This is a Vancouver magazine story that I wrote last year, but everything in it is relevant — 100 times more — today, when it comes to Vision’s difficulties talking to the public.
BTW, when this was published, a Vision insider passed along the message to me that it was a piece of crap, or words to that effect.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Keep It Real // Nov 11, 2014 at 2:05 pm
“We listen all the time. And the majority of people elected me.”
His mouth is the Mayor’s true Achilles Heel.
2 Lewis_N_Villegas // Nov 11, 2014 at 10:21 pm
Oh, Frances, that piece is just a bunch of krapp!!
[Sorry, I couldn’t resist.]
Good piece. I’m sorry I missed that night at the St. James Community Centre to see (your) Vision team in the ropes on the west side, just like they’ve been on the ropes in the east side, the west end, and the (historic) east end…
Politics aside, what went wrong with this adminstration was a complete lack of capacity on how to build the city. I was commenting to a friend just yesterday that the way “towers” is rolling off people’s lips nowadays is something nothing short of remarkable.
We have sustained in our city a special kind of barrage between Expo ’86 and the 2010 Olympics. I hope on Saturday voters will turn out in droves to put that era behind us for good.
Let’s get back to making Vancouver work for Vancouverites. Tax the foreign condo owners and let’s put the focus back on our family and community values.
[email protected]
3 Richard Campbell // Nov 12, 2014 at 1:03 am
Well, it would be really sad for the future of the city. It will just get more and more unaffordable. And all the old homes will still get torn down to build monster houses. Talk about a lose lose proposition.
Unfortunately, I suspect property prices are just too high to make your ideas workable. And, people have rejected your ideas as well. It’s not just towers that many are opposed to. Read the news.
Depressingly, none of the other parties have any workable policies and solutions for the average person. COPE has a plan for people without much money, which is badly needed. But what about the middle class?
The Green’s idea is probably worse than nothing. Forcing developers to build 1 unit of low income is great for that one person but what about the ten people who will have to pay tens of thousands more in an already expensive city.
The lack of leadership by most of the candidates is really disappointing. They just seem scared of doing anything that might make someone angry.
4 Lewis_N_Villegas // Nov 12, 2014 at 9:29 am
And people have rejected your ideas as well
Not sure what you are talking about there, Richard.
I agree that with the current land values it is impossible to make anything work for the middle class. My point there is that this is starting to look like Montevideo in the 1960s when home affordability vanished and with it went the middle class.
We came to Canada.
None of the other parties have any workable policies and solutions for the average person
Well, this one is for Frances and the journalist class! I would characterize this election cycle as “zero ideas”. It’s party politics and you pick and that’s that. Horrible!
Vision is standing by the Rize tower, the towerization of Oakridge, their holding strategy in Grandview-Woodlands, and the crappy plans they produced for two or three of the other neighbourhoods including mine. Their transportation strategy—unspoken—is to build a subway under Broadway, ignore the rest of the city, and build towers like the Rize all along Broadway to pay for the difference.
We all know the surface tram is the way to go, with dedicated bus only lanes pinching in while the rail implementation takes place at a responsible rate.
NPA is quiet of on the house front—don’t want to upset the $1.2 million dollar home owners, who are the voting majority. They are proposing counterflow lanes to solve the worst traffic congestion in Canada. Mr. Lapointe says that he is going to listen to the people and is prepared to bring in the Kinder-Morgan pipeline into Burrard Inlet… rather than, say, lobbying to make that body of water a water sanctuary or park.
We need a fast and efficient transit system that will pinch commuters from cars (that, Richard is not my idea BTW—it is modern transit planning as practiced in leading jurisdictions throughout the globe). The problem with relying on regulatory bodies to check industry is that it means relying on politicians who have been known to have their hand in the cookie jar, as Mr. Lapointe is accusing the Mayor of doing.
The Greens have a winning strategy—they are going to be the ‘king’ makers. They are pro-neighbourhood. But Pete Fry’s idea that the people of the neighbourhood are going to do the planning themselves doesn’t accord well with what we saw during the Mount Pleasant community plan process.
The hue and cry from the people was not “get out of the way and let it do it myself”. It was more like, “we don’t like these choices. We’d like to see something else. And what about—no towers; densification with street revitalization; a civic space to serve as the heart of Mount Pleasant with more to come; trolleys on HOV lanes on Main and tram on Broadway.” But I did not hear the dedicated group of participants say anything about, “we want to be the planners”.
COPEs challenge is to show that they can both represent unionized workers, and represent the rest of the people. If they are going to reman a “special interest party” then I don’t think we want to see a city or a country with one party representing labour and another party representing business, one for professionals, etc.
The politics of the new economy—and this is my idea—is the politics of consensus building and finding common ground.