Redevelopment of Oakridge Center in Vancouver on April 9. DARRYL DYCK / The Canadian Press
The last time Vancouver tried to address its housing problems with a comprehensive plan, nearly 30 years ago, it didn’t change much on the large tracts of land devoted to single-family homes on large grassy plots.
There was some development around the intersection of Knight Street and Kingsway to the east, a few townhouses and new condo buildings on Dunbar Street to the west and a bit of apartment building along streets. select commercials here and there.
But most of all, the 150,000 people who have moved to Vancouver since CityPlan was approved in 1995 packed up in the center of the peninsula and in the central neighborhoods of Mount Pleasant and Fairview.
“All the growth in the city has been in the north of the 16th. This small area of the city has been doing all this heavy work. None of the southern areas have had substantial growth and all are being emptied, ”the city’s chief planner Theresa O’Donnell said as she prepares to present a new city development plan to the town hall on Wednesday. “This will unlock the potential of all these neighborhoods.”
The plan for the next 30 years envisions a hyper-dense “city center” surrounding the huge remodeling of the Oakridge Mall that is already underway in downtown Vancouver. There will be many more groups of medium-height apartments around the shopping streets of the neighborhood.
Unlike the recently approved Broadway Plan, the so-called Vancouver Plan will not produce immediate changes because it is a general concept, unlike a block-by-block redistribution. So far, only 27 speakers have signed up to support or oppose it.
Some fans worry that it will take too long to produce remarkable results. Opponents fear it will destroy Vancouver’s distinctive neighborhoods with a fixation of growth at full speed and one-size-fits-all.
Ann McAfee, the planner who ran CityPlan in the 1990s, said it’s a valid critique to say the 1995 plan was too deferential with neighborhood groups wanting to spend time talking about every detail of every blog, along with everyone other topics, from culture to transportation to green spaces.
“It would have been more helpful if we had skipped community descriptions. We should have taken the next step and focused on, ‘What are the main services we want, what will your neighborhood center be, and how will development pay for it?’ “.”
But then there was less sense of urgency, said Ms. McAfee, who has long been retired but is still on the board of the National Housing Council of Canada. Planners, among others, felt that additional residents could be accommodated through the redevelopment of unused industrial land in the city center and the new development of condominiums over shops along shopping streets.
He said the Vancouver Plan will still force all projects to a time-consuming redistribution, a process that has currently stalled the council so much that the city had to cancel a public hearing on a major Broadway development. and Commercial this week because there was no more space on the schedule before the August break.
Mrs. O’Donnell said the detailed implementation will take place in the next phase of the Vancouver Plan when, if approved, it will be combined with previously existing community plans and further consultation in the neighborhood.
But critics of the proposed Vancouver Plan say they have little hope of it happening because the plan appears to be top-down, incorporating little of what residents would like to see on the way to new homes, in addition to proposing tens of thousands of homes. . this may not even be necessary.
Architect Brian Palmquist, who has closely examined urban planning initiatives, said there is already enough housing in the city to accommodate a quarter of a million people.
“She is OK. We are building an over-amplification of what we need and we are erasing the city we know, ”Mr Palmquist said, listing the homes that are already on the way, from the ongoing boom of street houses to large ones. developments throughout the city, from the Squamish Towers near Burrard Bridge to the Concord Pacific land plans northeast of False Creek.
Mr. Palmquist insisted that people in the city’s low-density residential areas have made great strides in their thinking since the 1990s, when they opposed almost any new development.
“People have come to six-story buildings and densification. There is an understanding that we need to give more opportunities. “
But, he said, this plan does not provide communities with specific parameters to help them make suggestions in a productive way.
“If you look at growth in the city and you say, ‘You need 200-300 more homes a year in your neighborhood, can you do that?’, People start thinking.”
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