Lots of shock yesterday re Mark Hume’s story in the Globe with a leaked copy of proposed changes to the ALC, which would see it moved inside a provincial ministry and have its mandate altered to take into account economic factors.

Metro Vancouver’s planning committee was already planning to vote on a motion today asking to ensure the ALC is not weakened in any way. The news about the legislation ought to add considerable fuel to that debate.

Richmond Councillor Harold Steves, in the follow-up story Mark and I did for today, also warned that Metro would make sure no agricultural land is let go in the Lower Mainland, using the new, strengthened provisions of the Regional Growth Strategy.

The civic election isn’t until Nov. 15, 2014. But you’d never know it from the jostling going on among parties hoping to harness the resentment they believe Vision Vancouver is sowing. A sign of the times — I wrote an article for Vancouver magazine about the energy people are putting into campaigns early — especially NPA president Peter Armstrong, who has already hired three people and installed two of them in his fantastic office on the 30th floor of the TD bank tower.

At the time, a mere four or so weeks ago, TEAM spokesman Bill McCreery was talking about the triumvirate that had founded this revival of the successful party of the 1970s — himself, Dave Pasin, and former councillor Jonathan Baker. At 5:16 a.m. today, I got a news release from the NPA (Natasha, that is some early hours you’re putting in) saying that Baker has joined the NPA, with various paragraphs outlining his history.

There’s a sign that Mr. Armstrong and company are going to go to the mat over even the littlest things — and that they consider TEAM a threat.

And TEAM, which I understand held a successful fundraising dinner last night (I meant to go but have been laid low with some version of the plague), is a threat. It could strip away the few thousand votes that the NPA desperately needs to win in a tight election. While more sophisticated voters, who understand the overall chess game, will be wary of throwing a vote away on a small party that seems likely to split the anti-Vision centre-right vote, others will not be. I know there are people out there who want to vote against Vision, don’t see the NPA as being any less in bed with developers, and who won’t want to express their discontent by voting COPE.

More of this to come. My opening chapter, in this issue of Vancouver magazine, is here.

By the way, after I had finished writing this story, I did get a face-to-face meeting with Peter in his stunning office, which seems to be a hive of political activity. As I arrived, former NPA council candidate Michael Geller was leaving and former NPA park-board commission Al de Genova was also leaving. The two full-time staffers for the NPA, KellyReichert. the former executive director of the B.C. Liberal Party, and Natasha Westover, former constituency assistant to one-time cabinet minister Kevin Falcon, were hard at work in their offices. Peter appears to be interviewing everyone in town about civic politics, from former mayors to me, where I got a light grilling about my political views. He has even attended a COPE public meeting, where, he says, there are people doing some fine work. Indeed.

Friends and associates are still mystified as to why he has taken this crusade on with such passion. Peter keeps saying it’s because he cares about the city, but I can’t help thinking there’s more. One person suggested it’s because he really didn’t like the fact that Vision councillors passed some kind of negative motion about Rocky Mountaineer during the lockout. Could that be it? Who knows?

At any rate, he is driving this boat full steam ahead.

Catching up on old news here, but really, hard to keep up with ROB FORD distractions all the time.

Anyway, as many of you know, there was a gathering of about 500 last week to talk about the role of transit in the economy. This was largely organized by TransLink and pushed forward by Mayor Dianne Watts, as far as I can tell. But they did get some sponsorships to cover the cost, including from the New Car Dealers Association, which you have to admit was ballsy and imaginative of them.

At any rate, everyone made strong points about the role that good transit plays in the economy. There was a bit of a weird digression at one point, where it looked like a fight was going to break out between people arguing over whether Vancouver has a knowledge-based economy or whether it has a resource-based one. UBC dean emeritus Michael Goldberg finessed that one by pointing out that the knowledge workers needed for the resource economy (accountants, lawyers, engineers) by and large operate out of Vancouver and, as they go (or don’t, stuck in traffic), so goes the resource economy.

There was some bashing of neighbourhood group NIMBYism by same Michael Goldberg, who basically said they are standing in the way of progress and sometimes political leaders need to not pay attention — just the message I’m sure you all wanted Gregor to hear.

