Scrolling through the usual wad of city reports, I came across a rezoning proposal up for public hearing Tuesday night that provides an interesting contrast to towers currently proposed in the West End.

One of the main complaints of those objecting to various towers — several of them that have been granted extra density in order to get the developer to provide rental housing — is that the community doesn’t really get any benefits from that extra density. They get extra people but not extra services for the neighbourhood, especially community-centre space, library space, park space and so on.

Here’s a tower at Hornby and Helmcken, just blocks away from the official West End, where city planners are entertaining a proposal from Concert Properties that it go from a current allowed 5 FSR to 12.44 FSR. (FSR, for newbies, is floor-space ratio. If a building has 5 FSR, that means its number of square feet of building is equal to five times the total square footage of the lot size. That doesn’t mean five storeys. It could mean much more, as developers don’t build right to the lot line on all four sides. So 5 FSR could well be a 10-storey building. Single-family housing is usually .6 to .75 FSR.)

Planners have calculated that the value of the land will increase by $9.9 million if this rezoning goes through. They calculated that the developer’s offer of $7.6 million in various community benefits was insufficient, so planners said Concert should have to put in another $1.5 million in benefits. That way, the city gets almost 90 per cent of the land lift. Concert gets to keep the last $800,000 or so.

Aha, you’re thinking. That’s a lot of money put in for community benefits. That’s the way it should work if a developer is getting a a big increase in density. The 400-500 people living in that building will generate new services for the area, so all will be good.

That’s what I thought when I first saw the report. But when I looked closer, this is what the $9.9 million breaks down to in community benefits:

– public art: $270,000

– improvements to the daycare spaces at Dorothy Lam and Quayside: $235,000

– improvements to “public realm and greenway”: $1.265 million

– DCLs that will go to “parks, childcare facilities, social housing, and engineering”: $2.16 million

– and the remainder of the money, about $5 million by my calculation, goes to heritage preservation. That’s because Concert has bought the heritage density from the old YMCA building that it rebuilt on Burrard and transferred it to this building.

So more than half of the community benefits are used for heritage, not new or improved community services. There are many who would have no problem with this. It’s the main mechanism the city has been able to use to preserve most of Gastown, the Stanley Theatre, and other bits of our rare and disappearing heritage in the city.

But it does add a big block of people to this area of town — already very dense and urban — with less than half the money dedicated to improving services. (And, I note, some of that will go into the city’s housing fund.)

By the way, only 11 people sent letters to city hall about this project. The majority objected, saying it was too big, added too much density to the area. But not all.

Allen Garr at the Courier caught condo marketer Bob Rennie in a talkative mood this week, where, from London, he slammed development consultant Michael Geller for his public comments about social housing at the Olympic village. In it, he calls Geller a “sniper” who is “taking out children” while aiming at social housing.

And he says Geller’s comments are damaging the ability to market the project — something that could eventually have a cost for everyone.

As most of you know, this is part of a rolling debate that has been going on for more than a week now, since Michael started commenting to various media, me included, that the social housing at the village was becoming a liability that could affect the prices for luxury condos.

He didn’t say social housing in general was a liability, but that the perception that the hardest to house (i.e. people from the Downtown Eastside with multiple issues) might move in, since the Portland Hotel Society was known to be one of the non-profits bidding to operate the buildings, might be a liability.

That generated scathing comments from Jim Green in the Vancouver Sun, a column from Globe writer Gary Mason slamming Green, and columns from Geller in the Sun and on his blog refuting Green’s criticisms. Not to mention, of course, bloggers weighing in. Plus more clarifications from Michael through the Vancouver Observer. I’m sure I’m missing some bits and pieces elsewhere.

This is a complicated fight because it mixes up so many different things: facts about who will actually live in the village’s social housing, people’s deeply held beliefs about what affects the value of real estate, people’s equally deeply held beliefs about whether segregated neighbourhoods are acceptable, idealism about how the city should work, business assessments about how to market housing.

What got Michael in trouble is not that he was expressing the secret wishes of the Non-Partisan Association, as Jim Green claimed. As anyone who knows Michael realizes, he expresses his views completely independently of any political group or ideology — to a fault, some might say.

