Gordon Harris

Imagine looking at 65 hectares of forest atop a mountain 25 kilometres from downtown Vancouver. Your job: build a community. Not just a bunch of condos or a collection of businesses, but a village that people want to live in, with all the amenities: banks, schools and public transit.

That was the challenge SFU’s University Community Trust took on in the early 1990s when it drew up plans for a community dubbed UniverCity, adjacent to the Burnaby Mountain campus. The official community plan was approved in 1996, along with the zoning required from the City of Burnaby. Visionary planner Michael Geller got the project off the ground, convincing developers to take on a venture that had never been attempted before: building an entire community from scratch, while adhering to strict principles of sustainability. Having seen the initial buildings take form and the first residents and businesses move in, Geller stepped aside last December. He turned the reins over to Gordon Harris, who was named president and CEO of the community trust in January this year. This would seem to be the dream job for an urban planner: a planned community built from scratch. Very seldom does this kind of opportunity come along in a planner’s lifetime. This is the only job that I can think of in the country that I would have given up my consulting practice for. With my planning background, and having done consulting for 20 years, it brings into one project all those things that I’ve worked on. So it’s not a question of just dealing with developers to build some buildings. No, it’s a real community. We work very closely with some bright people in the university, we have community residents who are vitally concerned about what we’re doing, and I don’t think a day goes by when I’m not in conversation with at least one of the local businesses, trying to figure out what we can do to help them and advance the entire community as a result. Now that the vision has been articulated, and buildings are taking shape, what’s the next challenge? My predecessor Michael Geller and his team were successful at getting developers like Intergulf and Millennium and Polygon up here in the first place. The challenge today, now that we have 1,400 people living in nearly 1,000 units, is that we’re now building a community. For me, that’s where it really begins to get fun and interesting – working with the people who are already here and the people who are moving here to make it as complete and successful a community as we can. The other really interesting challenge for me as the new guy is that UniverCity was established with the principle of being a leader in sustainability. The world has caught up to us, and other municipalities are taking sustainability far more seriously. That gives us an opportunity to raise the bar. We’ve demonstrated that there is a market acceptance for a sustainable community, and the developers are comfortable with the notion that they can operate in a more sustainable environment. What was your top priority when you stepped into the position in January? My number-one goal for 2007 is to advance the community-building efforts. We’re starting with a survey, going to every household in UniverCity and asking why they chose to live here, what they like, what doesn’t work, what they would like to see change. For many, it has been a bit of a construction site for the last few years, and we’re anxious to get more fundamental community-building elements in place. We know it’s been a struggle for some of the retailers who came here at the outset. So we’re working closely to help them, recognizing that it’s still a relatively small market population for them to serve. Another key element is an elementary school, and we expect to have one open by fall of ’09. Our intention is that the main floor of our next commercial building will be the home of a new grocery store. Are there any lessons that other municipalities can take away? There are a lot of lessons. For instance, the notion of what Michael Geller described as “the mortgage-helper in the sky”: the secondary suites as part of higher-density residential development. We get a lot of enquiries from other municipalities about that. We also think the focus on getting people out of private automobiles is important, particularly in this region. In partnership with Vancity, we offer an all-zone transit pass to all of our residents for $28 a month, and we also have Co-op Auto Network vehicles scattered around the community and available to all residents. I know other municipalities are very keen to learn from that and see what they can also do. Developers have had to do things a little differently, with the requirements for green buildings and greater density. Has that been a learning process? It’s certainly appealing to the developers because this is a good story to be telling. They’re willing to take on that challenge of being more sustainable and greener, and in return they’re finding there’s ready acceptance in the marketplace. Do you get much interest from other jurisdictions? Anyone I talk to across Canada in my field of urban planning knows about this project. They’re curious about it and they’re anxious to see it succeed; they want to know how we’re doing it and they want to see what they can learn from our experience. We tend to get a lot of tours when there are planning conferences or other urban-related conferences in town. Some City of Vancouver people recently toured around the project. And Dale Mikkelsen, our manager of planning and sustainability, joined us nine months ago from the City of Vancouver.