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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.

It’s also a counterpoint to 50 years of the “grand bargain” style of planning that combined single family character restrictions with super charged density - mostly on polluted arterials or former industrial sites.

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).

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).

So - we have a constrained city with a lot of $ from housing and investment demand that was either getting pushed up into towers or pushed down into the dirt below cute little houses.

What to do? We need to actually allow the city to evolve into a ‘city’ by ending the apartment ban, ending “tall n sprawl” planning and allowing the type of modest middle class apartment style housing that the rest of the world uses.