Questions About Villages? Join Us On Jan. 22!

Germaine’s Antiques, a longtime neighbourhood staple, is among several Dunbar Street businesses that have shut their doors recently.  A Jan. 22 Neighbourhood Cafe will discuss how the city’s plan to create villages will affect nearby shopping streets like Dunbar, which has the highest vacancy rate on the west side.

By Carol Volkart

There have been maps, surveys, reports, and a couple of open houses about the city’s controversial “villages” plan, but so far no chance for Dunbar residents to sit down with an informed speaker about what it might mean for the neighbourhood.

That will change on Jan. 22, when former senior city planner and head planner for Metro Vancouver Christina DeMarco will discuss villages at a Dunbar Neighbourhood Café, then open the floor for questions. The meeting begins at 10:30 a.m. at the Dunbar Community Centre. Everyone is welcome.

The café has also sent an invitation to city officials in charge of the Villages Planning Program.

The session is timely, as the plan is expected to go before Vancouver city council for approval this spring and be implemented this fall. If passed, it would establish 17 new villages, with the four closest to Dunbar at 16^th and Macdonald, 25^th and Macdonald, 33^rd and Mackenzie and 41^st and Mackenzie.

The city describes villages as “local hubs where many daily needs can be met within a five-minute walk, roll or bike ride from home. In the future, these areas will have a variety of small shops, services and a mix of housing up to six storeys.”

Affecting up to 600 blocks across 17 locations, the villages plan will “enable residential and mixed-use buildings up to six storeys around existing and emerging commercial nodes,” the city says.

The villages plan is one of a number of initiatives being developed as part of the 2022 Vancouver Plan, which in turn will be transformed into the city’s first Official Development Plan, which must be adopted this year.

But villages haven’t had an easy ride, from either experts or residents. In Dunbar, a first round of public engagement in late 2024 drew strong criticism about lack of consultation and information. But the most vehement complaint was – and continues to be – about the city pouring effort and money into creating new shopping areas instead of trying to help struggling commercial streets like Dunbar.

Indeed, a 2025 storefront report showed Dunbar Street had the highest rate of vacant stores on the west side of Vancouver, slightly higher than Point Grey Village. At 15 percent, it’s well above the 10 percent level considered unhealthy, and far beyond the 5-7-percent deemed healthy.

The 4Cats Dunbar Arts Studio at the corner of 27th and Dunbar closed recently, adding to the street’s high vacancy rate.

Another corner, another vacant building. The RBC Royal Bank branch at 26th and Dunbar Street is now closed, and the building is up for sale or lease.

At 17th and Dunbar, the longtime La Notte restaurant shut its doors in the last few months.

As a founding member of Friends of Point Grey Village, established in 2022 to help revitalize the shopping area there, DeMarco has strong ideas about the city’s focus on  creating new retail areas instead of working with existing ones.

“To me, it’s more fantasy than anything else. And a misuse of city resources,”  DeMarco said of the villages plan in a Dec. 10 Globe & Mail article. She said she’s puzzled about why the city is creating a whole new category based on small retail nodes, some of them holdovers from the city’s first zoning scheme of almost 100 years ago, rather than revitalizing the main commercial streets of today.

In the same article, Simon Fraser University’s Andy Yan called the villages plan “the kind of ‘tech bro’ approach. That is, ‘Move fast and break things,’ in neighbourhoods that are working.” It raises a number of questions, said Yan, an urban planner and associate professor of professional practice in urban studies: “What are the consequences? What’s the impact on land values? Is this enough to nudge out existing businesses?”

Dunbar architect and civic commentator Brian Palmquist has also written scathingly of the villages, saying that so far, he’s been unable to find out who decided on them and why.

Noting that the city already has 22 well-established neighbourhoods, his June 2025 City Conversation asked: “Shouldn’t we be reinforcing what already exists rather than diffusing our already struggling local shopping by creating additional commercial areas? Will this not just confuse businesses and their customers? Did anyone even stop to think about that?”

In preparation for DeMarco’s talk, I sent her some questions to get the conversation rolling. Her answers follow.

On Jan. 22, it will be your turn!

1. Why do you think the city is so eager to create the villages?

I think Mayor Ken Sim was more eager than staff to implement the village program and create new housing density, as evidenced by his October 17, 2023 Council Motion where staff were directed to make the villages a priority in their work program.  There is nothing in the overall city plan, now known as the Draft Vancouver ODP, to indicate that a village planning program should take priority over the much more important neighbourhood centres, located for example at Kerrisdale, Dunbar and West Point Grey on 10^th Avenue.  [Neighbourhood centres were one of six ‘neighbourhood types’ created by the Vancouver Plan; villages were another.]

At that time in the fall of 2023, Premier David Eby was on the eve of enacting legislation to create simplistic density circles around SkyTrain stations and bus loops.  So perhaps, Mayor Sim wanted to follow suit and find other places to draw arbitrary density circles, thinking it was progressive city planning.

2. What do you think will be the impact of these villages on the areas themselves? Will they create the vibrant centres the city envisions? How long would that take?

The underlying premise of these “so-called villages” in the Vancouver ODP is flawed. They are not part of the structure of the city. They are mostly tiny bits of remnant zoning from the 1930 zoning plan. That first city-wide zoning plan basically assigned some commercial zoning to small pockets of businesses that already existed. The location of that commercial zoning made sense at the time, long before widespread car ownership. These commercial areas probably created some convenience shopping where neighbourhood centres were a long walk or a streetcar ride away.

This proposed zoning could well have an impact on some of the so-called village areas because it appears that strata housing will be allowed. The village zoning is likely to have more housing market interest than the six-storey rental zoning /four-storey condo zoning along Dunbar and 10^th Avenue, for example. Given that the density circles around villages are so large, it will result in ad hoc housing developments wherever someone is able to assemble a few properties. I welcome additional housing supply and choices, but this is not the way to provide it.

I cannot imagine the additional housing having any significant impact on the ability to support local serving shops and creating vibrant centres, given how our neighbourhood centres are now struggling. If new commercial space is created in these villages by tearing down older buildings, existing businesses could be permanently displaced either through the construction stage or higher rents.

3. What will be the impact of villages on nearby struggling shopping streets like Dunbar?

My biggest concern is that the village planning program has diverted resources and potential housing choices away from the much more important neighbourhood centres. I asked city staff when they were going to begin neighbourhood centre planning and they said they did not know.

Our neighbourhood population base combined with our demographics and a range of other factors, have left Dunbar and West Point Grey neighbourhood centres with the highest storefront vacancies on the west side. Vacancy rates of around 15 percent are twice as high as what is considered a healthy vacancy rate.

A neighbourhood centre plan would create a variety of housing types within walking distance of the shops, as well as make a genuine effort to improve the streetscape and vitality of the neighbourhood centres.

4. Why do you think the city is putting ‘neighbourhood centres’ — i.e. Dunbar Street, last instead of trying to first solve its problems? What do you foresee as the result of this sequencing of city actions? 

I do not know why city staff could not persuade the Mayor and Council that putting resources in neighbourhood centre planning would create much greater public benefit.  The neighbourhood centres have much better transit access, and a range of services such as libraries and child care, and medical offices which help create complete communities and convenient, one-stop shopping destinations. They also have BIAs  [Business Improvement Areas] which are working hard to help local business survive and thrive. It will be up to our communities to lobby the city to put neighbourhood centre planning back on the work program and to re-think the villages program. Another idea is to do a pilot plan for a couple of villages in locations that do not compete with neighbourhood centres.