A tree-lined Beatrice Street, near East 20th Avenue, in Vancouver. The residential street is located one block east from local businesses on Commercial Street.Kayla Isomura/The Globe and Mail
Vancouver introduced a plan to create small shopping and residential areas throughout the city as part of its official development plan, adopted in 2022.
In 2024, planning began for 17 “villages,” which required rezoning of intersections in low-density neighbourhoods to add six-storey multifamily buildings with shops and improvements to the streets. On July 28, after considerable taxpayer expense, a three-day public hearing and much public outcry, the plan was shot down in a 10-1 vote by the mayor and council, with OneCity councillor Lucy Maloney the only vote in favour.
Planning experts say the failure of the plan exposed the city’s weak spot: public engagement. They say policy makers need to learn how to engage residents and develop density plans that communities can embrace.
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Tim Barton, senior consultant with consultancy firm Street Matters, worked with the city’s transportation planning team for nine years until late last year. His work included transportation planning for the villages plan. The Vancouver Plan document estimated that 260,000 more residents will be living in the city by 2050. The idea was to create walkable neighbourhoods away from busy streets and add housing for people who might not otherwise be able to live in Vancouver, said Mr. Barton. He and his wife had relocated to Coquitlam from the West End to find more suitable housing, so he says he personally understood the assignment.
Mr. Barton has responded on LinkedIn to public comments by Mayor Ken Sim, that staff had “overstepped” when they came up with the villages plan.
“Staff work at the direction of council, and this thing has been going on for two years,” he said.
“My personal thought, and someone else might tell me I’m wrong … the direction was, fairly early on in this council term, was, ‘We want you to get on and do the villages.’ And I was thinking, well, that makes sense because it’s the least dense piece out of these different things that you could have asked staff to work on. And so, it might have appeared like it was maybe the low-hanging fruit, if that makes sense. It was going to be the least controversial. And yet it failed.”
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Mr. Barton said despite criticism, city staff did do public engagement that went beyond notices in the mail. He said he met face-to-face with residents at several public events. But, he added, the engagement process needs to improve.
“There is a question about how, in general, we engage with people on controversial topics. And there are different ways of doing engagement,” he said. “There are co-creation type models and things that take a lot more time and might even involve an elected body handing a bit of power over to some of those groups. If we’re going to grow as a region and we’re going to accommodate density … we have to figure out the best way, as a society and as a people and as residents in Metro Vancouver, to do that, and to bring the public along with us.
“I think if you could have that more nuanced conversation with people, I think you could get a better outcome.”
The plan had called for increasing height and density up to six storeys in specific areas, most of them dominated by detached housing, with a sprinkling of shops. It included an estimated 550 blocks and more than 13,000 properties. The upzoning meant potential speculation and tax increases based on development potential. Only residents who’ve been in their homes for at least a decade could apply for an exemption to the “highest and best use” market valuation.
Vancouver planner Larry Beasley, former co-director of planning for the city, who famously helped shape downtown towers, called the city’s approach “brutal and naïve.”
In a strongly worded letter to the city he sent in June, he wrote that the plan could trigger speculation in some areas and cause land values to plummet in others, such as the homes overshadowed by six-storey buildings. Residents had raised concerns about the lack of transition between houses and low-rises, as well as loss of trees, and cherished neighbourhood shops that would be lost to new development.
“The result will be community displacements, victimization, physical blight, existing retail stress, and ironically, a difficult and risky development scenario,” wrote Mr. Beasley.
“With no co-ordination or focus to manage these random moves or concerns, the unintended negative results are inevitable.”
Instead of blanket rezoning for 17 villages, they could have added modest density around existing neighbourhood centres, he said in an interview.
“They could have said, ‘We’re going to work with the community to find out where the opportunities are, and what scale works best in this neighbourhood versus this neighbourhood,’” said Mr. Beasley. “Do that in a few neighbourhoods at a time, rather than the whole system, because otherwise, you’re just setting off speculation like mad.
“I always found solutions when I worked with the community … rather than people getting a letter in the mail telling them that their homes are being rezoned against their wishes.”
Mr. Beasley said he hadn’t seen such an angry public response in years. The city’s 2023 rezoning of single-family properties to allow up to six strata-titled units likely contributed to the outrage, he said.
“I think it was the last straw, and a lot of people were already angry because of the multiplex policy, which was just passed without much community involvement. The scale wasn’t right, the neighbourliness wasn’t right. The trees were all being lost.”
Mr. Beasley and planner Sandy James, director of Walk Metro Vancouver and former city planner, are part of a professional group known as Housing Reset that opposed the villages plan. The group, comprising urbanists, planners, architects and academics with decades of experience, regularly comment on housing policy, and are currently working on a set of proposed solutions for Vancouver’s growing pains. Ms. James believes the council decision to nix the plan was motivated by civic elections this fall. She also believes it’s not over, and a modified version of the plan will reappear before a new council.
“They wanted to do a blanket rezoning that was spread too thinly, and they made it a developer type of plan, and created a false construct of new communities, not looking at existing commercial areas and how to strengthen them – even though those areas have 10 to 15 per cent vacancies,” said Ms. James.
She also cites a failure to appreciate the distinct character of each neighbourhood with a one-size-fits-all approach, and a lack of engagement with those distinct neighbourhoods. Blanket rezoning, she said, serves developer interests above community interests because the developer will always choose the maximum zoning allowed even if it doesn’t make sense for adjacent housing.
“We are a city of neighbourhoods, so use those parks, use those schools, and look at opportunities to put higher density in those communities instead of creating false constructs,” she said.
“We used to have a planning department that had very strong relationships with the community and knew how to do public participation, and that was part of our planning – and it made us different than any other city in North America. That was our strength.”