This debate over the transit referendum is going to take more weird turns like this, I think, before it’s over. Here’s my story from the day. (And pasted below, as always)

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As some of you careful readers might have noted in the past, I am not always an admirer of the way opposition groups do war.

Saying they’ve been treated disrespectfully by city hall politicians and staff, they then proceed to issue statements and write blog comments that make them sound like foul-mouthed 13-year-olds.

Complaining that city planners and engineers have been deceptive, they circulate wonky bits of information and “facts” that suit their rhetorical purposes at the moment.

They’re not doing themselves any favours, that’s for sure.

But the new Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods has just issued a news release that deserves to be taken seriously and debated.

The group has looked at the population number that Metro Vancouver set as a target for the city in its recently passed Regional Growth Strategy. (To see it for yourself, go here.) It’s worked out what kind of growth that means per year if Vancouver is going to get to 740,000 b6 2041 from the approximately 630,000 it’s at now. And it has compared that to the actual number of completions of new units currently going on.

There are lots of issues still to be considered here: for example, does it matter what the RGS says, if people are moving here and prepared to outbid existing residents for housing if they can’t find enough supply?

But the numbers at least help us put what’s going on in context.

As I’d said in previous blog posts (or tweets or something), one of the things that’s making people uncomfortable about the current community plans is the sense that city planners are just jamming in maximum density wherever they think they can. Residents have had no sense of what projected rate of growth for their area is, no chance to talk about whether they think that projected rate is reasonable, no sense of whether the new density in plans matches that rate, and no sense of what the end game is at all.

The release is copied below

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That’s the way it reads at first run-through.

I await interpretation from the various legal experts out there.

Here’s the judgment.

COMMUNITYCENTRESVSPARKBOARD1

People concerned about the pace of development are not new to Vancouver. There’s been some discomfort almost since the day the city was founded about how rapidly it changes.

Neighbourhoods agitated for more control in the big, bad, freeway-building ’60s. In 1996, former alderman Jonathan Baker, who is now part of the new TEAM party that is challenging the way the Vision council has been handling development, started a new party that also was primarily focused on the pace and type of development. (He beat out then-COPE mayoral candidate Carmela Allevato in 25 polls in the Dunbar/Kerrisdale/Mackenzie Heights areas, an indication of a distinct level of unhappiness in traditional Non-Partisan Association territory.)

In the mid-2000s, Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver arose in reaction to then-mayor Sam Sullivan’s push for EcoDensity.

There has been a noticeable curve upwards in the past couple of years to a much higher level of anxiety. What’s interesting about this particular wave is the way groups are connecting with the general public, reporters, and each other through new social-media tools. That’s allowing them to get their message out much more effectively than small groups used to and also allowing them to form coalitions.

The result of that is in a story I reported Thursday, about the creation of the latest iteration of neighbourhood groups banding together to try to wrest some control from the city.

The group is holding a series of meetings to try to work out what they think good principles of community planning should be. (This is at the same time that Councillor Andrea Reimer has been heading up an “engaged city task force” to improve public input.)

I think pretty much everyone these days agrees there are some serious flaws in current public consultation.

People feel as though they’re being asked to select from a series of unpalatable choices. The consulters do not make it clear how public input will be integrated into planning. Neighbourhood groups who agree to one plan find themselves overtaken by new neighbourhood groups who say they were never consulted and are opposed to the plan. No one can seem to define how “community opinion” will be assessed — is it the planner’s impression of what the people at a particular set of consultations said? an opinion survey of the whole area?

So, good luck to all trying to make it better.

(BTW, the group did not say they were “anti-Vision Vancouver.” That was just an unfortunate headline, one of a series that has afflicted me lately, as Lewis pointed out.)

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Every development opposition person I meet always starts off by saying, “I’m not opposed to development but …”

In some cases, I believe that’s true. In others, it’s more dubious. The more you try to get an answer on what IS acceptable (Not towers. Not low-rise apartment complexes. Not six-storey projects. Not stacked townhouses. Not rowhouses or duplexes. Not laneway houses), the less you know.

