Retired lawyer Mike Mangan told a recent meeting that the city has effectively silenced residents’ voices during years of ‘breathtaking’ changes in Mount Pleasant. But people in other neighbourhoods shouldn’t be complacent; they’ll face the same thing themselves.
By Carol Volkart
Mike Mangan is his own best example of the problems he sees with the city’s treatment of residents at a time of massive change and densification.
The information and consultation process on the Broadway Plan was so dismal, the retired lawyer says, that he’d never heard of it before he came face to face with one of its results. Walking in his Mount Pleasant neighbourhood in September of 2024, he was shocked to see a development application sign for an 18-storey tower on a quiet tree-lined street.
That was two years after the city had approved a plan that reshaped how 500 blocks of the Broadway corridor could be developed, including allowing towers many blocks away from Broadway itself.
“Until I first saw the rezoning application at 14th and Yukon, I hadn’t heard of the Broadway Plan, nor had most of the residents,” he said in a March 25 talk entitled “Voiceless in Mount Pleasant: Towers and the Death of Public Oversight.” The talk was part of a 12-week speakers’ series on community planning organized by Local Focus, a Vancouver project aimed at raising awareness of civic issues.
“Since then, I’ve learned that most residents first learn of the Broadway Plan when a rezoning application sign appears outside or near their building,” said Mangan, who went on to use his legal expertise to help residents fight the tower. (It was approved.) “None of the many residents with whom I’ve spoken had any idea that the Broadway Plan would subject our neighbourhood to dozens of massive high-rise towers on our quiet residential streets.”
But the larger lesson is how the city has “effectively excluded and silenced our voices as residents, both tenants and homeowners, in the huge changes being imposed on our neighbourhood,” he said.
“We all understand the need for more housing and we don’t oppose it, but we want to genuinely participate in the process. As city council approves tower after tower in Mount Pleasant, our concerns are effectively ignored.”
‘Breathtaking’ pace of change in Mount Pleasant
The degree of change in Mount Pleasant has made the lesson a stark one. While all areas of the city have faced densification, in the last three and a half years, Mount Pleasant has seen five successive waves of change, all making it easier for developers to build housing in the area while, in Mangan’s view, making it harder for residents to have any input.
“The scale and pace of these changes and the relatively short time frame in which they have occurred is unprecedented and breathtaking,” Mangan said. “All with the barest minimum of short notice to Vancouverites, most of whom are still unaware of what’s happened and what’s going to happen to our city if we cannot restore participation in the planning of our neighbourhoods and our right to public hearings.”
Throughout his talk to an attentive and concerned audience, which included people from other communities as well as from Mount Pleasant, Mangan pointed to various factors that he said have cut residents out of the conversation.
They include hundreds-of-pages-long staff reports so complex that even Mangan, who taught and practiced real-estate law, had trouble untangling them. Other problems are lack of notice and consultation with residents, new processes that take many development decisions behind closed doors, and a ban on public hearings for most residential developments.
It’s a big change from council’s earlier approach to residents, Mangan said. He recalled the neighbourhood planning offices established by the city in the 1970s, where staff worked with residents on local issues, and even after that, “the city continued to genuinely include and respond to the views of residents when planning developments in our community.” He noted that the Mount Pleasant Community Plan, adopted by council in 2010, was “approved after broad public consultation.” At 33 pages long, it was “simple but effective.”
Now, he said, “the planners hide from the public behind the internet,” and even their once-public contact information has disappeared. While they’re willing to spend hundreds of hours communicating with developers and their architects and representatives, they “virtually shun” the public that will be affected by development, he charged.
Mangan recalled how a planner refused to make the 10-minute walk from the planning office to meet residents concerned about the 14th and Yukon project. “He permitted only one phone call and restricted it to two residents. He allowed only email communication. This often involved a delayed response or no reply.”
Mangan also had an anecdote about a council staffer who’d been involved in the meetings residents had set up to lobby councillors about 14th and Yukon. The staffer is reported to have told one of the residents: “It’s too bad you have a problem with change.”
The path to today’s ‘sad situation’
Mangan’s presentation traced five major changes that have affected Mount Pleasant since 2022.
