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“Villages” plan coming to council July 14. bit.ly/4atYlgE You can now sign up to speak! What do I think about the plan? Well…. 🧵

In short - yes! Let’s allow small lot single-stair walkable n’hoods - with accessible buildings as a default! It’s an important shift in urban planning for not just Vancouver but also for North America in that it aims to end the apartment ban for much of the city and allow apartments on small lots.

This created a lot of really nice single detached n’hoods but it also created a lot of gold-plated-dirt (…in many n’hoods a run down bungalows now costs $3m, which is just the price of the land).

More recently the city has tried something different with the Broadway Plan - where towers were allowed in many areas along the new subway line - if a certain % of units were ‘below market’.

This was an important shift in thinking but the problem was that it channeled a lot of density over the top of existing affordable apartment buildings within one of the few areas where they had actually been allowed to exist (… yes,the Grand Bargain, again).