(Full disclosure: He has been one of several people in the development field whose opinions I have regularly sought over the years to understand issues; I’ve been invited to many social events at his house, though have never managed to make it.)

He’s an honest and thoughtful guy, and almost constitutionally incapable of being mean — something he himself acknowledges can be a liability.

But what got Michael in trouble was that he was speaking as a development consultant who has been in charge of high-end projects, like the Bayshore development in the 1990s.

He expressed the view that is common among many who develop and market high-end projects, which is that, if you want to sell people a sense of exclusivity and luxury and charge them a very high price for it, you can’t have people around who obviously don’t fit the image.

That might mean people in social housing. At the Bayshore development, it did — Michael negotiated to have social housing for families moved offsite. He also designed a project that was not particularly suited to any kind of families, whether in social housing or not. That didn’t fit the kind of development the Bayshore owners were trying to create.

But that kind of marketing calculation is confined to social housing. The people seen as potential problems might also mean renters of any description. And it might also mean even buyers who are at the low end of the market.

That’s not being prejudiced. It might be inaccurate or based more on perception than reality  — I haven’t found any study yet that corroborates that, even though it’s an accepted truism in the marketing industry — but it’s based on an economic/marketing calculation. As George Wong of Magnus, currently marketing River Green in Richmond, told me, developers of very high-end towers deliberately design their towers so that there are no small units anywhere. They’ll stick to a minimum of 2,000 square feet, to ensure that there are no low-end buyers in the building.

That doesn’t happen with every building. There are plenty of examples in Vancouver and elsewhere of the first-time buyers populating the lower floors of condos, while the people who cashed in their West Van houses are perched in the million-dollar penthouses at the top.

That kind of concern about property values and how the demographics of people living nearby will affect them is hardly restricted to developers, though. Every residents’ group that has protested against basement suites, townhouses, apartments and laneway houses — and heaven knows that there has been no shortgage of that throughout the region in the past 20 years — is at heart operating from that fear. I’ve heard it umpteen times at public hearings, the fear that having renters in the area will affect the value of the investment that is the largest one that many people have.

It’s also why many strata councils don’t allow people to rent out their units — precisely because of the concerns from the majority of owners that having renters in the building will affect property values.

In the Downtown Eastside, advocacy groups also worry that even one building of moderate-income renters or buyers will start to drive property values up and force out the very poor who live there. That’s why the Carnegie Community Action Project opposes every kind of development in the Downtown Eastside except for additional social housing. Even buildings that are aimed at affordable rental or affordable home-ownership geared to people making service-industry wages are on their no-go list.

The problem for many of us is that we don’t have the information to judge whether any of this is true, so fear ends up playing a part in our assessments.

Some academic could do a lot of good in this city by studying the impact of economic mixing to see what really happens. There is much more of it than we sometimes realize.

In spite of the heated battle over basement suites in the 1990s, the reality is that basement suites are now an accepted fact of life throughout Vancouver — west side and east side. So are laneway houses.That creates an economic social mix similar to having social housing formally designed in.

As well, there is social housing studded throughout the city — from the social housing across the street from the Bayshore Hotel in Coal Harbour and from Urban Fare in the Concord developments to older projects near the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club at Jericho Beach. Even at River Green in Richmond, there will be a chunk of the development designated as affordable housing, if I understand Richmond’s mandatory policy on inclusionary zoning correctly.

What is the real impact of that on property values? We don’t know. By and large I suspect it’s been non-existent, because most people don’t even realize social housing is in the neighbourhood. But that kind of obliviousness has taken a ding in the last two weeks.

The laneway houses are proving to be a craze. The city has had 173 applications for laneway houses approved so far and another 50 or so are going through the process. They now account for one out of every eight houses built in the city.

But the city report that just popped up today notes that there are some glitches that still need to be worked out. One is the general size of houses on bigger lots, which can be as large as 750 square feet — bigger than some of the post-war houses we boomers grew up in. One is the height of the houses on both the bigger and the standard 33-foot lots.

