There’s a lot being written about what led to the end of Brent Toderian’s time as Vancouver director of planning and, connected to that, what the next director will need to do or not do.
To sum things up briefly, 1. Developers did him in (if you believe developers control the city 2. Vision did him in (if you believe everything at the city all boils down to Vision vs the NPA) 3. He did himself in, by never finding a group besides his own department and urban-planning-conference attendees to support him. 4. Everything did him in, because he was replacing three people at a time when developments in the city got a lot more contentious as they moved into established neighbourhoods.
And … the next director will have to be 1. God 2. Superman 3. Able to suck up to Vision 4. Able to suck up to developers. And so on.
There are a few additional observations to make about all of this conversation.
One is: The attention given to the change-over in planning directors is more evidence that this city is unusually obsessed with its development. That’s not surprising. The downtown in this city has changed more than any other city I can think of in the past 30 years, as a result of a huge influx of investment and successive councils that welcomed that investment into new developments.
But it’s still unusual to see how much we talk about things that don’t even rate a mention in other cities. Toronto’s planning director, Gary Wright, is retiring in March. Haven’t seen a thing about him and his impact on Toronto in the news.
Second is: What odd judgments people come to. Something that I quoted Brent Toderian saying, three years ago, was “Good planning isn’t a popularity contest.” That quoted was repeated endlessly the last week, with some people interpreting it to mean he didn’t care about anyone’s opinion. (And their corollary: He was arrogant and no wonder he got turfed.)
Which is odd, because there’s nothing about the quote to suggest that he meant he didn’t care. Clearly, he meant, and I understood it that way, that planning is tough, there are lots of warring parties, and ultimately, someone is going to end up not happy. But a planning director has to make the best choice for the city overall, not just what’s going to make the most people happy or the loudest people happy.
When I wrote it, I didn’t even see it as a negative. I thought it illustrated his commitment to making the right decision, even if it was difficult — a good quality that people in the city would appreciate.
My third comment: I won’t attempt to duplicate the other good observations people have made about what’s needed in the next director of planning. (Bob Ransford’s column here is a nice example.)
I’ll only add my own little caveat. There’s a danger in the world of planning — and we see it here on this blog endlessly — of thinking that planners can save the world, if only people will just listen to their advice for how to build a sustainable city.
City planning has become a bit of a cult, with lots and lots of the converted talking to each other about how well-planned cities will stop climate change, eliminate greenhouse gases, and possibly revive some extinct species.
While I won’t argue that planning cities better will make a difference to environmental quality, everyone has to remember that the “best” projects, neighbourhoods and cities are going to run into trouble if the majority of people don’t actually want to live in them.
As a very smart planner once told me, you can’t make people choose how and where they live because it’s good for the planet. A small group will do it. Most just won’t. Instead, you have to make very sure that whatever you plan or design also appeals to people for all the other reasons in their lives.
They’ll choose those greener projects and neighbourhoods only if they think their kids will have great places to play and hang out, if the whole family has room to do the things it wants to do, if they get the privacy or the greenery or the quiet that they think is essential.
If not, they’ll continue to go to low-density parts of the city.
20 responses so far ↓
1 Glissando Remmy // Feb 5, 2012 at 10:28 pm
Thought of The Day
“It’s all about… luck!”
100% of the development applications in Vancouver are in reality an exercise in futility; usually the end result has nothing to do with the idea that started it all. It’s more like luck, and by luck I mean… you sent the right sized cheque to Vision & Mayor.
Let me explain.
Architects, Engineers, Planners, Developers prepare sound preliminary or complete development applications.
After months of back an forth with Planning & Development city staff, the PDA/ CDA reaches the UDP (UrbanDesignPanel).
Engineers, Architects, Planners, Developers, Local Artist on the UDP, are voting Yay or Nay on many things (form of development, architectural expression, density, height, use, heritage density transfers, materials, LEED design features, view corridors, etc…)
Public input is welcomed.
A Yay vote sends the DA to the DPB (Development Permit Board). A Nay vote sends the Applicant back to the drawing board.
Once at DPB, another plethora of advisers (general public, design profession, UDP, development ind., heritage rep…) are giving advice to the a Three members board… and here’s the thing, only the three member’s votes count!
Which IMHO is the first flaw in the process.
Thinking now, that the oldest member… Brent got fired, the Board is left with a newbee and a nobody, both of which could play ping-pong with each other, but never could finish a game.