Mangan calls the Broadway Plan the beginning of the “series of events that bring us to our sad situation today.” His list includes:
- Broadway Plan, passed in June 2022, after a 493-page report. Taking effect in September of that year, it permitted high-rise towers across about 500 blocks, from Vine to Clark Drive and from 1st to 16th Avenues. While the city’s position is that consultation was thorough and robust, critics, including Mangan, dispute that. Noting that consultation was done during COVID, when most interaction was done online, they say it failed to reach and engage most residents.
- Transit-Oriented Area bylaw, passed in June 2024. It created concentric circles around transit stations and bus exchanges with 8, 12, and 20-storey towers allowed depending on distance from the station. The bylaw was required by the provincial government, but critics say the city has gone beyond provincial requirements. As well, Mangan said, city council “can and often does allow extra height if the developer asks.”
- Amended Broadway Plan, passed in December of 2024, after a referral report of 353 pages. This controversial move turbocharged the Broadway Plan, relaxing requirements for developers and increasing the number of projected towers to 550 from 350.
- Mass rezoning of Mount Pleasant, Fairview and a large part of Kitsilano, passed in October of 2025. The 447-page referral report was a “masterpiece of obfuscation,” difficult for even a real-estate lawyer like himself to negotiate, Mangan said in an Oct. 2, 2025 Op Ed piece in the Vancouver Sun. He also decried the “dismal lack of notice to the many thousands of affected tenants and homeowners. A postcard and a two-week Q&A online does not amount to substantive consultation for a measure as enormous as this.” Depending on the block, the change allowed towers of nine to 27 storeys by default, with no public hearing. Mangan’s home in a quiet residential block could suddenly get a nine-storey tower next door. “There’s no rezoning application, no rezoning application sign, no public hearing. All the developer’s arrangements are made behind closed doors at city hall.”
- Official Development Plan, passed in March of 2026 based on a 200-page referral report and what Mangan called a “disgraceful lack of warning to the public.” A key aspect – mandated by the provincial government – is a ban on public hearings if a development aligns with the plan and is 50 percent residential. Mangan said it’s the end of nearly all public hearings in residential areas across the city. Virtually all the arrangements with the city will take place “out of the public sight behind closed doors at city hall,” creating the potential for corruption, he said.
Overall, he said, the changes have removed residents from the conversation while the development industry, whose names are prominent on the funding lists of most city councillors, have the say. Developers have “managed to persuade both levels of government to take all the guard rails off, which is what they have wanted for decades.”
How to effect change
A culture change is needed, and to achieve that, people have to fight, he rallied the crowd. “We did not elect city council to give away the city to developers.”
He urged residents to get informed: Write the mayor and council en masse (one letter “won’t move the needle”); attend all-candidates’ meetings and ask candidates if they’ll repeal the Broadway Plan and amend the Official Development Plan; vote in the Oct. 17 civic election; and when the provincial election comes around, ask candidates if they’ll repeal provincial housing bills requiring towers around transit stations and banning public hearings.
The question and answer period turned into a brainstorming session on how to effect change. One audience member wondered if Vancouver could learn from Calgary, where a new council is moving to repeal blanket rezoning passed by the previous one. And leading up to this fall’s civic election, she asked, could residents stage protests, write letters and “create a lot of noise” so there’s little council can do in the face of the public outcry?
When another audience member asked how difficult it would be for a new council to “get out of this cycle,” Mangan replied that except for what’s mandated by the province, the city can pass and repeal or amend its legislation. But it could cost money. “It may involve some lawsuits by disappointed developers. It may involve changing staff at high and mid levels in the planning department so that there is a complete culture change there. But if the politicians detect sufficient support, they’ll be prepared to do it.”
“So there is hope?” said the audience member.
“There’s hope,” said Mangan. “There’s hope. But your last bit of voice, if you’re concerned about this, is the election in October.”
The video for this talk is available here.
This is one of a series of reports on 12 speakers talking about community planning issues in neighbourhoods around Vancouver this spring. The free speakers series is organized by Local Focus, a Vancouver-based project aimed at raising public understanding of civic issues. Sign up for remaining speakers at https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/community-planning-matters-4821906