EcoDensity here to stay
Despite Mayor Sam Sullivan's electoral loss, the plan to increase city densities has widespread support
Frances Bula, Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, June 12, 2008
VANCOUVER - For the past two years, EcoDensity has been ridiculed as a marketing ploy, an empty phrase for self-promotion by now-deposed Mayor Sam Sullivan, a giveaway to developers, and a recycled version of existing Vancouver policy.
But it was also praised as a much-needed and exciting kickstart for Vancouver in thinking about how to build a more sustainable city.
Today, the controversial initiative to increase density and boost environmental city-building is official city policy. And it's one no political party appears likely to dismantle, since the approval vote, except for a disputes on a couple of points about affordability, was unanimous.
One of its most popular elements, likely to become visible reality soon, is laneway housing, which may get rolling by early 2009.
Also, effective retroactive to March 13, all buildings being built under a rezoning and all large-scale projects have to meet the highest environmental standards in North America. And city planners now have authority to negotiate various kinds of affordable housing with the developer.
Coun. Raymond Louie, one of the three mayoral candidates for Vision Vancouver, says if elected, he'd ask planners to go back to a couple of items and put in defined goals for affordability in new major projects, rather than leaving it up to planners to bargain with developers.
But otherwise he'd demand no major changes.
Non-Partisan Association Coun. Peter Ladner, who defeated Sullivan for his party's mayoral nomination Sunday -- in part by saying EcoDensity had been too much about slogans -- said he's very happy with the program, which was finally approved on Tuesday.
He wouldn't ask for affordability targets. The one tweak he might make, if elected, would be to get planners to push measures related to affordable housing to the top of the action list.
Besides getting approval in its home town, EcoDensity is now a name and a plan that is admired in other cities.
Development consultant and council candidate Michael Geller was just in Ottawa talking to politicians and planners there about how to create more compact housing.
"They asked if they could use the name. They liked the ideas," Geller said, but he had to tell them it was trademarked.
That became a political hot potato when the mayor applied for a trademark under his name rather than the city's. Sullivan said he was just protecting the name for the city and the trademark was duly handed over, but the incident stuck in people's minds and the plan was sometimes referred to as EgoDensity.
Geller, one of the circle of people whose advice Sullivan sought before announcing EcoDensity at the World Urban Forum in 2006, said the way Sullivan's team launched and carried out the initiative created problems that worked against it.
Geller had pushed Sullivan to include a stronger emphasis on affordability. That advice went mostly by the wayside. Instead, Sullivan put his emphasis on saving the planet through density.
That brought out groups of protesters who had been quiet for years. Both irate west-siders and put-upon east-siders were convinced their neighbourhoods were to be overwhelmed by massive towers.
More than 150 people registered to argue passionately for and against in a record seven nights of public meetings.
Even planning director Brent Toderian, who devoted much of the last two years to developing and promoting the idea, admitted at one point that the controversy sometimes made it difficult to get people to talk about the actual ideas.
In the end, the plan attracted only about 30 protesters -- who wore black bands on their mouths to indicate they'd been silenced -- to the final meeting.
"It was an exhaustive process," says Toderian. "But we got to a draft that all the political parties and all stakeholders could see themselves in."
Geller is more blunt about the problematic process.
"The label was clever and it was a well-intentioned initiative," he said. "But it led to a lot more harm than good.
"There was a great deal of misunderstanding and a lot of unnecessary fear," said Geller, who has been developing the UniverCity project at Simon Fraser University. He pioneered ideas like creating locked-off rooms in condos so that apartment dwellers could help pay the mortgage by renting out space as homeowners do with their basement suites.
In the end, both Geller and Ladner think the plan pushed the city into more aggressive action than it might have under the status quo.
Louie disagreed, saying if Sullivan hadn't bogged the city down in political controversy and endless process, the city might have moved faster to new environmental building standards, laneway housing and new forms of secondary suites.
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