BC Business
CITY MAKER Larry Beasley was Vancouver’s co-director of planning until 2006 and the man behind Yaletown
When the City of Vancouver tabled its official community plan for Grandview-Woodland in April 2013—proposing, among other things, a row of 20-storey towers along low-slung East Broadway—area residents were startled. The height limits were out of scale, they argued, and current residents would be priced out of any new buildings; furthermore, the plan bore little resemblance to proposals floated at open houses over the previous year. Vocal opposition to the Grandview-Woodland plan—which came to symbolize everything wrong with planning in Vancouver—ultimately forced the city to make a very public retreat and led to the resignation of Brian Jackson, Vancouver’s top planner. Now, after two years of focus groups, the plan is back on track for council’s consideration. But will a new plan—and, indeed, a new planner—have any better reception?
According to Larry Beasley, not likely—or not until there are some fundamental changes at city hall. Beasley, now a planning consultant and professor at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning, was Vancouver’s co-director of planning from 1992 to 2006 and is largely credited with planning the highrise communities in Yaletown and Coal Harbour that transformed downtown. He says that the city has put itself in a bind without a clear master plan for Vancouver—pursuing a policy of spot rezonings, with one-off towers that exceed neighbourhood scale. “The planning agenda is at least a decade behind where the market demands are,” he says. “Nobody has systematically looked at the city for at least that long.”
While former planners, including Beasley, were among Brian Jackson’s sharpest critics, the fact is that the authority of Vancouver’s city planners has been eroding for years—even as the amount on their plate has piled up. Brent Toderian knows this all too well. Toderian was Beasley’s immediate successor, serving as director of planning from 2006 to 2012. “There was a pressure during my time to pre-conclude,” he says, describing the city’s proclivity to decide on what a plan should look like before it goes to consultation. “That’s something a successful planning department can never do.” Besides taking on the job of two people—the city previously had two co-directors of planning—Toderian also endured a series of budget cuts during his tenure, which he believes left his office debilitated (he was terminated by council in 2012 after a series of public run-ins). When Jackson was hired, city hall also stripped the planning office of its independence, placing it under the auspices of city manager and retitling it “general manager of development of general services.” Previously the planner reported directly to council.
Gordon Price, a former Vancouver city councillor and current director of SFU’s city program, says that the move represented a fundamental shift in power—from a planner who could present reports and opinions to council free of interference to one under the thumb of the city manager (in this case, the imposing Penny Ballem, who was forced out of office herself in September). “At issue is who gets to make the decisions, write the reports and frame the questions that get to be asked by council,” says Price. “If there’s a division of opinion, the planner gets to express that.” It comes at a critical time, he adds, as the city tries to address the pressing issue of affordability with one of the few tools in its tool kit: densifying low-slung neighbourhoods. The supply of industrial land that allowed for Vancouver’s condo-building boom of the 1990s and 2000s is nearly gone, and if Vancouver’s population is to grow—a modest 150,000 in three decades, or 5,000 a year—neighbourhoods outside downtown will have to accept some change. Grandview-Woodland, for example, has seen its population hover around 27,000 since the late 1960s. Oakridge’s population, meanwhile, has actually declined over the last three censuses, while Dunbar and Kerrisdale have a lower number of persons per hectare than suburban Langley.
Next spring—after having spent close to $275,000 on focus groups and a new consultation process—Vancouver’s planning department is expected to have a revised community plan for Grandview-Woodland to present to city council. Jackson—who is credited with introducing successful community plans for Marpole, the West End and the Downtown Eastside—will be long gone by then (he leaves office at the end of December), with council’s contentious push for change falling to Jackson’s successor. Whoever inherits the poisoned chalice, Brent Toderian hopes the new plan does a better job of addressing community needs and incorporates many of the 270 recommendations that came out of the yearlong focus group. “Frankly you have to prove that you were listening, which city hall doesn’t always do a good job at.”