Dunbar News

By Carol Volkart

Anyone interested in learning how to fight – or at least influence – city hall should head to the Dunbar Community Centre on June 10.

That’s when a group of Mackenzie Heights residents will explain how they achieved the remarkable feat of persuading city council to launch a review of multiplexes – those four, six and eight-unit buildings on single lots that have generated considerable controversy around the city.

The 6-7:30 p.m. meeting is also an open invitation to join the group’s efforts to ensure that neighbourhood concerns get a better hearing from council in the future. With a civic election coming this fall, that includes nailing down the positions of all candidates and parties on multiplexes, density and other major issues facing neighbourhoods.

The group believes densification can be done well, with new buildings adding affordability and livability, or badly, as has happened with some multiplexes they say are overwhelming and disrupting neighbourhoods. The group provides examples of both on its new website  www.smartdensityvancouver.ca 

Speakers at the June 10 meeting will include ABC councillors Peter Meiszner and Lenny Zhou, who introduced the successful motion for the multiplex review.  Vancouver’s former co-director of planning Larry Beasley will also be there to discuss how residents can work with city hall to get their voices heard. MC for the meeting will be former Global TV reporter Marisa Thomas, a leading figure in the energetic Mackenzie Heights group.

“We want to let people in the broader community know what we’ve been doing here and how they can get involved and have their voices heard as well,” says Rob Marsh, a member of the group that has collected 2,600 signatures on a Change.org petition about multiplexes.

The group was also deeply involved in the multiplex motion, which called for a review of building size, massing, setbacks, tree canopy and relationship to neighbouring properties. The motion was passed May 21, with all ABC councillors and the mayor in favour and only OneCity’s Lucy Maloney opposed. (The Green’s Pete Fry and COPE’s Sean Orr were absent.)

“This meeting is hopefully one of the early steps of spreading the word that you can start to have an impact with community involvement,” says Marsh. “If enough people get involved, maybe we will have an impact.”

Density push causes sore spots

While multiplexes are the starting point for the group, they lead to a much broader issue – the city’s relationship with residents.

During a recent joint interview, group members made it clear they think the city is listening carefully to developers while ignoring the voices of residents who are feeling the on-the-ground impacts of the push for density.

They cited a long list of sore spots they see resulting from the city’s laser focus on increasing supply while ignoring livability and affordability:

• Abolishing most parking requirements for new density while failing to provide alternatives to cars. “It seems peculiarly optimistic to think that by making cars inconvenient without providing any real alternative to people that they will somehow magically get their kids to daycare,” says Marsh.
• Clearcutting lots for building while ignoring the impact of tree loss. “Suddenly after decades and decades of efforts to protect trees and everything green, just look at any of the construction sites now – they’re literally clearcut,” says group member Isabel Grant. “This is just shocking to us all and deeply worrying. What’s happened to the principles of protection of the environment?”
• The multiplexes themselves. While the group says some are fine and fit well into the neighbourhood, there are others that tower over their neighbours, depriving them of sunlight and privacy while destroying the feel of neighbourhoods.
• Eliminating neighbourhood character in favour of one-size-fits-all development.  “Are they planning on eradicating every charming spot in the city? Because that’s what they’re doing here,” says the group’s Elaine Stevens.

This all needs to change, says Stevens. “I think we feel as a group very, very passionate about the fact that the city needs to wake up and look at doing something differently.”

Time for citizens to wake up

But it’s even more important that citizens wake up, say the group members, beginning to riff on the idea of billboards or a blimp bearing the message: “Wake up!”

“I think Vancouverites have become a bit complacent,” says Grant. “Because we’ve been used to so many decades of really thoughtful and reasonable and incrementally changing planning. And then suddenly there have been these extremely significant things not only proposed but enacted. And it certainly caught me, and I think many, off guard. Like, what’s going on?”

To Grant, who worries about concessions to developers leading to a lack of the necessary infrastructure to make communities livable, “it’s as if this big scam is unfolding behind some curtains that most of us who live in this very fine city aren’t aware of.”

She says that when she raises the topic of what’s happening in the city with people she meets, “literally the first words that come out of their mouth is, ‘How come I don’t know about this?’”

Stevens says she starts conversations on buses and everywhere she goes these days, “and an awful lot of people just feel helpless, like there’s nothing they can do. And we know that’s not true. . . . It’s just a question of connecting with people who also feel that this isn’t working.”

Marsh says it’s understandable that residents remain unaware. “If you have two kids in school and two working parents, you don’t have time to go and search for what’s happening with council meetings and zoning or to spend two days hanging around city hall waiting for your turn to speak.”

Local park fed the action

As for why this little group in this little neighbourhood was able to get through to city hall, the residents attribute it a strong feeling of community, all centred around a small triangle of park close to their homes. It’s where they walk their dogs, hold neighbourhood parties, and sit on a bench with a cup of tea and chat to whoever passes by.

It’s where they started passing the word about a “flabbergastingly” ugly multiplex that loomed over the neighbours’ properties. That eventually led to a tour with Councillor Meiszner, who the group said seemed unaware of what some of the new buildings looked like.

While the group members are pleased that the multiplex motion passed, they’re cautious too. They plan to monitor it carefully, aware that it didn’t require community engagement, and that it could be a way of punting the issue until after this fall’s election.

And they know multiplexes are just the beginning of the changes to their neighbourhood. The city’s Villages Plan, expected to be approved this summer, will allow six-storey apartment buildings throughout much of their area, with no public hearings allowed.

Marsh takes hope from the fact that the Mackenzie residents aren’t the only ones noticing the problems and seeking solutions.

“It’s amazing how what on the surface are disparate groups all really have the same ideas – community involvement, something that will really deal with affordability while maintaining the livability, the natural beauty and the things that have made Vancouver so desirable in the first place. And objecting to an approach that seems to not really answer the affordability issue but destroys livability.”

The city’s relationship with its residents needs to be dinner-table conversation not just in Mackenzie Heights and Dunbar, but everywhere throughout the city, says Stevens.

“How do we make sure that city hall re-engages with the citizens of Vancouver in an open and honest way so that decision-making is more open and reflects the needs of the 22 different neighbourhoods in the city?”