Citywide Plan Leaves Residents in the Dark

(Note: The Dunbar Neighbourhood Café will hold a meeting on the Official Development Plan from 7-8:30 p.m. on March 13 at the Dunbar Community Centre. Speakers are Elizabeth Murphy,  formerly with the City of Vancouver’s housing and properties department, and Patrick Condon, professor emeritus at UBC’s school of landscape and architecture.)

By Carol Volkart

Dunbar residents who recall the surveys, the meetings and the media attention surrounding the 1990s CityPlan might wonder why they know so little about an even bigger plan expected to be passed by city council this month.

Vancouver’s Official Development Plan, which will shape the city’s growth and development for the next 30 years, goes to public hearing on March 10.

While the city describes the plan as setting the course “for a more equitable, livable, affordable, and sustainable city with a strong economy where people and nature thrive,” it’s highly controversial. Critics say it allows for massive densification, erases traditional neighbourhoods, and silences citizens by banning public hearings for any rezonings that comply with it.

Concerns are so high that 30 prominent urban planners, architects, and academics have written council urging it to withdraw the plan, which it calls “a wrong turn that will lock the city into 30 years of inflated land speculation, the demolition of existing affordable housing, and a permanent loss of democratic oversight.”

Underneath all these objections boils the issue of public consultation.

Critics say the public hasn’t been properly consulted or informed about the plan at any of its many stages of development – from its beginnings as the Vancouver Plan through to its current transformation into the Official Development Plan (ODP).

The city has a different take.

It says the Vancouver Plan-making effort “was one of the most extensive in the City’s history, involving over 52,000 engagement touchpoints, more than 520 events, and the participation of hundreds of stakeholder organizations. Specialized efforts resulted in an extraordinarily diverse array of participation, including partnership agreements” with First Nations.

But the urban experts,  who include such luminaries as Vancouver’s former co-chief planner Larry Beasley, say the Vancouver Plan was “very flawed” and approved by the previous council “without meaningful participation. We urge council to refer this back to staff for reconsideration through a meaningful public participatory process, before adoption.”

Those who participated in the Vancouver Plan consultations, which began in 2019, recall a stifled, restricted process carried out at the height of the COVID pandemic. Almost everything was done online, from surveys to information sessions to Q&A efforts. While “stakeholders” such as industry-related groups and under-represented groups were prioritized, the outreach to neighbourhoods, residents’ groups and the general public was limited.

That continued when the city modified the Vancouver Plan into the Official Development Plan in 2024-25, as required  by the provincial government. Those consultations were mainly with institutions like the school board, civic agencies and other municipalities. Public engagement amounted to a three-week online survey in October of 2025 and a few sparsely attended in-person open houses.

When the 204-page draft plan went out for public review last fall, the Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods wasn’t impressed. The plan’s ungainly size, short commenting timeframe, and  lack of notices and posters for the public almost guaranteed it would  fly under the radar.

“Most people who look at this document, if they see it at all, they will have no idea what it all means to them or the future of the city. In fact, our groups and members are still struggling to understand it all,” the Coalition wrote to the city. “This is not a legitimate process for public input.”

Nor did the ODP address any of the concerns about the previous “flawed” Vancouver Plan process, the group said. ““The main stakeholders who have been consulted are industry and development related groups, without involving the public in any meaningful way.”

Now, days before the public hearing that’s expected to lead to the ODP’s quick approval, well in time for the province’s June deadline, critics say the general public is as much in the dark as ever.

“I don’t believe the public has been truly consulted, and I don’t believe that residents know about these two plans and what their intention is for the city,” says former Vancouver city planner Sandy James.

Elizabeth Murphy, a private sector project manager formerly with the City of Vancouver’s housing and properties department, echoes that: “I think the public has not been meaningfully engaged at all. Only the industry-related groups have been engaged, not the public.”

Randy Helten of CityHallWatch, an online site that closely tracks city council’s doings, says that if council passes the Official Development Plan, “its implications will be massive. But almost no one knows about it.”

James and Helten say lack of consultation isn’t the only problem. There’s been a lack of information and notification as well — failures on the part of both the city and the local media.

“Media coverage has been almost non-existent,” says Helten. “The City of Vancouver is doing the absolute minimum required notification. While other cities held town halls events and extensive consultation, Vancouver just held few scarcely-advertised and sparsely-attended drop-in events, months ago.”

As well, the city’s outreach for next week’s public hearing has been “appallingly low,” he says. “There are 100,000 land parcels in the city of Vancouver, and for moderate cost the city could have sent out a notification card to every address. That would have been completely fair game, considering the entire city is affected.”

James, too, is concerned about the lack of notification of residents. The erasure of the need to notify residents individually of the scale and scope of this plan is “alarming,” she says.

As for media coverage of the ODP, James says: “What media coverage? I had dinner with a past premier who reminded me that there are more public relations persons in municipal and provincial government than there are journalists at the newspapers.”

“So when we hear about these plans from the province and for us from the city of Vancouver, we are hearing about them from media specialists that have massaged them for general information, not for the deep dive on implications that each citizen truly needs and deserves. We don’t have media coverage; we have media-massaged messaging.”

CityPlan did it better

It wasn’t always this way.

Longtime Dunbar residents will remember the meetings, workshops and surveys they participated in to create the Dunbar Community Vision that was approved by city council in 1998 (and subsequently repealed in 2023 along with about 70 other volunteer-created plans to make way for the Vancouver Plan.)

