VANCOUVER, March 11, 2024 – People power can fight the towers – that’s what TEAM for a Livable Vancouver members and supporters will be saying at the March 14 Town Hall meeting at Kits Neighbourhood House.
Eighteen months after the developer-friendly Broadway Plan came into effect, City Hall has been flooded with rezoning and development applications and inquiries by real estate developers for high-rise towers. Some would be over 30 storeys high.
This kind of development-on-steroids won’t solve the housing affordability crisis. In fact, many of these applications involve demolition of existing affordable rental buildings. For example, a 20-storey tower proposal for 2175 West 7th Avenue would wipe out a long-established 35-unit rental apartment building.
The new towers will gut existing communities – lining the pockets of big developers as well as serving the blinkered political vision of their ABC enablers at City Hall. Other major cities around the world understand that low-rise, people-oriented development is the way to ensure a livable city, instead of high-rises that have negative environmental and social impacts – and which will turn Vancouver into a collection of dystopian concrete canyons.
In 2022, TEAM for a Livable Vancouver campaigned on withdrawing the Broadway Plan to prevent arbitrary application of out-of-scale buildings lacking local context -- like the ones we’re seeing proposed now.
TEAM’s plan calls for density under a new neighbourhood-based process, with meaningful involvement of local residents and businesses: plans that allow for population growth, including a healthy mix of affordable housing options, with rental and ownership tenures, and with the required local services, transit, schools, parks and amenities.
TEAM wants to work with responsible developers who see themselves as part of the community to build a city that’s for people, not just for profit. We hope to hear from such developers at the Town Hall meeting. Tower proponents have been invited to the meeting.
City of Vancouver planners were also invited to provide an overview of the Broadway Plan, with a specific focus on Kitsilano, but declined. When it passed the Broadway Plan in June 2022, the City offered "enhanced" tenant protections; we’d like to know how realistic and workable are those protections?
Some of the development proposals are for towers on quiet tree-lined streets. How will the population and character of Kitsilano change? What new parks and amenities can be expected?
Those were the kinds of questions once dealt with in Vancouver's local neighbourhood plans and visions, 72 of which were repealed by council last fall as part of its top-down, one-size-fits-all Broadway Plan model that put local democracy on the critical list. ABC and their YIMBY shills don’t like community involvement in the planning process because it threatens the bottom line of their corporate masters. Also likely up for debate will be the province’s controversial Bill 44, which muzzles public discussion of development proposals.
TEAM for a Livable Vancouver encourages those who care about our city’s future to attend the Town Hall, which is being organized by CityHallWatch Media Foundation in association with KitsPlan.
CityHallWatch is also planning Town Halls in Fairview and Mount Pleasant. For more information about these meetings, please go to the CityHallWatch website.
Please come to the Town Hall at Kits Neighbourhood House on Thursday. Together we can make our voices heard – and fight the power!