A construction site on East Broadway in Vancouver on July 29, 2021.DARRYL DYCK/The Globe and Mail
Vancouver’s transformational proposal for its major east-west corridor has not set targets for park and community-centre space, prompting one councillor to question whether the massive amounts of new housing envisioned over the next three decades will be livable.
City councillors were expected on Thursday to vote on the Broadway Plan but were unable to do reach that point after seven hours of debate over some 40 amendments. A final decision on the proposal – which would add 50,000 new residents and office space to almost 500 already-dense blocks surrounding the central Broadway corridor, where a subway line is going – is set to take place June 22.
The recent council session did agree on some issues, such as changing rules around building sizes to allow for smaller buildings and requiring stronger protections for renters affected by development – but could not decide on hard numbers for standards around parks and community centres.
Earlier this week, a B.C. coroner’s report into 619 people who died in last year’s heat dome said a number of the deaths were in urban areas with few trees and urged governments to put a priority on tree canopies. Vancouver’s park board has a goal of increasing the city’s tree canopy – a green parasol that can reduce a street’s temperature by 10 to 15 degrees – to 30 per cent from its current 23 per cent.
Green Councillor Michael Wiebe tried on Thursday to get support for a last-minute, uncosted motion that would have set minimum standards of 0.38 hectare of park space per 1,000 residents by 2052 and 1.2 square feet of community-centre space per resident, which would require 11 hectares of new parks and 70,000 square feet of new centre space.
“We can’t just put renters in places that are not livable. We need this with climate change and the heat dome, 100 per cent,” Mr. Wiebe said. “And right now, there’s no targets and, in our capital plan, there’s zero dollars for new trees.”
Mayor Kennedy Stewart, some other councillors and staff said that setting rigid and expensive targets – possibly as much as a billion – could scuttle the whole plan. Instead, the majority voted to ask staff to do more research about what an achievable standard for park and community-service space could be.
However, Mr. Wiebe was successful in getting the majority of councillors to vote in favour of his push to see at least 11 per cent of street space re-assigned to create public plazas, pocket parks, greenways and the like.
The delays in approving the Broadway Plan indicate that council is listening to the public and attempting to ensure the proposal strikes a balance, according to Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung with the ABC party.
Ms. Kirby-Yung was successful in getting an amendment passed that will reduce the minimum frontage required for a new building from 150 feet to 99 feet. That means a developer will only have to assemble the equivalent of three standard city lots instead of five.
It’s something that both non-profit housing developers and private developers said would help them assemble sites and build housing more quickly, she said. Allowing for smaller sites will help create more interesting building forms, she argued.
“Then we don’t have to have all the big monolithic buildings,” Ms. Kirby-Yung said.
The city’s director of planning will have the final say on each smaller-lot development.
Critics have worried the change could make smaller apartment buildings more vulnerable to demolition and re-development. But Ms. Kirby-Yung said she doesn’t believe that will happen because strong renter protections in place for those older buildings mean they will likely be the last choice of developers.
Council has unanimously agreed to an amendment by Mayor Kennedy Stewart to require any developer re-building an older apartment to ensure that all renters who are displaced get a first right of return at their original rent or a rent that is 20-per-cent below market (whichever is lower). In the two or three years of construction, the developer will also be required to subsidize their rents if the renter can’t get anything similar at the same price.
ABC Councillor Rebecca Bligh also had an amendment successfully accepted, requiring that the city work more aggressively on a plan for additional school space in the area. Vancouver, along with many other cities in the region that have encouraged new development, has seen huge frustration among residents who move into neighbourhoods such as the north shore of False Creek or Olympic Village but don’t get a local school until at least a decade later.
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