City staff are looking at whether there need to be some adjustments made: reduce the overall size of the larger houses, for one. For two, allow the laneway houses on smaller lots to extend further into the backyard so that they have the same amount of square feet, but are one storey instead of two.

No immediate action planned yet, though, which will enrage some people who see this mini-McMansions popping up everywhere. The city’s map in the report seems to indicate, though, that they’re not just a west-side phenomenon, but equally popular on both sides of the city.

And wait for the next step. The city is currently entertaining a proposal from a developer working the 3200-block of East Boulevard, who is suggesting an eight-unit little complex on a lot there, with two strata-titled laneway houses. To this point, the city isn’t allowing strata titles because the aim has been to produce more rental stock, not to create subdivided single-family lots. Not sure where this one will go but, surprise, there’s a neighbourhood group that’s not too excited about this idea.

Some realized it early and others didn’t, but the Hornby bike lane also extends along Drake for a block to carry riders over to Burrard and then along Burrard to get them onto the bridge. As well, there are some streets that are not Hornby that will be impacted to get cyclists to the seawall.

We heard from businesses on Hornby. Now the anguish begins elsewhere, as evidenced by this email passed on to me.

I was shocked to learn that the bike lane being constructed on Drake Street, between Hornby and Burrard is being built on the south side of Drake Street. VR 1183, 950 Drake Street is a strata-title residential building of 150 suites that only has access for moving in and out of the building from the loading zone on Drake Street. If you take away our only access to the building there will be no way to move in and out. No loading zone for seniors either. If fact, access is already blocked by the construction crews on Drake Street. Somebody has made a huge error in the disclosure and planning for this bike lane. We must have access to the street to move in and out. It also appears that the bike lane will block access to the common area courtyard which various trades need access to for critical maintenance work and fire department may need access to for the whole Anchor Point complex, which is bounded by Pacific, Hornby, Drake and Burrard….Lawrence McGillivray, strata manager VR 1183, 950 Drake Street, Vancouver

Okay, I officially give up trying to understand what is going on between TransLink and the province or among TransLink’s mayors. They signed a memorandum of understanding just weeks ago that seemed to pave the way for an agreement between Victoria and TL on how to fund future transit projects.

And now they’re back this week to where they were last year, with mayors saying they’re not willing to fund projects through property taxes, as proposed to them at a recent mayors’ council meeting, and no other solution in sight. Mayors issued a news release on this (see below) — so much for keeping their fights out of the media — and Dianne Watts, who wasn’t at the meeting, chimed in with her opinion here.

In the meantime, people, the last time I had to take the 99B across town, three completely packed double buses went past me about 30 seconds apart from each other and I was only able to squeeze onto the fourth slightly less packed bus because I elbowed my way in.

Mayors’ Council News Release-Oct12-10[1]

Architect Bing Thom’s buildings bring poetry to unexpected places all over Vancouver — the Sunset community centre, Surrey Central’s SFU campus and office tower, the Aberdeen Centre mall  and more. But others like his work too.

The New York Times profiled his re-design of a Washington theatre complex this weekend, which he approached in his typical Bing style. Something for us Canadians to check out when we’re there next. (Possibly the March for Sanity Oct. 30? Think about it.)

This interesting story was in the Sun today, detailing the way Surrey’s efforts to develop an entrepreneurial arm is generating backlash from industrial people there, saying it forces them to compete against the city and gives city developments an advantage.

The city says not, that it’s just trying to do a little extra to turn Surrey into a hub for new tech businesses. Which could eventually benefit others.

But, as we’re seeing in Vancouver these days, it’s tough when the city plays developer. Vancouver did it for years, very successfully, thanks to a rising real-estate market. The Woodward’s project, a complicated affair that combined market condos with social housing, city offices, university space and more, was the shining example. But the recession has played havoc with many developers, Vancouver included.

For now, Surrey is focused on buying and preparing industrial land in order to foster business growth. But that development arm is also supposed to be playing developer in Surrey’s central city in order to remake it into an urban core. If things go well, it will be written up in the textbooks. If it doesn’t — well, look at the situation Vancouver is facing.

