Overflow Crowd a Sign of City’s Failure to Listen: Beasley

By Carol Volkart

To many, it may have looked like a big crowd of riled-up people out on the lawn of the Dunbar Community Centre on Wednesday evening.

But to Vancouver’s former co-director of planning Larry Beasley, it looked like the results of a city hall that ignores residents and does what it wants without them.

“The culture at city hall now. . . is a culture that is not appreciative of your input. In fact, it’s not even reaching out for your input,” he told the meeting on multiplexes, which had to move outdoors when triple the expected crowd showed up.

The 60-person room booked for the event was standing-room-only and overflowed into an adjoining kitchen before organizers announced they’d been given a choice of cutting the crowd to 60 or moving outside.

The event was organized by Smart Density Vancouver, a group originating with a number of Mackenzie Heights residents unhappy with the size, bulk and impact of some of the multiplexes in their area. Smart Density has collected more than 3,000 signatures on a Change.org petition on multiplexes and was instrumental in persuading city council to pass a May 21 motion to review them.

The two councillors who introduced the review motion, ABC’s Peter Meiszner and Lenny Zhou, were speakers at the meeting, lending piquancy to an event that allowed the feisty, booing, clapping audience to express their opinions of council policies. (MC Marisa Thomas banned heckling, saying, “It’s not helpful.”)

While the topic of the meeting was multiplexes, in reality, it was about far, far more.

It was about residents clamouring to be heard by a city council they think shows no signs of listening, about a city that says it wants to grow the tree canopy but allows 28 mature trees on a single lot to be felled for a multiplex, about unaddressed ever-worsening traffic congestion as density grows, and about the city’s claims of the urgency of  continued building when 4,000 condo units sit unsold and empty. And although the city’s new Villages Plan wasn’t on the agenda, it was on many minds, with one resident saying he didn’t know about it until he got a real-estate agent’s letter telling him how it would affect his property.

“What we are seeing right now, with you sitting outside, is a meeting not organized by the city, not organized by a process of engagement with the public, not sponsored by the city, no staff people here, these two poor councillors are being asked to carry the whole load, and if anyone tells you this is how you get public input, they are wrong,” said Beasley.  “This is not how you get public input.”

He spelled out what should happen instead. The city should set up processes for residents to work with staff to come up with recommendations for what they want to happen, in this case with multiplexes. Those recommendations should then go to city council for decision.

While Meiszner and Zhou made a “very, very courageous first move” in getting the motion for a multiplex review passed, he said, it doesn’t include any provision for citizen involvement.

“I don’t see any public process. I don’t see announcements of when you can get involved. And we need to know that, because as a citizen, you can’t be helpful if you don’t know how and when. You can’t give your advice if there’s no doorway for it, if there’s no window for it.”

If the city doesn’t set up a public-input process, he said he can arrange for citizens to work in small groups with UBC planning students on better solutions for multiplexes to present to council. And if council pays no attention even to that? There’s always the ballot box in the Oct. 17 civic election.

MC takes no prisoners

Earlier in the evening, Thomas, a former Global TV reporter who acted as the meeting’s MC, gave a scorching review of the multiplex policy. “There is not one single design guideline that they have to abide by,” she said of the new buildings, which can overwhelm neighbourhoods and mean the loss of sunlight and privacy for those nearby. “We have given developers ownership of what our city looks like because they’re allowed carte blanche.”

Meanwhile, there’s an “urban clearcut” going on, with developers allowed to cut every single tree on multiplex lots, she said. Despite all these negatives, there’s not even affordability, with units in her area priced at  $1.7 to $2.8 million, or $1,350 a square foot. “We’re not getting affordable housing, we’re losing trees, we’re going in the wrong direction.”

She also made it clear she was taking no prisoners when it came to getting answers and action from politicians on the multiplex issue.

She thanked Zhou and Meiszner for listening to her group and introducing the multiplex-review motion, which passed with the support of all the ABC council members and Vote Vancouver’s Rebecca Bligh. The only vote in opposition came from OneCity’s Lucy Maloney. “We appreciate you working with us – this is not an endorsement!” she warned Zhou and Meiszner to laughter from the crowd.

But why did the Green’s Pete Fry and COPE’s Sean Orr absent themselves before the vote, and what is their position on multiplexes? She said Fry explained he took the night off because ABC was voting as a bloc, and Orr had health issues, but neither responded to a query about their positions on multiplexes. Thomas said her group emailed Maloney and two other OneCity candidates but did not get a response. But she noted TEAM for a Livable Vancouver did put out a press release supporting the review and livability principles.

“We think this needs to be an election issue,” she said to applause. “We are willing to work with any political party that believes what we’ve just outlined today.”

After welcoming  Zhou and Meiszner to the “hot seat,” she gave them a chance to bask in approval for the multiplex motion before grilling them on its deficiencies. Such as: Why won’t the “expedited” multiplex review begin until 2027? Why was the motion “watered down” with a last-minute change that she said gives developers a “get-out-of-jail-free” card? Why the continued urgency to build when there are 4,000 unsold condo units out there? And why not a moratorium on multiplexes to prevent further problems and destruction of trees until the review is completed?