The fact that a DP Application may pass with a vote of 2 to 1 is stupid, and totally wrong on so many levels.
Public input is welcomed.
All that good, solid professional & public advice could prove to be good for nothing in the end, as the Aufochs aka Ballem of the day could vote whichever way their ego is pointing.
And in all fairness Toderian was doing his own ballet steps in there as well.
Yay or Nay.
If it’s a Yay, the CDA goes to Council. Where it dies, or survives with trauma, or it goes through a sex change operation.
If it’s a Nay… well, in the past decade I do not RECALL a single Nay in there, but I may be wrong.
And here’s the kicker.
After months of work, city staff involvement, panels of professionals, higher echelon cronies showing off their cufflinks… the application is viewed by Cllors. Deal, Reimer, Louie, Jang… all solid urban thinkers, champion in-camera tweeters, advocates for green paper slippers inside the Chambers… oh, and last but not least, the person in charge of the microphones… The Gregor!
Terrifying, I am telling you!
Public input is welcomed… Ho, Hey!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IDcmUQa0WM
So Ladies and Gents, it comes to this:
If Cllor. Meggs is low on sugar, you are screwed.
If Cllor. Reimer is having a bad hair day, you are screwed.
If Mayor Gregor can’t find his spectacles, you’re screwed.
If Cllor Deal misses her brunch, you-are-screwed.
So you see, it goes all back to… luck.
A city, who’s major decisions are made by a group of misfits, needs TO CALL itself the Parody City.
Lewis N Villegas wrote not long ago on a previous post:
“We all understand that these are highly political positions.”
There it is! Right there! Do you see it?
…
I say… No, Lewis, we do not understand, for sure, these shall/should/must NOT BE POLITICAL POSITIONS.
City’s administration should be under no influence from the politicos, what-so-ever!
But now that Vision Vancouver caravan came to town, it’s becoming obvious that you may have something there after all.
Frances, with this post, tries very hard to diffuse the tension created inside the Hall, to no avail though, as more and more people are waking up to the reality, that the nuts are running the asylum.
Useless to say that inside City Hall these days, it feels like on the HMS Titanic, when the Second Mate, shouted from the bottom of his lungs: “Ice-Berg a-head!”
When Captain Edward J. Smith, was having a nice dinner with his crew of … first, second and third grade mates, was there anyone in charge, to listen, or understand the message?
No one!
Welcome on HMS Ballem everyone!
We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.
2 Lewis N. Villegas // Feb 5, 2012 at 10:28 pm
Brent is to be congratulated for his a 7 year run. Notch that one on his belt.
“The downtown in this city has changed more than any other city I can think of in the past 30 years”
Gosh, I’m getting my history from a different cereal box, or travel guide, FB. I still see Vancouver—speaking historically, of course—as a branch-town run by the bosses.
“Good planning isn’t a popularity contest”…
Sure, but what is in a competitive economy? Planning is not about the “reading of the tea leaves”, or lifting a finger to the wind (no, not that finger). What seems to go by unnoticed is that we don’t have a tradition of “urban design” in what is otherwise a very well established, and well developed, tradition of planning here in our city.
The question is this: Can we really have ‘good’ planning without urban design?
Is our brand of planning is like an engine without a catalytic converter? Or, a jazzy car without a sun roof? When are we going to finally acknowledge “the elephant in the planning room”?
“But a planning director has to make the best choice for the city overall, not just what’s going to make the most people happy or the loudest people happy.”
No, not in my world. If the DoP has to choose, then we’ve already lost the game. No matter what choice the DoP makes, there is an urban design plan that should have been in place—providing that guidance—that is missing.
Why else are the neighbourhoods running around with their hair on fire, saying that they have not been consulted? Or, as is the case with Mt. Pleasant and the Rise tower, that they were consulted, but it didn’t amount to a damn??
A plan articulating a consensus vision of place based on concrete and verifiable criteria… I know—this is just another “foreign language” being spoken in our midst—significantly, a language not understood in our city…
Tap, tap, tap… the digital Renaissance is here already. Information is ever less and less “power”.
“They’ll choose those greener projects and neighbourhoods only if … If not, they’ll continue to go to low-density parts of the city.”
Old paradigm: “The suburb is the best”.
