner.

White also worked on the campaigns of two more Calgary councillors in the political/private-sector years: Druh Farrell, who served six terms on council then quit to run as an NDP candidate in the 2023 provincial election (she lost), and Jyoti Gondek, who went on to become the city’s current mayor. All of that shows the signs of someone who knows a lot not just about planning but also about the political strategies and pragmatic calculations needed to get things done.

Throughout his first weeks on the job in May, he was doing all the right things. Using Mobi bikes to cycle around Vancouver and check out its different neighbourhoods. Meeting with movers and shakers in the community. Figuring out who’s who. Assessing where he and his family (his spouse is also a planner and they have two elementary-school-aged children) will want to live. When I speak with him, Olympic Village has been winning over the kids.

He adheres to a pretty progressive line: more housing is the key priority and it should be everyone’s because it’s something that helps the environment, social equity, the economy. B.C. is the best place to be working on that in Canada these days, because the province is making such precedent-setting moves.

More cycling infrastructure is a necessity: “Cars are very space-intensive. If we’re going to move people around in any kind of functional way, we have to lean on transit and walking and biking to move people efficiently and sustainably.” (He notes that he’s been impressed by how much of the city he can get across by bike on “quiet-street” routes.)

On the Broadway Plan, Vancouver’s very aggressive effort to add 30,000 new homes and 50,000 people to a 500-block area—a historic transformation that is generating increasingly noticeable levels of anxiety about how it’s working out not just among the usual NIMBY-aligned resident groups but also among tenants, tenant advocates and former city planners—he’s treading a careful line.

Of course there has to be more density along a billion-dollar transit line, he says firmly. But, he adds, at the two-year mark “we’re trying to understand what’s working and not working so we can make adjustments because that’s what planning should be, not a static exercise.” On the other hand, he doesn’t believe, as some are arguing, that more density means good urban design has to be thrown out the window. “We can be much more assertive about achieving housing outcomes but at the same time be really thoughtful, building on the 35 or 40 years of excellence in urban design in Vancouver,” he says. “There’s a lot of muscle memory about how to create good, potentially sensitive buildings.”

He either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to say publicly that, in fact, the focus that Vancouver used to have on good urban design has been weakened, something that former planners who set the bar high in the ’90s and early ’00s, like Larry Beasley, Trish French, Scot Hein and others, have pointed out frequently. The city no longer has an urban-design studio, and it currently seems more focused on unit-count production and adhering to basic building-code requirements than on ensuring that the new density comes with an equal focus on everything else needed to make it work: parks, community services, a variety of housing types, an inviting street environment, a sense of neighbourhood connection.

“Not sure Josh has any knowledge/context of how far we have fallen,” says Hein. And it’s not clear how fast he can move on slowing down development if it threatens to produce a wave of tenant displacement in spite of the city’s measures to prevent that—something that a group of those former planners say needs to be put in place now.

White will be getting the message, for sure, from Vancouver’s always-vocal planning critics. What everyone will be looking for: whether he simply carries out directions from above or has the ability (one that good strategic planners have) to gently steer the politicians and public toward new strategies that can provide a clear road through the pitched ideological battles and fixed ideas that often dominate when it comes to trying to figure out Vancouver’s future.