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The City
Vacancy at top of City Hall nears two decades
By Kevin Potvin
The demise of Sam Sullivan keeps with a pattern that leaves the city dangerously exposed
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There is something profoundly sad about the political demise of erstwhile Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan. Political life is all about defeats, of course, but to have to stick around for five months after being fired not by the electorate but by one’s own party must be painful. It’s also one thing to see a self-aware manipulator get his come-uppance, but it’s quite another when it’s not clear the downfallen knows why it’s all happening. Well, that’s life.
On a more important note, the total collapse of the mayoral office under Sullivan’s occupancy marks the 15th year and counting (22 if you include Gordon Campbell) that Vancouver has utterly lacked effective political direction.
The timing is bad. The last two decades have been the most transformative period in the city’s history. The city is being remade in a way and to a depth and with a rapidity rarely seen anywhere else in the world in any era. Civic thinkers from around the world come here to witness it. And yet, throughout it all, it would be difficult to find a city more poorly lead so consistently for so long. It is as though a ship were navigating one of the most dangerous passages in the world and chose that time to experiment with putting no one in the wheelhouse.
Sullivan was pegged by critics early on for having no purpose for public office besides personal self-aggrandizement—a point even the membership of his NPA finally picked up on. Before him, mayor Larry Campbell admitted to losing interest in politics within the first year of his three-year term. Before him, mayor Philip Owen sat for 10 years in the office with apparently nothing to do up until he was turfed by his party, after which, for about three months at the end, he finally acted mayorally. Before him, Gordon Campbell was mayor, and while he was generally successful as mayor, he acted solely in the interests of property developers, of which he was one. Still, at least he understood that the office of mayor is there for taking action. We have to go all the way back to 1985, the last year of Mike Harcourt’s administration, to find a mayor who actually acted like a mayor.
The string of ineffective mayors doesn’t mean the city has had no direction at all. Power abhors a vacuum. In lieu of power in the mayor’s office, it has generally been property developers who have collectively directed the course of Vancouver through this transformative period. And so we have a city today very much designed by and for property developers, for whom it works very well.
But hey, who’s complaining? The city is consistently ranked at or near the top of every livability ranking of cities that ever comes out. Can the extraordinary run of bad mayors have been so disastrous if the city is regarded around the world as one of the most livable of all?
One might imagine lack of effective political leadership, and the power of civic direction flowing to private property developers as a result, is the secret key to success.
Except for the reasons why Vancouver ranks so high. Take Vancouver away from its natural endowments—the ocean, the mountains, the year-round moderate climate—and there would be far less livable about the world’s most livable city. What’s more, while the city is currently so successful, its rapid transformation risks it becoming much less so in the future. It is so livable today because of good stewardship of the past. There is little evidence of community spawning in newly developed or redeveloped areas like Yaletown and Coal Harbour and certainly none of the community spawning that was immediately evident when the city was first rapidly transformed, when 4th Avenue, Mount Pleasant and Grandview were built. The development of Kingsway and the Southeast quarter show what can go wrong when private developers have no guidance or control from City Hall. Give the new sheen of Coal Harbour 10 years to tarnish and the fad of Yaletown to pass, and those areas will be revealed for the Kingsway they are—urban dead zones.
When Vancouver is billed as a livable city, it is invariably the community feel that makes it livable. Strongly community-oriented neighbourhoods don’t just happen by accident. Private developers are required and they need their freedoms, but they also need to be controlled and directed and usually by the moral authority conferred by the mayor’s office. Left alone, they create Kingsway—strip malls, gas stations, parking lots and impossible-to-stroll streets, and few community enhancing businesses come in.
What’s more, while Vancouver may have got to where it is as a city by adapting well to prevailing conditions, these conditions are rapidly changing as well and here there is little evidence of awareness of these changes or preparations to adapt to them. The province, for example, seems insistent on doubling the capacity of the main east-west car corridor into the city—Highway One—to the exclusion of all other means of moving people, like public transit. The city remains effectively unopposed to this assault, having no leadership at City Hall for going on two decades.
Nor does there seem to be any thinking about what happens when all transportation infrastructure investment has gone into a mode of travel teetering on the brink of sudden obsolescence. The price of oil is making travel by car much more expensive. As commuters have repeatedly insisted, no effective alternatives to cars exist. The result will be personal expenditures diverted away from a variety of traditional places and towards gasoline for necessary travel. It will be the very things that make a city so livable that will suffer—busy restaurants, small shops, theatres and other cultural amenities, small business services, and so on.
These coming shifts in spending will have enormous effects on the neighbourhood communities that make the city so much of what it is. These changes are predictable and their impact avoidable, so long as the office of mayor is occupied by someone with knowledge about them. They will hit Vancouver harder than most other cities because we are more car-oriented than most other cities.
We have a livable city today. But a consistent lack of leadership through these large transformations spell serious challenges to retrofitting any elements of livability back into the city in the future, when conditions—expensive gas and housing in particular—will be radically different.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
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