Speaking notes: Broadway Plan pre-zoning
[Update: video from the hearing. Council finished the speakers list around 11 pm - it’s now closed. Debate and decision will be on October 7.]
There’s a public hearing for the Broadway Plan pre-zoning tonight. There’s a lot of opposition and more than 50 speakers, so I expect that council won’t get through all the speakers tonight. Agenda, with comments in support and opposed.
I signed up as speaker 6.
Hi, my name is Russil Wvong. I’m a resident of Vancouver. I’m calling to speak in support of this rezoning.
Reading through the opposing comments, it’s evident that a lot of people don’t like high-rises. Of course the issue is that you’re hearing from people who are self-selected instead of randomly selected, myself included. Burnaby held a workshop in 2019 with randomly selected participants, and two-thirds supported more high-rises near SkyTrain stations. A 2019 poll by Mario Canseco in the city of Vancouver found similar results, with 38% of people opposed to high-rises near them.
Why do people want to build high-rises? We have a chronic housing shortage that’s affecting the whole region. We have limited land, because of the ocean and the mountains. To add more housing, we need to build up. In a central location with easy access to lots of jobs, lots of people want to live there, so it makes sense to allow more height and density. Because we’re especially reluctant to build taller buildings in the city of Vancouver, compared to Burnaby or Surrey, it’s like pushing down on a balloon. When you don’t build something, the people who would have lived there don’t vanish into thin air. They get pushed further out. Instead of living in a central location near SkyTrain and getting around by transit, they end up living further out and having to drive to work, adding to traffic and congestion. Lack of housing in the city of Vancouver is driving up prices in Burnaby, Surrey, and further out. It’s incredible to me that we’re building high-rises in Langley.
Younger people and renters are being crushed and driven out by the high cost of housing. When we have lots of jobs and not enough housing, prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to push people out. This is a bad situation even if you’re an long-time homeowner or renter who’s insulated from the madness of the housing market. We all depend on the healthcare system, for example. When younger people can’t afford to live in Metro Vancouver, hospitals are going to have a very hard time finding nurses and doctors.
In recent years, there’s been a lot of new housing supply, including purpose-built rentals, and it’s helping to bring down prices and rents. Asking rents have been declining for more than a year now. This is good news for renters trying to find a place, and for first-time homebuyers. But housing is still scarce and expensive, even if it’s gotten a bit better. We need to keep going.
There’s basically three bottlenecks to housing supply: the incredibly slow process of getting approval, high costs, and the actual construction.
In particular, most of the residential land in the city of Vancouver is reserved for low-density housing. Under the institutions that the city set up back in the 1970s, it’s illegal to build anything else. You need to go through a process called “spot rezoning” where you have to beg the city to change the law for your particular site. There’s a lot of micromanagement, amounting to co-design. It consumes a huge amount of time and effort on the part of city staff and council, as well as the people trying to get approval. Naturally this is very expensive, and those costs get passed on to renters and homebuyers.
You have to go through pretty much the same slow and expensive process whether you want to build a small project or a big one. To quote Ginger Gosnell-Myers, “It's easier to elect a pope than to approve a small apartment building in the city of Vancouver.” So there’s massive economies of scale from going as big as possible. It doesn't make much sense to go through the painful rezoning process for a small project. We end up with high-rises in a relatively small area, and a sea of old detached houses, with not much in between.
The recommendation from the 2021 expert panel led by Joy MacPhail was to change this approval process. Instead of micromanaging each and every new apartment building, the city should figure out broad guidelines for what buildings it wants to allow. This may involve a lot of public consultation and debate, of course. But once the city figures it out, it should update its city-wide bylaws to allow them. So I’m glad to see that this is happening for the Broadway Plan.
Finally, I’d like to emphasize the need to protect renters who are living in older buildings that get redeveloped. The Broadway Plan does include protections for renters. But the real test of this policy is going to be when the first redevelopment of an old low-rise building actually happens. If it goes well, people will be reassured. If it goes badly, there’ll be even more opposition and backlash.
Thank you.
Thank you Russil, you are saying the right things. I actually think the City needs to go farther and upzone the whole city, but first they need to secure funding for infrastructure, at least for water, sewer, fire protection, garbage disposal (with a lot of cooperation from Metro Van and other levels of government). Hydro too, but I think Hydro is the Province's jurisdiction. I think a lot of infrastructure is actually taken care of by large condo developments, such as meeting rooms, gyms (partially replacing community centres). Libraries are going digital and can be scaled without adding more physical buildings. Community centres will be crowded, but I think people will find creative ways around that. Road are crowded, but that's where transit comes in (again, the Province and Metro region should chip in for transit). There's not much physical room to expand the streets anyway.
It's a great piece. Hope to see more residents in favour of density.