Families shocked by Villages Plan freeze on homes
- salrobinson6
- Jul 14
- 10 min read
by Carol Volkart
For Annabel Kershaw and her husband Barry Weih, their home of 30 years is a haven where they raised their kids, built a community of friends and neighbours, and hoped to live until, as Kershaw jokes, “they carry me out feet-first.”
For Matthew Huang and his wife Shelly, who bought the Mackenzie Heights house next door five years ago, it was a foot into the housing market and a place to raise their two young children.
For Sarah and Mason Lau, the main-floor-and-basement home they bought in the East 33rd and Fraser area in 2017 was a place to be expanded for their family’s future housing needs, first for their parents, then for their kids.
So it was a shock to all three households to get a May 22 letter from the city saying that under the Villages Plan, their properties will effectively be frozen. If the plan is approved, future development of their properties will be restricted to four-to-six-storey apartments with ground-floor retail. Until then, they won’t be able to expand or add to their homes, or build any other housing type.
“Cruel,” “shocking”, “ham-handed,” “draconian” and “authoritarian,” were among the words that arose in recent interviews about the situation.
“When did we become this dictatorship?” asked Kershaw. “It really does feel like expropriation to me.”
The Villages Plan, which goes to public hearing on Tuesday, July 14, will create 17 new villages around the city, including at West 33rd and Mackenzie, where Kershaw, Weih and the Huangs live, and at East 33rd and Fraser, where the Laus live.
The plan “aims to support complete walkable neighbourhoods by introducing more housing and a wider range of shops and services across 17 areas of the city,” according to the city’s May 22 letter to residents facing the new constraints.
About 600 of the approximately 13,000 properties included in the Villages Plan will face the restrictions, which are aimed at ensuring continuous retail in core commercial areas. Elsewhere in the villages, a wide variety of new housing can be built, from single family to duplexes, multiplexes, all the way up to six-storey apartment buildings, which will not require public hearings to proceed.
Kershaw said the fact that only about four percent of the properties will be frozen for retail doesn’t make it any better for those affected “It makes me mad that they say it’s only a few people. Well, I’m one of these people. I’m not just a lot or a property. And that is quite a few people.”
The city’s May 22 bombshell has left residents devastated and worried about what the future will bring.
“I feel like the rug has been pulled out from under me,” said Kershaw, an actor and yoga instructor who lives in the 2800-block of West 33rd. After three decades in her home, she feels like her security has vanished. “You feel like there’s a wrecking ball sitting outside your home.”
Besides thinking and talking about it “every single day,” she said, “I’m a pretty emotional person, so I do feel like crying a lot of the time, to be honest.”
She fears being forced out of her home, either through rising taxes or through a land assembly that could leave her house “stuck between two huge monolithic things,” its value plummeting.
To her, the plan has a “cruel” and ageist slant, with the underlying message that “we’re just a bunch of old selfish people” who deserve to be forced out of their homes. “Are we just supposed to die? We worked hard and we put a lot of our energy into our community and living here and yet that counts for nothing now?”
“I don’t want to be forced out. And that’s what I feel like, I feel like this is draconian. I feel like I’m suddenly at the mercy of some authoritarian regime, quite frankly. I don’t feel like we have a choice. This is being so pushed on us.”
If she and Weih are forced out, she said, they won’t be able to afford anything comparable. Even the larger townhomes or condos – at $2.5 to $2.8 million with no green space – in the area would cost more than their house is worth. It’s less valuable because it’s on a busy street, she said, and with the rezoning hanging over it could be worth even less.
Weih, who has just retired as an architect, said he understands what the city is trying to do, but he’s “shocked” that it is fast-tracking the Villages Plan when it is clearly not ready. He called it a ham-handed, half-baked plan that should be an election issue, not passed at the height of summer at one of the last council meetings just before the election.
“To see our city and our representatives take this kind of drastic step with so little thought is frankly shocking.”
