Group Seeks City-wide Help in Stopping Villages Plan
- salrobinson6
- Jul 1
- 8 min read
by Carol Volkart
A small community group with big ambitions has launched a grassroots battle against the Villages Plan, which urban experts have warned could destabilize communities, create winners and losers and cause urban blight without producing affordability.
“We hope this is the beginning of a city-wide movement,” said Smart Density Vancouver’s Elaine Stevens as passers-by checked out the group’s information booth at 33rd and Mackenzie on June 26. “We’re making contacts all over the city.”
The Villages Plan, which goes to public hearing on July 14, would create 17 new “villages” in Vancouver, four of them in the Dunbar area. It would allow up to six-storey buildings on 13,000 lots over 550-600 blocks, a bigger area than is covered by the Broadway Plan.
The city says the goal is to create walkable, livable communities with a diversity of housing and enough new retail that residents can walk to meet their daily needs. But urban experts say the plan is too much too fast, will have many negative unintended consequences, and was done without properly informing or consulting residents.
With the clock ticking down to the July 14 public hearing, Smart Density Vancouver is racing to inform residents about the plan and encourage them to voice their opinions to City Hall.
The group’s June 26 and 27 information booths on Mackenzie were aimed at making that as easy as possible. Laid out on a table were copies of seven pre-printed letters opposing various aspects of the plan for residents to sign. There was a step-by-step instruction sheet for how to write to council online. There was a 4,000-plus signature petition to sign. And there were stacks of flyers for concerned citizens to distribute through their own communities.
Visitors who drifted into the first information session were curious, thoughtful and appreciative of the group’s efforts. Poring over which letter to sign or picking up flyers to give their neighbours, they thanked organizers over and over again. “Where can we donate?” one woman asked, saying she knows flyers and information sheets don’t come free.
Information-session organizer Agnes Lee told her the group hadn’t set up a donation system, partly because they didn’t want anyone to think they were just trying to raise money. “There’s so many scams these days,” she said.
A Dunbar resident who came to the booth to pick up flyers to distribute to neighbours and a group she belongs to said she’s especially concerned the new villages, with their additional retail, will destroy existing main streets like Dunbar. “We’ve already lost so much of the commercial area, so many stores are sitting vacant,” she said. “What do we have left? Not a lot.”
She said she hopes people will get in touch with City Hall “and make their voices heard.”
Summing up the two information sessions later, Smart Density’s Stevens called them “wildly successful.” Even though they lasted only a few hours apiece, the group ended up with more than 280 signed letters to deliver to City Hall, as well as spreading the word to many people who didn’t know about the plan.
“People were universally horrified at what is happening and supportive of our efforts,” Stevens said of the booth visitors. “Of course there might have been a few people who just passed by and didn’t agree but I really don’t know about that, and it’s clear the overall response to our efforts was very positive.”
Besides the information sessions, Smart Density is doing everything it can to reach out to residents citywide. It has a petition, a website explaining what it’s all about, it’s on Facebook and Instagram, and it’s working to make connections with neighbourhood groups throughout the city.
Perhaps its most visible effort is the thousands of colourful flyers that volunteers will pop through Vancouverites’ mail slots. After a first run of 1,000, Smart Density had another 5,000 printed. Stevens said 1,000 of that second batch were dispersed over the weekend, and the group continues to ask for volunteers to distribute them throughout the city. Making it as easy as possible for this to happen, it says it will drop them off to anyone who’ll get them out to their neighbourhoods.
Among the volunteers is Upper Kitsilano resident Barbara May, who stepped up after hearing that flyers were available for distribution. In an email to Smart Density about the flyers, her anger and passion about the plan was evident.
“When I am walking in my neighbourhood the majority of people I talk to know nothing about the plan. If they did, I am sure most would object strenuously. I am willing to distribute as many flyers as you can give me to give to every residence that will be impacted.”
Noting that the plan will affect a large part of her area, between West 12th and 16th and between Balaclava and Macdonald, she said: “That’s a lot of people who will be displaced. Upper Kits is a lovely neighbourhood filled with beautiful trees, heritage homes and new duplexes that generally blend into the streetscape.”
Smart Density’s short but lively history
Smart Density Vancouver is a new group, and small, but it’s already had an impact on City Hall. Begun earlier this year by a group of Mackenzie Heights residents concerned about the size, shape and impact of the multiplexes springing up in the neighbourhood, it was instrumental in persuading the ABC majority on city council to approve a review of multiplexes.
Smart Density also organized a June 10 meeting on multiplexes at the Dunbar Community Centre that’s still being talked about in the neighbourhood.
When triple the expected crowd of about 60 showed up, the meeting had to adjourn outside. MC Marisa Thomas, a former Global TV reporter, grilled ABC councillors Lenny Zhou and Peter Meiszner (who introduced the motion for a review) about multiplexes and the reason the review was needed before a feisty and angry crowd.
Although the focus of the meeting was multiplexes, the Villages Plan soon arose as an even hotter topic, as some of the audience members had just learned the plan would effectively freeze their properties. In certain areas destined for retail, the future use of existing homes is required to be four-to-six-storey apartments with first-floor retail.
