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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).

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).

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.

And we now have the tools! With the new single stair code we can do relatively small (4 to 6 storey) buildings on single lots or small consolidations. You don’t have to drive up land values by getting 5 owners to sell at the same time.

Is the plan perfect or easy? No. Is it the difficult but needed path after 50 years of the Grand Bargain? Yes.

What can we fix? I hope we see more flexibility in the plan for owners on land where retail uses will now be required. I’d like to see Live/work broadly allowed, and I’d like more options for lots less than 40’ wide… but what’s proposed is a good start.