Another census blitz and another complete misinterpretation of the results by some.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen all kinds of headlines about how the suburbs are growing the fastest. In Metro Vancouver, Surrey is always listed as growing the fastest.

Conservatives, in particular, seem to delight in propagating this kind of interpretation, as though somehow it “proves” that those city slicker types are increasingly in the minority, that fancypants city planners are clueless with their boring rants about density and transit, and that the nation is pleasantly filling up with giant single-family suburbs where the car remains king while the decadent, immoral cities are emptying out.

Others, I suspect, are simply lazy or they didn’t take my brilliant Math for Journalists course.

But the unfortunate result is that people walk around with the mind movie in their heads that American-style suburbs are winning the day. I can’t speak for elsewhere in the country, but if you look at the numbers carefully, it’s simply not true here in Metro Vancouver.

First, what people don’t seem to get is that the central city is never going to grow quite as fast because, guess what people — it’s already filled up with buildings. Saying that the suburbs are growing is like saying people in their 20s and 30s have more kids than people in their 40s and 50s.

But there’s also another error people make locally, which is not factoring in the existing area of a municipality when looking at its growth. If you calculate how much growth there was in each of the region’s municipalities according to their area available, Surrey does not come out on top.

Surrey appears to be growing the fastest because it is the largest municipality by area in the region. At 122 square miles, it’s three times as big as Vancouver or Burnaby or Richmond.

So I took the numbers of people added in each municipality between the 2006 and 2011 census and divided by the number of square miles (sorry, folks, can’t get away from my 1970s schooling). This is how the rankings look when you compare on a per-square-mile basis.

New Westminster: 1,232 people added per square mile between 2006 and 2011 (7,427 people in 6.03 square miles).

North Vancouver City: 658

Surrey: 600

Burnaby: 584

Vancouver: 574

Port Moody: 546

Langley City: 368

Port Coquitlam: 324

Richmond: 320

White Rock: 292

Coquitlam: 252

Langley Township: 88

Maple Ridge: 69

Pitt Meadows: 64

Delta: 44

North Vancouver District: 30

West Vancouver: 17

The growth in places like New Westminster, Burnaby, North Vancouver City, and Vancouver is all the more astonishing when you consider that these are cities that are already exceptionally densely populated. They are adding as much or more people per square mile to their city cores, even though they have nothing like the easy-to-develop greenfield land that places like Surrey, Langley, Maple Ridge and elsewhere.

And it’s evident to anyone who drives through these areas that the population is going far and away into multi-family housing, either towers or lower-rise apartment buildings. So much for the reign of single-family suburbia.

Those of you following my tweets Sunday know that the COPE annual general meeting continued what has now been 10 years of struggling over where it wants to put itself on the political spectrum.

The meeting split almost evenly between the two contenders for external co-chair, with 145 votes for RJ Aquino and 141 for Tim Louis.

The rest of the executive saw mostly people from the “incumbent” group (aka, the non-Tim Louis group that has managed to dominate the last few years and might be called the moderates, the compromisers, the work-with-Vision-to-keep-the-NPA-out group) elected to the function positions, while the independents won the five at-large seats — partly because the incumbents left some of those seats open.

That will result in a slightly more diverse executive and, some are hoping, will result in a conversation between the two sides, instead of the win-or-lose cage matches at general meetings and nominations that have been going on for the last decade — ever since COPE won council for the first time ever and then promptly split into two groups.

What will happen by the time the next election rolls around is anyone’s guess. The independents seem fairly determined to turn COPE into a no-compromise anti-developer party with Vision now identified in their minds as the party that’s bought and sold by developers.

How that will square with the other group’s position that COPE needs to work with Vision, while maintaining different positions, in order to keep out the NPA is going to be an interesting conversation to watch.

Almost as interesting as watching the Conservatives in this province decide whether to back Cummins, and thereby ensure an NDP victory, or compromise and unite behind Christy Clark.

Other interesting notes from the meeting:

– COPE raised and spent $340,000 on the election, with $280,000 coming from unions, mostly CUPE

– The party identified 30,000 voters intent on voting for COPE, which gave the combined Vision/COPE slate 80,000 “marks” altogether, as they’re known in election lingo. That means almost half of Vision’s ID’d voters.

– The party is still carrying a $90,000 deficit from the 2002 election, when they spent a million dollars for the first time ever and elected Larry Campbell and eight COPE councillors.

– David Cadman and Tim Louis, who lent the party some of that money, are asking for some of it back — $20,000 to be exact. Money that COPE doesn’t have.

[Read more →]

Although many of you will know this already, thanks to the instant world, I wanted to note the news that flashed out yesterday about former councillor Jim Green.

Green, who is an essential part of Vancouver history with his battles and ingenious ideas for building social housing, creating banks, redeveloping Woodward’s and more, had a bad bout with lung cancer two years ago.