Multiplexes remain a high priority for the group, but it’s now driving full-tilt at the Villages Plan as the July 14 deadline looms. Members see the trees and the tree canopy that have always been one of their major concerns even more threatened by the Villages Plan than by the multiplex policy.
“If you thought the multiplex policy was bad, this is much worse,” the group says in its latest petition update, adding that the Villages Plan contains “zero affordability requirements, zero tree protections and zero design guidelines.”
Reverberations from the June 10 Smart Density meeting reached even into City Hall, where general manager of planning Josh White referred to it in a June 23 memo to the mayor and city council.
The memo noted that “questions and comments” were coming in from the public on the Villages Plan, and that Zhou and Meiszner had shared some of them in “feedback from a neighbourhood meeting.”
The memo said staff wanted to address “several common misconceptions” that had arisen about the plan. Some people have incorrectly been told that all parcels in the Villages Plan must be four to six storeys with ground floor retail when they are redeveloped, it said, but in fact this applies to less than four percent of the properties in the villages. The memo said the changes will happen over the long term, and the policy is necessary to ensure the new villages have complete and walkable retail areas.
Smart Density’s Marisa Thomas was not impressed.
The four percent of properties “represent hundreds of families and thousands of people,” she wrote back to White.
“These families got a letter in their mailbox in June telling them, that if the Villages Plan is passed, they no longer control what they do with their home. It’s retail on the bottom and residential on the top. Period. No renovation that would expand their home, no laneway house, no multiplexes. Their only choice is to sell to a developer. They are now in real estate limbo. I’m no lawyer but that sounds like an expropriation to me.”
In a similarly scathing message to Mayor Ken Sim, Thomas urged a halt to the Villages Plan, saying it takes the mistakes of the multiplex policy and puts them on steroids.
Urban experts with “hundreds of years of design experience” have called a code red on the plan, she said. “Even as a non-design expert, this entire report is lazy, lacking in detail and completely misrepresents what communities want.”
The plan will clearcut the village areas, destroy the tree canopy at a time of climate change, fail to produce affordability because there’s no requirement for it to do so, and turn all neighbourhoods into cookie-cutter lookalikes, she said. It ignores the need for infrastructure and amenities for a higher population, has failed to adequately consult residents, and gives developers “free rein to design our neighbourhoods,” she told Sim. “Look how that worked out with multiplexes. Huge, ugly structures that diminish liveability.”
“You need to press pause,” she urged. “Order staff to actually engage in community dialogue. Show Vancouverites you are working for residents, not developers, and you understand that Vancouver neighbourhoods are distinct, not plain vanilla.”
Discord, blight and victimization ahead
Smart Density’s concerns echo a tsunami of criticism from the urban planning community, including the Housing Reset group of 28 planners, architects, and academics with decades of experience. The group has written a letter to city council on the plan, and some members have written other articles, commented publicly or spoken to the media about their concerns.
Vancouver’s former co-director of planning Larry Beasley foresees a future of discord, destabilization, victimization and physical blight if the Villages Plan proceeds.
The plan’s blanket rezoning will lead to many randomly spread real-estate moves, prompting some land values to soar and others to plummet, resulting in “community displacements and victimization, physical blight, existing retail stress, and, ironically, a difficult and risky development scenario,” Beasley wrote in a separate letter to council from the Housing Reset one, which he also signed.
His letter made many of the same points as the group’s, but included more detailed criticism.
Both letters warned the size of the new construction allowed by the Villages Plan will overwhelm existing communities. The result, warned Beasley, will be “discord among new and existing residents, and a fall in the quality of everyone’s liveability, with overshadowing, overviews, loss of outward views, loss of trees and an unnecessary sense of crowding.”
He also warned that the plan will produce one-size-fits-all neighbourhoods, ending “the great diversity which is at the centre of our city’s image, reputation, and diverse choices of living.” Plus, the plan won’t provide affordable and non-market housing because it doesn’t require it. “Sadly, you cannot expect this to happen naturally, without proactive measures.”
The icing on the cake is that the plan will “profoundly” damage existing main streets, even at the start, he said. While the city should focus first on reinforcing and rounding out these areas, the current plan “will only lead to hijacking of limited local demand, which will diminish and cripple existing centres.”
Overall, Beasley said the whole initiative is “too soon, too widespread, and too top-down.” Both his and the Housing Reset letters noted there’s already enough approved development in the pipeline to meet the needs until 2050, so there’s no urgency for villages given all the negatives.
“The current rushed timeline is completely unjustified. Thousands of city residents and business owners will come back from summer holidays and find that their properties have been rezoned, most having no idea beforehand of the proposal,” said the Housing Reset letter. “Such surprises are highly unpopular, stressful and unnecessary.”
All the experts urged the city not to proceed with the current version of the plan and instead to rethink what’s really needed in consultation with residents. As Beasley ended his letter to council: “Let’s not break our city down brutally, but evolve and cluster our city carefully and gently.”
(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.)