Day by day, year by year, Vancouver will grow from a west coast town into an urban city. The rest of the region will trail behind, and provide an inexorable amount of “drag”. Yet, the future here is “urban”. But, the future is not now. There is ample time for more mis-steps.
What I found interesting about the City’s press release is that it would be an “international” search for the next DoP. As if our schools and our universities, our towns and our cities, were just not turning up good enough product.
Mirror, mirror…
3 Lewis N. Villegas // Feb 5, 2012 at 10:47 pm
Glissy and I crossed posts. Ahem… but we seem to be crooning the same song.
4 Glissando Remmy // Feb 5, 2012 at 10:54 pm
Aaaah Lewis,
I believe we pressed the Submit button almost the same time, like on Jeopardy.
“What I found interesting about the City’s press release is that it would be an “international” search for the next DoP. ”
EXACTLY!
I can think of at least half a dozen people capable of doing the job, from Vancouver alone.
This international search is an efffing travesty, similar to the one when Ballem’s henchmen conducted interviews to replace Ark Tsisserev… with the wrong candidate, in the wrong discipline… and with the Human Resources Dept. sitting on the information that the named candidate may take a job in the EU if selected… which
he did … and he went!
Money, money, money, they spent, screwing this city, to the left and to the right.
Pathetic!
Maybe it is about time for the citizens of Vancouver to wake up!
Now, in the “City for Sale” Category… for 400…
” Heartbreaking Scene In Which #She Lets #Him… Go…With A Touch Of A Hand And A Generous Severance Package …!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5u5zXVmoHM&feature=fvst
And the answer is:
“Who are #Penny Capulet and #Brent Montague?”
5 Lewis N. Villegas // Feb 5, 2012 at 11:05 pm
Glissy, you take me to a Game Show I have secretly always despised…
Contestant— Urbanism for $400….
Alex— Urban Form that works.
Contestant—What is sustainable urbanism?
Watching from the sidelines: Vancouver Planning—We’re not there yet.
6 jesse // Feb 6, 2012 at 8:02 am
Is there any story with severance here? For a position of that leverage, isn’t one year pretty much the going rate these days?
7 jesse // Feb 6, 2012 at 8:08 am
“If not, they’ll continue to go to low-density parts of the city”
In that respect Vancouver and San Francisco seem to be soulmates. Looking at the demography of SF and how families have been “pushed out” by higher prices and fewer amenities to the suburbs Vancouver perhaps should embrace its destiny.
This is ostensibly the case with other cities around the world too, the likes of New York, Boston, Paris, what have you, but what many are asking of Vancouver — including its council — is allowing families the ability to stay within the City’s borders. Perhaps the order is a bit too Brobdingnagian.
8 MB // Feb 6, 2012 at 9:19 am
@ jesse #7: “Looking at the demography … and how families have been “pushed out” by higher prices and fewer amenities to the suburbs Vancouver perhaps should embrace its destiny.”
And is building rickety, cheap — er, “affordable” — plastic houses on large lots in the poorly-serviced suburbs a realistic answer, jesse?
Where? On protected farmland? To the 1,000 metre elevation on steep, forested mountainsides? (The North Shore currently draws the line at 400m.) Floating communities on the rising ocean and on river estuaries?
There is no reasonable comparison of the contraints of Metro Vancouver’s geography to any of the cities you cited.
We have a land affordability challenge, not a housing affordability challenge. The latest assessments demonstrate that perfectly in simple numbers.
Moreover, the quiet, green spaces Frances refers to are achievable in many ways, and aren’t necessarily joined at the hip to sprawling single-use residential subdivisions on greenfield sites, which may not be possible for much longer on the Lower Mainland.
Perhaps we need to chuck the ubiquitous planning models of last century altogether, and encourage the flat farmland-circumscribed suburbs to urbanize. Of course, that would be after Vancouver itself does more infill development of its own.
And that’s not a purely green objective. It’s only reflecting the physical and economic circumstances we live in.
9 gmgw // Feb 6, 2012 at 9:51 am
” …if you believe developers control the city…”
You mean there’s still people out there naive enough to believe they *don’t*?!
gmgw
10 MB // Feb 6, 2012 at 10:50 am
Gmgw, developers have a lot of influence, but “control the city…” I don’t think so. They control the land they own and develop, but within the parameters that the city sets.
If they truly controlled the city, then the roads, sidewalks, parks and utilities would be privatized and we’d all pay a series of private tolls or user fee every time we stepped outside of our doors.
