Vancouver's New City Plan.....It’s here at last — Vancouver’s long-awaited plan that will guide land use decisions from density to design across all neighbourhoods until 2050. It unveiled its city-wide plan today, with a focus on waking low-density residential neighbourhoods “from their slumber” and welcoming more floors and even corner stores to those quiet areas. The draft confirms the direction the current council has set into motion: the end of neighbourhoods exclusively zoned for detached houses. "Change is possible everywhere,” said Karis Hiebert, the planner who headed the process of consulting residents, businesses, organizations, professionals and government partners in the crafting of this draft. The plan also talks about how the city can address widening inequities that have been brought into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-related crises like an extreme heat wave and smoky air caused by wildfires. City planners expect the city’s population to grow from 675,000 people today to around 920,000 by 2050.
The city-wide planning process started back in 2018, one of the first things the newly elected city council voted on. The city was still reeling from a historic jump in property prices that left many Vancouverites feeling shut out of the city. Census data had shown that the city’s west side — where home values had soared into the millions or tens of millions — had lost population while most other neighbourhoods in the city had added new residents. Unlike other B.C. municipalities, Vancouver does not have an official community plan. The province requires all local governments to come up with a plan for long-term growth every five years. But Vancouver hasn’t had such a plan because it has its own charter, allowing the city to dodge certain requirements of the province’s Local Government Act. This doesn’t mean that Vancouver is flying blind. Instead, a collection of neighbourhood-specific plans for growth have been developed over the years. One of the city’s former planning chiefs called it a “patchwork” and a “recipe for frustration” for residents and developers alike due to the uncertainty. “There are so many policies, we don’t actually even know how many there are. Seventy-five? A hundred?” said planning director Theresa O’Donnell during the unveiling of the draft plan today. O’Donnell explained the city’s numerous types of existing policies in detail. There are community plans for neighbourhoods like the West End and the Downtown Eastside,and there are visions, which date as far back as the 1970s, Then there are 14 official development plans, specific rezoning policies and city-wide policies like those for green building and incentivizing rental. “So right now, people, businesses, developers have to wade through all of these different levels of plans to figure out which ones actually apply, which ones maybe applied in the ’80s but they’re outdated,” said O’Donnell, “[and] which ones conflict or compete with other plans.” It’s been four years since work on the plan began and Vancouver’s problems have only grown in size and complexity. Housing affordability is worse than ever, with rents and home prices again rising rapidly. Homelessness has likely grown (because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city stopped doing an annual survey). Many local businesses and cultural spaces have closed, struggling with affordability and “demovictions” even before the pandemic. This draft city-wide plan is the first attempt to “straighten” everything out.....read more https://thetyee.ca/News/2022/04/05/Vancouver-New-City-Plan/?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email