Speaking notes: Jericho Lands policy statement
Opponents: "The density and built form are not compatible with the surrounding neighbourhoods"
The draft policy statement (a kind of high-level plan) for the Jericho Lands site in Kitsilano is being reviewed by Vancouver city council today.
[Update: passed unanimously, with some minor amendments. Video on YouTube.]
Summary of the Jericho Lands site concept (a high-level plan from earlier in the process):
The approach is to have taller buildings and more open space (like Oakridge), rather than shorter buildings which are more filled-in (like Olympic Village). The three tallest buildings (the “Sentinels”) will be 49 storeys.
The plan is to build 13,000 homes, over a 30-year period. 20% (2600 homes) will be social housing, and 10% (1300 homes) will be moderate-income rental housing. The rest will be leasehold strata: the First Nations don’t want to sell the land.
Once the SkyTrain extension from Broadway and Arbutus to UBC is built, there’ll be a station at Broadway and Alma (within walking distance of the eastern half of the site), and a station at the Jericho Lands site itself. The plan includes a VSB elementary school, 360 daycare spaces, a community centre, and 30 acres of open space, including 20 acres of park space. It also includes a grocery store, commercial space (stores), and light industrial space.
Opposition to new housing in Kitsilano is especially strong, despite housing there being extremely scarce and expensive. Opponents of this project have set up a group called the Jericho Coalition. It’s well-funded and well-organized: they’ve raised more than $20,000 through an online fundraiser. Bill Tieleman, a long-time NDP political operative, is their spokesperson. They’re saying it’s a “massive overreach in scale and density”; Tieleman describes it as “high-rise luxury concrete towers.”
Whenever someone objects to new apartments as being “luxury” or “unaffordable,” I always wonder, what about the far greater unaffordability of the single-detached houses in the neighbourhood? To buy a house, you need to buy a large amount of expensive land.
For example, there’s a house for sale just south of the Jericho Lands site, on West 8th, selling for $10 million. This would require a household income of $2M/year to be affordable, on top of a $2M down payment.
For anyone who would like to help counterbalance the opposition, it takes literally 60 seconds to submit a comment. Just select "Feedback on an upcoming Council meeting agenda item," enter "Jericho Lands policy statement," select "Support" or "Oppose", and enter your comment. It can be as simple as "I support this plan."
I signed up to speak at tomorrow’s council meeting. There’s more than 60 people signed up; I’m speaker #7.
Hello, my name is Russil Wvong. I’m a resident of Vancouver. I don’t work in real estate. I’m a member of a pro-housing group called the Vancouver Area Neighbours Association.
I’m calling to support the Jericho Lands policy statement. We desperately need more housing. Housing being so scarce and expensive is driving younger people and renters out of Metro Vancouver.
People move where the jobs are. At a geographically central location with easy access to jobs, a lot of people will want to live there. So land values are high. Allowing greater height and density means that each household doesn’t have to pay huge amounts of money for a lot of expensive land.
Restricting height and density is like pushing down on a balloon. The people who would have lived there don't vanish into thin air. They end up moving further out, spending more time commuting to and from work, and adding to traffic and parking congestion.
Opponents have argued that a better plan would be to have shorter buildings and a more filled-in site, like Olympic Village. But the tradeoff is that you would then have less open space and less public green space.
As a side comment, I find it ironic that it’s easiest and fastest to get approval to build the most expensive housing, a single-detached house, at the very top of the housing ladder. It’s much more slow and painful to get approval to build condos, rentals, and social housing. As I understand it, after the policy statement, there’s an official community plan, and then a rezoning. This could easily take another five years. It’s an extremely slow process, when we’re in desperate need of more housing. It’s not just the Jericho Lands which are sitting mostly empty. We have land all over the city which is underused because it’s so labour-intensive for the city to give its approval to build anything which isn’t a single-detached house.
I understand that people in the neighbourhood are afraid of change. I sympathize. But there's a choice between two kinds of change. We can keep the buildings the same, and watch Vancouver become more and more exclusive and expensive, like an exclusive country club. Or we can let the buildings change, so that younger people can afford to live here. That includes our own children, as well as the nurses and doctors who we need to run the health-care system.
Thank you.
Process
To summarize the steps in the approval process (about five years so far), before construction can begin:
Guiding principles
Site concept
Policy statement (you are here)
Official development plan
Rezoning
Development permits
Building permits
More
Jericho Lands high-level plan (two possible “site concepts”), October 2021
Update to Jericho Lands high-level plan (revised site concept), July 2023
Kenneth Chan, Daily Hive: Vancouver City Council to decide on Indigenous-owned Jericho Lands development project, January 2024
Dan Fumano: Massive Jericho project inches ahead as polls show vastly different views, January 2024. This points to the self-selection problem: only 38% of commenters via the city’s Shape Your City website supported the plan (almost half were opposed), while 65% of Vancouverites polled through random sampling supported it (9% opposed).
Opposition fundraiser: Jericho Coalition Opposes Plans for Jericho Lands
Claire Wilson, Vancouver Is Awesome: Neighbourhood residents propose new plans for Jericho Lands project, July 2023
Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun: Battle of Jericho Lands over ecology, density, affordability, December 2023