Speaking notes for Broadway Plan review
With limited land, we need to build up
Vancouver city council has two standing committees, one on city finance and services, one on policies and strategic priorities. From the city website:
Standing committee meetings are held to hear information from staff and the public in a more informal setting, compared to the formal council meetings.
There’s a meeting today of the standing committee on city finance and services, which includes a review of the Broadway Plan. Agenda.
What the staff report includes:
Recommended policy amendments to comply with the province’s transit-oriented areas, and to replace a number of older urban design guidelines (for “C-3A zones”) with a single set.
Recommended policies for redevelopment of the City Hall site at Broadway and Cambie.
A Public Realm plan (for public space on Broadway), together with recommended policy amendments.
Apparently there’s a lot of people signed up to speak to the committee. I’m registered as speaker #4.
Hi, my name is Russil Wvong. I’m a resident of Vancouver.
I’d like to say that I support the Broadway Plan policy amendments recommended by city staff to comply with the province’s transit-oriented areas, to plan for future redevelopment of the City Hall site, and to plan for the public realm on Broadway.
I know that not everyone likes high-rises. But we have limited land in Metro Vancouver, because of the ocean and the mountains. So if we want to grow, we need to build up, especially in central neighbourhoods close to jobs and to rapid transit, where lots of people want to live. And we do need to grow. As people get older and retire from their jobs, we need younger people to fill those jobs. We need more people to work in healthcare. We need more teachers, police officers, even judges. All of these people need a place to live. When we don’t build enough housing to keep up, prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to push people out.
There’s supply skeptics who argue that Vancouver’s built more housing than anywhere else, and it hasn’t brought down prices and rents. Their data is questionable, because if you look at the fastest-growing metro areas in Canada, Vancouver isn’t even in the top 10. But the deeper issue is that we’re always aiming to maximize city revenue from new housing, and so we keep pushing up the floor on prices and rents. They can go up, but they can never go down. To make housing more affordable, we need to look for ways to lower costs instead of raising them. That’s why it’s important to allow more height and density in places where land is especially expensive, to lower the cost of land per square foot of floor space.
Because there’s a lot of old low-rise rental buildings in the Broadway corridor, it’s critical to protect current renters as these buildings are replaced with new high-rises. The Broadway Plan requires that current renters be able to return to the new building at their old rents. Besides protecting renters, the additional cost also serves as a disincentive to redevelop where there’s a lot of people who will be displaced. It makes more sense to build where there’s few people who will be displaced, or none at all.
You probably don’t want to reopen the renter protection policy. I'm reminded of the Meech Lake Accord. Once you've got a compromise in place on a difficult issue, it's pretty hard to reopen it, because then everyone who wanted something different comes forward with their demands. It's like opening a giant can of worms.
Thank you.
Q1. What of the exacerbation of congestion of people and traffic? Q2. Would it not be better to campaign for increased density in currently less-dense areas vs. further compounding it in already dense areas?