I do hear a lot of chatter out there, as well, about people who think it’s some kind of developer spin that there are people moving to this region. I guess Statistics Canada is in on the whole game, since they keep publishing census results indicating that there are more people living here every every year.

In the view of the population-increase deniers, nothing would happen if development stopped, since no one is moving to this region.

But assuming that most of us accept the likelihood that Stats Can is not fabricating numbers and that there are about 30,000 to 40,000 people moving to the region each year (nothing like what Toronto gets, but still quite a few people), what would happen if the city slowed development right down to a crawl?

When I talked to former city planning director Ann McAfee recently for a story I did about anti-development activism and how to talk to communities, she said that one thing planners made very clear when doing CityPlan consultations in Vancouver back in the 1990s was that there would be very negative effects to doing nothing.

The way McAfee put it to me: Vancouver is a small chunk of the region, with about 70,000 single-family houses. If nothing changes, then that limited stock of housing eventually is bought up by the wealthiest buyers in the region. So, even though the city doesn’t change visibly, it does change in who owns it.

I’d argue that there are two likely possibilities if the housing in the city were more or less frozen. The biggest, single-family properties would be bought by one of two groups. One, singles and couples who are very wealthy and can afford the whole property for themselves. Two, they’ll be bought by groups, likely families, who will crowd as many income-earning adults into the house as they can in order to cover the high price and compete with the wealthiest buyers.

(The city’s service workers, of course, will continue to crowd into small apartments or live six to a household, as they are doing now.)

I keep trying to figure out if that doomsday, or at any rate, depressing scenario is wrong. I’d love to hear from all of you how you imagine the future unrolling in the city if residents decided they’d had enough and weren’t going to accept any or much new density?

My feature piece last weekend is the beginning of a longer look at the anti-development groups, tactics, and messes around the Lower Mainland. People think Vancouver is the only place where residents are increasingly tense about new development. It’s not, as my story makes clear. (And, after I published, a group in Port Moody also contacted me to get their name added to the list.)

What also seems clear is that it’s increasingly difficult for city politicians and planners, for developers, for media, and for general residents to figure out what their community really thinks of new development.

Looking forward to the reasoned debate I know will follow here on this issue.

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Vancouver council heard all about the latest numbers on homelessness and new housing this week. (Breaking news: The city just bought the Ramada on East Hastings for some dollar amount that we media scum were told we’d get but it hasn’t been provided yet.)

The positive: 480 people who went to winter shelters the last five years are now in permanent housing somewhere. The not so positive: There are still about 1,600 people every night either in shelters or on the street. (Boring, repetitive old Frances intervention re understanding homeless numbers — that doesn’t mean 1,600 known individuals are homeless in Vancouver and once we find them and put them in a building, the problem will be solved. Numerous studies have shown that those “point in time” counts mean that about four or five times that number of people are homeless over a given year. People move in and out of homelessness constantly.) My Globe story on various bits of this here.

Lest anyone think this is unique to Vancouver, the trend is the same around the region. Although many municipalities — City of North Van, Richmond, Surrey, New West,Maple Ridge, Langley, Coquitlam — are taking aggressive action to try to deal with homelessness, the most they can do is keep a lid on it, as Surrey Councillor Judy Villeneuve said.

In cities that are growing, that’s still an accomplishment but it doesn’t mean homelessness is going to be eradicated any time soon. Which is going to be a problem for Vision Vancouver over the next year, because the mayor and his team promised to end homelessness or street homelessness by 2015. The party’s political opponents are primed to jump all over that one.

Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts and her team have been careful not to make that kind of promise.Their just-finalized homeless action plan sets a goal of building 450 units of transitional and low-cost housing — no promises that that will get everyone off the street. I wonder if the Vision people are wishing they’d done the same.

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Food trucks and bike shares, the trendiest urban movements of the 21st century. They’re perfect, right?

Well, they are great. I’m a huge fan of both. But that doesn’t mean all is bluebirds of happiness in paradise. (Now there’s one weird mixed metaphor.)

For my latest Vancouver magazine column, I went out and took a good hard look at how the food-truck world is evolving in Vancouver. Yes, there are some successes. (One of them: the guy who makes food trucks.) There are also some very unhappy stories.