Urban planning

Conference on housing reveals dull imaginations

  Rather than show us new and stimulating ideas, the developer community in Vancouver only pushes for the City to give up the one power it has over them

  by kevin potvin

From the corner of Quebec and Keefer Streets, you can scan across about 90 degrees of view and count 19 high-rise construc-tion cranes. It’s positively Shanghai-ian.

Most, if not all, are pulling up residential condos, and I stopped to marvel at the sight on my way to the imposingly-named Morris J Wosk Centre for Dialogue.

There is no way to approach the Wosk without feeling self-important. It’s a make-believe United Nations general assembly hall, complete with terraced seating in the round, and at every high-back adjustable leather chair, there’s an array of voting buttons (including one for abstain!), wire jacks, power outlets, and a microphone. The Wosk is housed in a formerly prominent bank on Hastings Street, but unlike in those formerly colonial days, the shades over the tall windows looking out over Hastings are never up.

Here on Monday, March 27, was the first in a series of conferences on the future of Greater Vancouver. The Price We Pay, the theme of the first installment to do with the high costs of housing, drew out all the heavy hitters in the Vancouver market, including Bob Rennie, Ward McAllister of Ledingham McAllister Properties, and Michael Geller, CEO of SFU Community Corporation, all to talk about how developers and government leaders can ensure there is an adequate supply of housing for the middle-class market in Greater Vancouver. The mayors of Richmond, North Vancouver, Coquitlam, and Langley were there, as well as a couple of Vancouver councillors.

I happened to have with me research material for another story: a photocopy from a microfiche of the Vancouver World newspaper from exactly a hundred years ago where an advertisement appeared offering for sale a 50-foot-wide building lot facing Hastings Street only two blocks away from this conference at the Wosk, to be sold for $4,100. Exactly 100 years later, Bob Rennie, the one they call the Condo King, told of the record-setting land sale that had just occurred at the corner of Richards and Robson streets, about three blocks away. Its value was about 50,000 times more than the advertised price for a similar lot 100 years ago. The value of land in Vancouver had doubled 16 times over those 100 years.

This fact, said Bob Rennie, is the chief and inescapable reason why nothing can be done to build adequate housing for the market unless city councils zone large regions for much more dense styles of housing construction. The land itself—which will never become cheaper since they’re not making more of it—is already too expensive for single houses, even before construction and materials are paid for.

But as Jay Wollenberg of Coriolis Consulting made clear, city councils have not shown the courage necessary to zone large areas for higher density. People living in neighbourhoods usually do not favour changes of any kind to their areas, and are typically very much against higher density—and will vote against those councillors proposing it. Thus, said Wollenberg, in a statement seconded by all the panelists, “They need to show some guts.”

What developers would like, said developer McAllister, is for cities to stop zoning site by site according to developers’ applications, and to zone whole areas ahead of developers’ requests, and according to visionary planning.

The problem is, zoning is about the only real power City administrations have. By retaining the power to withhold zoning decisions on a lot-by-lot basis, City administrations can extract from developers financing for any number of public amenities the City can’t afford on its own. Without the power to withhold zoning, City administrations can’t wheel-and-deal with the heavy-hitting property developers.

The developers at the conference suggested that some consistent schedule of fees for development permits on land already zoned for higher density would be a good substitute for City administrations that are no longer able to extract deals on a lot-by-lot basis. But then, that would leave the fees vulnerable to a developer-friendly council interested in simply cutting the fees.

This conference was billed as a “discussion intended to challenge traditional thinking and stimulate actions.” Instead, it turned out to be only an opportunity for developers to tell political leaders to give up the one tool City administrations have to get anything out of developers.

What the developers should have been asking themselves was, How come the residents of neighbourhoods consistently reject what the developers offer when they propose more dense constructions? It may not be density itself that citizens reject, but the shape and form of it as delivered by unimaginative developers. It was this same developer community, after all, who delivered us leaky condos. If there is a benefit to residents from more dense zoning in their neighbourhoods (and I certainly believe there are), then perhaps developers can take upon themselves the task of explaining those benefits to citizens.

For example, higher densities make small, independent retail stores more viable, and more stores nearer by mean less car travel for everything people need to shop for in a typical week. More citizens walking the sidewalks up to more stores means more eyeballs in the neighbourhood, which means more public safety. Also, shopping at small, independent stores, as opposed to huge box stores, is more fulfilling, more interesting, and more rewarding. Perhaps developers could help entice more interesting shops to their buildings by cutting rents for small, independent shops—and thereby show other citizens resistant to densification how much richer life is if they agree to it. 

Better looking designs, better built buildings, better quality provision of public amenities, and more imaginative and creative ways of helping to advance the vision of planning we already have—these are the means by which developers can win the hearts and minds of the citizens as they plan to stack us up ever higher and tighter together.

It’s not like developers haven’t had the opportunity to advance their own cause. The NPA, the most developer-friendly cabal that’s ever run any city in Canada, has exercised power at Vancouver City Hall for all but a precious few of the last 75 years. No, the Vancouver developer community has been restricted only by their own limited imaginations.