Dunbar’s effort was part of CityPlan, a 1990s citywide planning process that engaged more than 100,000 people, according to a Viewpoint Vancouver column written by James in 2022.

Looking back now, James points to how the city made it easy for people to participate and become informed.

The internet wasn’t widely used then, she recalls, “but there were postcards sent to every resident, meetings with community associations and at libraries, and staff were available  to come out and speak to any group that wanted that information. There was even a permanent office set up on the CitySquare mall beside City Hall so that residents could drop by anytime to get more information or to be involved.”

But now, she says, “we somehow have skipped the fact that the taxpayers are the electorate and they need to be informed about the Vancouver Plan and the ODP in any way that best serves them, not the digital genies at city hall asking for online surveys and responses.”

In her 2022 Viewpoint column she recalled how enthusiastically the public got involved in CityPlan. More than 100 ‘City Circles’ of 10-12 people each were set up to discuss city-related issues. People were asked to pen or draw potential idea for an Ideas Fair held one weekend at Robson Square, “with thousands of people coming to view presentations, demonstrations, and to share their ideas.”

And in contrast to today, the media dove in.  James recalls how The Vancouver Sun created teaching kits for schools to get children involved, and then-editor Ian Haysom embarked on a parallel process to CityPlan, “using the newspaper to identify the key issues in the region that needed to be addressed.

“People were invited to write in, questionnaires were conducted, and in-depth articles written about emerging regional challenges, including air quality, the watershed, public transportation and housing.  Mr. Haysom also saw the newspaper’s job as ensuring that the city heard from ‘ordinary citizens.’”

New Plan Silences Residents for the Future

If residents were mainly ignored during the creation of the Vancouver Plan and the Official Development Plan, James believes there’s worse to come.

“We have given up the city to developers and bureaucrats looking for the highest and best use of land, with citizens being a temporary inconvenience soon to be silenced through this ODP,” she says by email.

Banning public hearings for developments that conform with the ODP is a “draconian” approach that she compares with the 1972 plan to blast a highway through Chinatown and Strathcona. The difference, she says, is that at least residents were notified the highway was coming.

“Hushing up residents and binding them to an ODP where there is no citizen input has not been discussed with residents but the impact will be exactly like in 1972. It moves planning away from being a collaborative approach with communities, to being one led by a real-estate based ‘highest and best use’ for land.”

In the end, she says, “What citizens think is not important, and after ODP approval will not count.”

CityHallWatch’s Helten makes the same point: “If passed, the ODP will instantly and significantly reduce opportunities for residents to know about and have a say in how their neighbourhoods change.” He says this dramatic change is premised on the incorrect provincial presumption “that the public has been adequately consulted in the development of the ODP.”

James see the silencing of residents as part of the city’s switch away from the needs of residents and neighbourhoods to focusing on the development industry. “It is a builders’ approach how to build the most capacity possible in tower and midrise form, not a people-centred approach to build housing that citizens actually need through all of their life stages, including detached housing, low rise, townhousing, and ground-oriented units.”

Nor is there any  concern about the parks, schools and amenities that will be needed, or who will fund them, she says.

“More than anything, this plan erases any other community plan or directions, seeing towers and high density as the way forward. Are we really a population that in the next 30 years needs to live only in towers and multiplexes, without other forms of housing? And who made that decision on behalf of citizens?”

It’s no small thing to lose public hearings, she says. “As a staff person the public hearing was very useful to me, because it taught staff what we missed (and we could amend) and also allowed for a conversation about the work and the community. It was a learning experience and should be inclusive of English as a second language people as well. I was disappointed to see the allowed speaking time reduced to three minutes, which can be difficult for second language speakers.”

Given the loss of traditional media that once kept citizens informed about issues, what can the city do to fill that missing role?

James suggests the city can give accurate, truthful information, correct misinformation quickly, and have “people readily and happily available to come and talk to whoever needs that outreach.”

And maybe the public has a role to play, given recent changes that have brought in a new city manager and general manager of planning from other places in the last couple of years, she says.

“There is no institutional memory on how to work with communities efficiently and effectively, so it is up for the communities to insist on a transparent and clear process.

“If that does not happen, the best that can be hoped for is a new council voted in this fall that will rescind the quilting of Vancouver for developer density, and instead work with neighbourhoods once again to do density right, near parks, schools, community centres and commercial areas in a legible way that makes sense for a city of residents, not potential land investors and developers. We need to create a city where people and where and what they live in truly matters.”

What’s Next

March 10: Public hearing on the Official Development Plan begins at 6 p.m. at City Hall. Public hearing agenda page and documents:

https://council.vancouver.ca/20260310/phea20260310ag.htm

March 13: Dunbar Neighbourhood Café session on the Official Development Plan. From 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in Room 208 of the Dunbar Community Centre.

Speakers are Elizabeth Murphy and Patrick Condon, professor emeritus at UBC’s school of landscape and architecture. While this session comes after the public hearing begins, the ODP will be around for awhile, and it will be worth it to hear what the experts say and get your questioned answered.

Read about the ODP:

CityHallWatch’s take on the plan and more links:

Dunbar architect Brian Palmquist’s thoughts on the plan:
https://brianpalmquist.substack.com/p/vancouvers-plan-to-die-and-what-we-3ae

Letter from 30 urbanists to Vancouver on Official Development Plan (ODP)  https://housingreset.ca/2026/02/25/cov-vancouver-official-development-plan-odp/

Elizabeth Murphy Presentation on the ODP https://cityhallwatch.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2026-03-10-ppt-murphy-odp-summary-v5-cov-official-development-plan.pdf