In the toy-filled living room of the house next door to Kershaw and Weih, Matthew Huang also used the word “shocked” to describe his reaction to the May 22 letter.
When he read that no extensions or laneways could be added to the older home he and his wife bought in 2021, “That’s where I thought, ‘Okay, it’s not okay. That’s really bad.”
Huang said they have no intention of leaving, as they like the neighbourhood, their kids are in school there, and they have family nearby. But if health or job changes meant they had to sell, the city’s freeze means a loss of flexibility for their property “and definitely a potential loss in value.”
Huang works in residential real estate, so he is acutely aware of the current poor market conditions and the impact of uncertainty on property values. Under a worst-case scenario, if the plan passes, market conditions don’t improve, and something happened forcing them to leave, “we could have a really hard time selling this home.”
If the Villages Plan hadn’t come along, Huang said he and his wife would “definitely” have renovated the house when they had the money. “But if it passes, why sink in money to do a kitchen renovation?”
For Sarah Lau and her husband Mason Lau, whose 1950s home is in a core retail area of the planned village at East 33rd and Fraser, the loss of their ability to expand or add to it, is a major blow.
“This stops our plan, completely halts it,” said Lau, a speech language pathologist. She said she and her husband, an engineer, both took pay cuts to move back to Vancouver from Alberta in 2016 so they’d be able to help their parents as they aged.
Barely squeezing into the market by buying a one-floor-and-basement house in 2017, they hoped to expand it in future, either by raising it or adding a laneway house. In the shorter term, it would be for their parents and in the longer term for their two kids.
“It kind of breaks my heart because I can’t do anything to my property to make it more functional,” said Lau. “At some point we’ll have to sell it.”
She said she and her husband are so busy with their work and their children that they’ve barely had time to react to the proposal, let alone write or speak to city council about it.
But the city’s “looming” plan has definitely added stress to their lives, said Lau. “I feel really anxious and stressed. I worked hard to move back to Vancouver and set up my life. It feels like expropriation, like trying to force my hand.”
Fear stretches beyond the frozen areas
Even for those outside the “frozen” core retail zones of villages, where a variety of housing up to six-storey apartments will be encouraged, the Villages Plan is raising fear, stress and endless questions for residents.
Should they renovate? Will there be a land assembly and a six-storey apartment next door? Will they be forced out by higher taxes? Will their property values go down? Where will they go if they do have to leave?
All those questions are at the forefront for Jayne Berube, who lives in the 1700 block of West 59th, in the Angus and 57th Ave. village.
“It makes no sense,” says Berube, who sees the Villages Plan as an exercise in disrupting well-functioning neighbourhoods like hers and ousting the residents for no good reason.
“You’re taking an area where people have lived a long time, have invested money into their homes and are proud of their homes and we have a neighbourhood, and people know each other and you’re wanting to displace a lot of people.”
Like Kershaw, she questioned where people would go if the changes force them out. The new housing being built in the area is expensive, small and lacks green space, she said. “If we wanted to move into something that would allow me to garden, which is my pastime, we might be looking at more than what we could possibly sell for here and still have a smaller space.”
Like the Mackenzie Heights residents, she says her neighbourhood is already a walkable area, with most of the stores and services that people need within a quick walk or bike ride away. The little group of shops, including a grocery store on 57th, works well, and Kerrisdale is close by. If anything, the Villages Plan threatens a well-functioning existing village, she said.
With all the empty storefronts, why all the plans for new retail space?
Berube and others are questioning the Villages Plan’s focus on creating new retail space – a total of nearly one million square feet over 17 villages. Not only will it threaten existing retail, which is already struggling in many areas, but they ask how much more is needed when so many people do most of their shopping online?
Berube said young people like her daughter even buy groceries online, so the city could be setting up a future of empty retail spaces. Stores close regularly in Kerrisdale, she said, and the ground-floor retail spaces of the new apartment buildings on East and West Boulevard are often empty.