Moreover, Vancouver’s vast land bank is still pretty well intact.
11 Lewis N. Villegas // Feb 6, 2012 at 11:06 am
Comparative population numbers from Wikipedia (city pop/metro pop):
Los Angeles 4M/18M (2nd in the U.S.)
San Francisco 800k/7.5M
Seattle 600k/3.5 M
San Diego 1.3M/3M
Sacramento 500k/2.5M
Portland 600k/2.2M
Vancouver 600k/2.1M
The metro populations help to put the urbanism in perspective:
Anchorage 330k/0.4M
Victoria 100k/0.3M
12 Frank Ducote // Feb 6, 2012 at 12:58 pm
Thanks for those useful numbers, Lewis. It is a good reminder that suburban areas continue to be the great majority of both a region’s population and it’s land mass. And will continue to receive increasing shares of growth. ( There was a time not that long ago when the central cities in the regions you cited held the bulk of population rather than, say, 20% or less.)
It’s also a wake up call about how important it is to develop complete, compact and connected communities in outlying areas, with jobs and services close to home to reduce car dependency, based on sound land use and density patterns, transit and other infrastructure appropriate to emerging needs of the evolving region and subregions.
13 MB // Feb 6, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Lweis, the Metro population as actually 2.3 million a few years back, probably 2.4 by now.
14 Lewis N. Villegas // Feb 6, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Just to look at it another way, I have indexed the cities by dividing the regional population by the core area population. The winners are:
10 — San Francisco 800k/7.5M
6 — Seattle 600k/3.5 M
5 — Sacramento 500k/2.5M
4,5 — Los Angeles 4M/18M (2nd in the U.S.)
4 — Portland 600k/2.2M
4 — Vancouver 600k/2.4M
2.3 — San Diego 1.3M/3M
15 voony // Feb 6, 2012 at 11:07 pm
Absolutely Franck and Lewis,
that is the reason why the future of Vancouver lies in Chilliwack, and prospects look pretty bleak to date
16 gmgw // Feb 7, 2012 at 1:16 am
@MB #10:
You’re right, of course, MB. Why would developers want to take on the vast task of controlling every aspect of the city when they have so many people at City Hall, councillors by no means the least, eager to be of service to them?
gmgw
17 Lewis N. Villegas // Feb 7, 2012 at 11:42 am
the future of Vancouver lies in Chilliwack, and prospects look pretty bleak to date
voony 15
And reading on voony’s blog, we see that he is contrasting the LA model of development with the Swiss.
LA is a grid of Freeways, and the air quality, shortages in potable water, and energy grid issues all speak for themselves. Still, it is #2 in the U.S.
The Swiss model (expect “clockwork” and “capital investment to play a role) moves people on rail, rather than Freeways.
My favorite analogy here is the BC Electric right-of-way going all the way out to Chilliwack … uhm, but laying there fallow (unused).
The 5 minute walking radius from a transit stop on the BC Electric can house 20,000 in fee-simple houses (not apartments). Land values, we presume, would decrease in proportion to the distance from the core, and the length of the rail ride downtown. Of course, South of Fraser, a great number of people would not be going downtown for work. Their rail trip might be to sports, culture and entertainment.
The driving distance is 1.5 hours or 100 km. You pick. At 4 km intervals, 25 TODs (transit oriented developments) would house 25 x 20,000 or 500,000 people. That is half of the 1 million projected growth in the next generation.
Unfortunately, the Gateway is the first leg in the LA model of urban transportation.
Late entiry to the indexed city survey
1.4 — Tijuana 1.3M/1.8M
18 Ask Alice // Feb 7, 2012 at 9:57 pm
Funny how the dark horse from elsewhere is touted as the cure, when the Beasley/McAfee team which grew and developed within city hall were admired internally and were great performers for staff and the city. They spent time with staff, understood work programs, worked directly with staff and had staff support. Might be a lesson there. Might also be too late. The others have bolted from the barn.
19 Joe Just Joe // Feb 7, 2012 at 10:06 pm
Since there isn’t a thread for it yet, let me be the first to congratulate Michael Gellar on being appointed the lead on the affordability task force.
I’m not confident that it’ll solve anything but I do feel better knowing it’s being run by competent people.
20 Frances Bula // Feb 7, 2012 at 10:25 pm
@JJJ. You reminded me to put something up so maybe you can repeat this over there. Thanks.
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