The West End Neighbours, a resident group that sprang up to oppose the new rental towers being proposed under Vision Vancouver’s new program to encourage rental housing, essentially forced the VV council to slow down and do more consultation.

As half the world knows (or at least people who read this blog), they kicked off a media uproar when they caught tape of Mayor Gregor Robertson, thinking the mikes were off after a meeting had ended with them, wondering if some of them were “NPA hacks.” That comment came at the end of a difficult night where WEN members were questioning how politically neutral a mayor’s advisory committee on the West End would be.

I have heard that at least eight people from WEN, including the most vocal spokesman, Randy Helten, applied to be on the committee and weren’t chosen. The only known WEN member was Tiko Kerr, an artist who supported Vision in the last election and is likely the most Vision-friendly, non-confrontational member of the WEN group.

In spite of that, the WEN group is wishing the committee the best, as per their response from their website appended below here.

[Read more →]

Someone not chosen to participate in Mayor Gregor Robertson’s West End advisory committee — the consultation process he has come up with to try to deal with the fracas in the West End over several new towers proposed under Vision Vancouver’s initiative to promote rental housing — has sent on this list of who has been chosen. All info welcome on the backgrounds of the nominees welcome.

 I know that Tiko Kerr, an artist and one-time Vision supporter, has been working with West End Neighbours, the group that has been leading the opposition to the towers.

 Jim Deva, who runs Little Sisters books, has been a Vision supporter and generally a more moderate voice in the fracas. Cherie Payne is a one-time candidate for the Non-Partisan Association.

Ms. Christine Ackermann
Mr. Tony Clark
Ms. Marlann Cooper
Mr. Jim Deva
Ms. Michelle Fortin
Mr. Rob Hines
Ms. Lena Hozaima
Mr. Peter Jackman
Mr. Tiko Kerr
Mr. Dean Malone
Ms. Cherie Payne
Ms. Carol Reardon

This out a couple of hours ago.

STATEMENT FROM NPA CITY COUNCILLOR SUZANNE ANTON

“No one who spoke to council on Tuesday expected to be a part of a Kangeroo council,” says Coun. Anton

“On Tuesday night at 11:38pm city council once again held a vote at the end of a marathon meeting that suited the agenda of the Mayor and his caucus more than it did Vancouver citizens, small business owners, or City staff.

“When the meeting concluded I was satisfied that two of my biggest concerns about the Hornby Street bike lane project were met. First, I was assured by the City’s Engineering Department that the design of the separated bike lane was the absolute best of all available options for Downtown Vancouver. Second, thanks to my amendment of the motion I understood that every best effort would be taken by the City to mitigate the impacts of this development upon Hornby Street residents, businesses and their customers.

“However, earlier today I discovered that a critical requirement of my support has not been met. I’ve learned that at 7:30am on the morning after council’s decision, crews and equipment began immediate work on the new Hornby Street bike lane. It’s clear to me from prepared signage and work plans that logistics for this project were not done overnight, and that staff was given direction to undertake this work weeks ago. Furthermore, I’ve learned that the road had already been marked in preparation for the work as early as Monday, a full day before the public meeting took place.

“Regardless of your views on the Hornby Street separated bike lane, no one who spoke to council on Tuesday expected to be a part of a Kangeroo council. It is a fundamental trust between citizens and their elected representatives that when we meet in council chambers that we are there to listen, deliberate and debate, and finally decide based upon the inputs we have received.

“It is crystal clear to me now that Tuesday’s council meeting was a mere formality, and pure political theatre. Businesses on Hornby Street cannot have faith that their concerns will be properly considered, nor can they have faith that this is a ‘trial’ project.

“I am therefore submitting a motion to rescind to the City Clerk, and withdrawing my support of this project. I will also request a full report from staff that explains how these preparations had been completed in time to stage work the morning after our vote.

“Thanks to the STIR projects, HEAT Shelters, and now this bike lane, Mayor Robertson and his colleagues have a well-earned reputation for being autocratic. With my decision I am hoping to send a clear message to council that we must listen to the people who elected us.”