CORE summary finds CityPlan `weak, vague’: [FINAL Edition]
. The Vancouver Sun [Vancouver, B.C] 31 May 1995: B.5.
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CityPlan: Vague, too general and weak? Or a broad vision of what people in Vancouver want that will be used to plan detailed changes to the city?
A handful of people from the city’s left-wing municipal party, Committee of Progressive Electors, held a press conference in front of city hall to talk about everything that’s wrong with CityPlan.
In the afternoon, planning director Ann McAfee presented her summary of CityPlan. However, council deferred any discussion until the last round of public delegations is heard on Thursday.
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CityPlan: Vague, too general and weak? Or a broad vision of what people in Vancouver want that will be used to plan detailed changes to the city?
Those are the two takes on CityPlan being presented to the public, who will be hearing a lot more about those competing versions in the months and years to come.
The arguments got little public attention on Tuesday.
A handful of people from the city’s left-wing municipal party, Committee of Progressive Electors, held a press conference in front of city hall to talk about everything that’s wrong with CityPlan.
In the afternoon, planning director Ann McAfee presented her summary of CityPlan. However, council deferred any discussion until the last round of public delegations is heard on Thursday.
The opposing evaluations will be tested when the plan moves from paper into neighborhoods.
COPE says CityPlan is a weak document to allow development business as usual in Vancouver.
City staff and councillors counter that CityPlan represents what people in Vancouver want for their city: neighborhood centres; fewer cars and more transit, walking and biking; industrial areas preserved; more local input into how neighborhoods look; and a willingness to take in 160,000 more people and densify their neighborhoods.
McAfee, in a presentation to council Tuesday, tried to answer some of the criticisms that have been circulating about CityPlan, the vision that has been more than two years in the making and is supposed to guide the city’s development for the next several decades.
Why is it so general?
“We have the broad, comprehensive plan, now we’re going to start filling in the details.” In the same way, Vancouver’s greenways plan evolved from a concept to a map that shows exactly where they’ll be, she explained.
How much public input was there?
Six thousand people wrote submissions, 20,000 people came to events, 10,000 people came to the early Ideas fair, and 15,000 people came to the Futures tour, when they were presented with four basic choices. West-siders were slightly over-represented, said McAfee, but staff took that into account when they summarized the public response.
Were people asked whether they wanted growth?
Yes, said McAfee, it was made clear that the city was looking at creating 100,000 new housing units that would take in 160,000 people. The survey of 1,500 people in the city specifically asked questions like: Would you be willing to have apartments around shopping areas?
But COPE representatives say there haven’t been many answers given for the $3.5 million that was spent on CityPlan.
“Would anything have been done differently by the council of the last nine years if they’d had this document? No,” concluded Libby Davies, a former COPE councillor who lost to Philip Owen in the 1993 run for mayor.
“We think this means business as usual at city hall. This is a bureaucratic document the NPA can use to justify their developer agenda.”
Coun. Jenny Wai Ching Kwan, the only COPE councillor elected in 1993, says the plan is deficient in three critical areas: it doesn’t define what a neighborhood is; it doesn’t talk about a ward system or how to make city government more fair and democratic; and it doesn’t have clear targets.
The Tenants Rights Action Coalition is also using CityPlan to make political points. The coalition said a better plan would:
* Use the city’s zoning powers to foster affordable housing.
* Increase the supply of social housing.
* Get tougher with developers.
* Encourage secondary suites.
* Use public land for non-profit housing.
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