Meiszner said he originally supported multiplexes because of hopes they would increase affordability so young people like him could live in various areas of the city “but clearly that has not happened.” Describing himself as a “pretty design-forward person” who understands architecture, he won a round of applause when he described some of the new multiplexes as “ugly,” failing to fit the lots and neighbourhoods and expensive besides. “I’m never going to be able to afford one of those places so why are we doing this?”

He said he and Zhou are “full-throated” supporters of the review, and the reason other parties and councillors aren’t responding to Thomas’s queries is that they don’t support the review.

Zhou said Vancouver has always been known for its livability, and some of the multiplexes don’t fit into Vancouver’s livability criteria. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, to let builders to do whatever they want as long as they comply with the allowable floor space ratio. Three years after the new multiplex policy came in is the right time to review and refine it, he said.

As for the delay of the review until 2027, which Thomas said “sounds like a slow walk to me,” Zhou said it’s not acceptable to him and he’d talk to the planning staff about it. Both Zhou and Meiszner said now is a challenging time for staff because of FIFA and this fall’s election.

Regarding Thomas’s complaint that the motion was watered down by prohibiting the review from impacting housing-supply objectives or permitting timelines, Meiszner said, “to me it’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card; to me it’s that we can do both. . . . We can have good design and we can also not unnecessarily delay the delivery of housing which does add to the cost.”

As for the 4,000 million-dollar-plus unsold condo units, Thomas said it feels like council’s policy has blinders: “It’s like, ‘Let’s build housing but we’re not building the right  kind of housing  but that seems to be okay because we’re building housing.’ So what are you guys going to do about that?”

Zhou blamed government regulations for making housing so expensive and said council is tackling that. Meiszner said “it’s complicated,” drawing snorts from the crowd. “Originally I did believe it will lead to more affordable housing but as you’ve shown, that’s not true … it’s unbelievable how much these units are selling for. So who are we building these for?” In the end, he admitted, “I don’t know the answer. But policy can help make affordability happen.”

Thomas’s question about a moratorium on multiplexes until after the review to prevent further tree loss and problems got a big round of applause from the crowd, but a similarly vague response from the councillors.  Zhou said it’s complicated because of the provincial law around multiplexes. “Let’s wait for the report back,” he said.

Audience got testy

Things got testier during the Q&A with the audience, with audience members disputing some answers, booing others, and at one point someone called out, “bulls..t,” all prompting Thomas to urge participants to stay civil.

Audience members questioned the impact of more density without increased amenities to handle it. “How can you propose more housing when you don’t have the infrastructure?” asked one. Said another: “Traffic is ridiculous now; there’s no city planning for roads, for buses…It’s so difficult to drive anywhere.”

The city’s Villages Plan, which proposes 17 new villages, four of them near Dunbar Street, was a particular target.  Buildings of up to six storeys will be allowed without public hearings in all of these villages, which the city says are aimed at providing walkable, livable communities for more people.

The first mention of the Villages Plan drew a strong round of booing during the audience Q&A.

“Every village in this city has its own unique flavour and its own unique theme,” said an audience member. “We don’t need cookie-cutter villages being dropped around the city because they’re all different. What you’re doing is you’re destroying those neighbourhoods; you’re destroying those [existing] villages.”

Meiszner said council doesn’t want to destroy any neighbourhoods. “Obviously we want to create walkable and livable communities much like the ones we have and currently enjoy.”

Both councillors repeatedly urged audience members to express their opinions on the Villages Plan to council at the July 14 public hearing, which drew a angry response. “Come on!” a chorus of voices called out. “You don’t listen!”

Another audience member asked how councillors can expect residents to hold their questions for a public hearing when the city is running such a tight timeline that it’s already planning to implement villages in the fall of 2026.

“What about notice? How is it you’re planning a major overhaul of our city and I get a notice on June 1 in the mail from real estate agents advising me that my property is being rezoned for a six-storey highrise, that my neighbourhood is about to disappear and I don’t  find out about that from the city?” the resident asked angrily. “You advise people to come to council meetings, but you don’t tell people about what you’re doing.”

“You’re not taking any feedback from the people who are most affected. How is it I’ve not been notified by the city?”

Beasley  who spoke near the end of the meeting, said until there is a different culture in the city, with citizens, planners and politicians working together, things will always go the wrong way. “We are always going to promote the bad mistake of three years ago.”

As for the current issues, he said it would be difficult, but still possible, to pause multiplexes instead of allowing the next 20 to 50 projects to be built. But the Villages Plan “is one where you can pause your decision in three weeks.”

There’s been no process for the Villages Plan, he said.  “I love villages. But I don’t like a good idea that gets rudely applied on the ground with more victims than you have beneficiaries.”

“It has to be a process. And it all comes down to one thing you must insist upon in this next election. And that,” he said to a big round of applause, “is the re-establishment of community-grounded decision making.”