In Mackenzie Heights, Kershaw said most of the shops and services she needs are a five to 10-minute bike ride or 20-minute walk away. “We have a village,” she said. “What do they envision this retail to be that’s so necessary when we already have it? And as we know, a lot of the shops struggle. The reality is that people shop on Amazon and that’s not going away.”
Weih said there appears to be very little evidence backing the amount of retail space that’s proposed for his area.
“I’m shocked that they think it’s okay to freeze all the lots in the mixed-use areas based on a very flimsy retail report, which in itself says there is not any market for new commercial uses in our neighbourhood for the foreseeable future. The report says there’s no basis for it, there’s no market for it, why are you doing it?”
Weih said he’s friends with all of the retailers in the Mackenzie and 33rd area, and knows how hard they struggle to stay in business. It was a point graphically illustrated by incoming news that longtime area staple Windsor Meats was closing its Mackenzie outlet.
Huang said he’d love to see more small businesses, “but when you force it like this, it just doesn’t work.” Pointing to all the empty storefronts on major arterials, including Dunbar Street and West 10th, he said “it’s so bad for a neighbourhood to have all these empty stores. It’s bad for crime, it’s bad for vandalism, it’s bad for neighbourhoods. I think they’re kind of dreaming on that one.”
There’s a reason small businesses can’t survive or aren’t daring to open, he said. The city and the provincial government should be looking at why it’s so risky and what they can do to help.
‘Head in sand’ residents; obscure city reports
Why is the Villages Plan such a surprise to people if, as the city says, it was “informed by 18 months of public engagement”?
Berube is more informed than most, as she is on the city’s contact list and regularly fills out its questionnaires. But she said most people “have their heads stuck in the sand” when it comes to city issues. “People lead busy lives and are still working and have kids and thinking about these issues demands energy and time.”
The city doesn’t make it easy, either. It schedules major decisions for the summer, when many people are away. Its postcards tend to just get thrown away, as many people don’t get much mail anymore. Its documents, like the 300-plus-page Villages Plan, are too long and complex. Its open houses are poorly attended, with young staffers who sometimes seem poorly informed. And its questionnaires seem designed to obtain a preprogrammed result, rather than really seeking public opinion, said Berube. “They narrow you down and narrow you down and narrow you down to more or less get the answers they want.”
Huang said he went to information sessions about the Villages Plan, but “it was all pretty superficial.” It certainly didn’t prepare him for the surprise contained in the May 22 letter, he said.
Kershaw has vague memories of filling out a survey and going to an information session some time ago, but she never heard about a proposed freeze. “The reality is that everybody is always so busy. It’s stupid of us, I guess. We’re not aware enough of how this is going to impact us. Until.”
The lack of local understanding hit her when the May 22 letter arrived. She and Weih were so concerned that they put out a four-page letter for their neighbours clearly spelling out what it meant for them, complete with a map and the city’s letter. Kershaw said the city’s communications aren’t clear enough for most people, and city postcards get tossed because they look like junk mail.
Sarah Lau said she feels “very disheartened by how the city has approached informing individuals” and isn’t giving them enough time to react. Between that and holding a public hearing in the summer months, when so many people are away, “it feels very deliberate that the city hopes to pass this without people finding out about it.”
Lau herself is an example of why it’s hard for young people to speak up on issues like the Villages Plan. Between her work and her kids, her time is so squeezed that she can’t even keep up with the emails neighbours are sending about it. She’ll be on a work trip the day of the public hearing, and her husband will be putting the kids to bed when the hearing begins at 6 p.m.
“I have had no time to adjust to it, to figure out what to do for my family and the future of my kids,” she said. “I can’t even read what’s happening I’ve been so busy.”
She’d like the city to cancel the public hearing “and really engage in collecting feedback and finding out what people want.”
(This article was written for Dunbar News, a news site created by former Vancouver Sun editor/reporter Carol Volkart to inform Dunbar residents about what's happening in their area. Carol is also a longtime member of TEAM for a Livable Vancouver.)