(I was surprised at the time at how lowkey he was about it. He missed a couple of radio shows with the civics panel on Bill Good and only mentioned when he came back, his usual sometimes impatient and prickly, sometimes bubbling over with enthusiasm self, that it had been for lung-cancer surgery.)

Word came out yesterday, via various friends and then ultimately a message from the mayor’s office, that it was back and serious.

As the message said: “As you may have heard Jim has been quietly battling cancer over the past while. The cancer is spreading and Jim is spending all of his time with his family and working on various exciting projects,” before asking media to call Councillor Geoff Meggs for information and comments, rather than his family.

I heard from someone who called me yesterday that he is getting hospital-style care at home. Home, for the last few years, has been a mid-tower penthouse in the Woodward’s building, a beautiful space filled with the books, pictures and artifacts of his life, with windows all around that allow him to look out over the city he has loved and fought for so long.

Others would have wanted a place higher up in the building with a view. Jim liked being able to look at the old buildings along Cambie and at his Woodward’s project around him from a level where he felt like he was among them, not viewing them from above. I’m sure there are a lot of people in this town are hoping he will get to see that view for many, many more days and months.

New councillor Adriane Carr is bringing a motion to council on a topic much beloved by the various groups that have sprung up in opposition the last few years to various redevelopments, towers, rezonings and so on.

Those groups have made the point, or tried to, that there is lots of capacity in existing city land that’s already zoned for more density. They’ve been trying to get a number from the city to prove this.

Carr’s motion coming to council Tuesday is one more poke at this.

But I’d like to hear more from them about how useful they think this would be. The underlying assumption that I think I hear in their requests is that, if they can prove that there is already room for 100,000 more units in existing zoning that hasn’t been taken up yet, the city shouldn’t approve any more rezonings until that’s all gone.

I hope it’s not that simplistic, but I fear that it is. And if it is, getting that number will do nothing. Because, as anyone who knows anything about land development knows, just because someone’s land could be built at a higher density doesn’t mean that person is willing to tear down their existing building and rebuild something larger — even if it theoretically meant more money.

Sometimes they can’t be bothered. Sometimes they like what they have and don’t want to redevelop (hard to imagine in this city, but it exists). Sometimes they can’t get access to the capital needed to rebuilt. And hundreds of other reasons.

I live in an RT-5 zone, which theoretically allows everyone in the neighbourhood to tear down their house and build a duplex. In the 10 years I’ve lived there, that has only happened once in my particular quadrant of the city — last year. And it’s not going to result in more affordable housing. The builders have torn down some big old place that was rented out in suites to many people, most of whom seemed to have an unfortunate predilection for classic rock played loudly at 2 a.m. It will now be two million-dollar-or-more units.

The same is true in many other zones of the city.

I think (but could be wrong) that “we’re not anti-growth just better planning” groups might argue that, if rezonings were choked off everywhere else, then developers would be forced to go to the existing sites that have zoning capacity already.

However, I have my doubts that this would work. If existing owners don’t want to develop, the only way to entice them to is to offer more money. Developers could do that, but then they’d have to sell the units for more money. And the market may not be willing to pay the end price.

Those are my preliminary thoughts, but I’d very much appreciate it if someone could explain the thinking behind this drumbeat to know the number on Vancouver’s zoned capacity.

The SFU Urban Studies program presents two public talks by Scott Bernstein, President, Center for Neighborhood Technology, and our Visiting Fellow in Urban Sustainable Development. Details of these talks are noted below and in the posters attached.

“If Not Now, When? How Making Economic Progress Count Accelerates Public and Private Infrastructure Investment in Cities and Regions”
Monday, March 19, 2012, 7:00pm
Room 5280, SFU Surrey
13450  102 Avenue, Surrey
(just south of the Surrey Central SkyTrain station)
Reservations are required: http://www.sfu.ca/reserve

It’s said that a good idea, unlike fine wine, doesn’t get better the longer it sits on the shelf. Long infrastructure investment timelines put cities at risk—transportation projects can run 10-20 years, while elected officials typically serve four-year terms. An increasingly volatile economy, with 2+ recessions per decade, increases borrowing cost and risks of project cancellation. Current policies don’t reward better or faster public investing results, and slow delivery delays economic benefits. Regulations get blamed, but most project delay isn’t caused by rules; rather, project sponsors lack a culture that rewards speed, in turn lowering expectations among consultants, investors and the public. But where regions exhibit collective efficacy, “better and faster” outcomes result. This lecture reviews what we’ve learned from efforts to innovate for “better and faster” economic development from infrastructure investing in cities around the world.

“Progress Lost, Progress Redefined, Progress Regained – How Location Efficiency Performance Measures Are Being Used to Achieve Economic Security”
Thursday, March 22, 2012, 7:00pm
Room 1700, SFU Vancouver (Harbour Centre)
515 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver
Reservations are required: http://www.sfu.ca/reserve

The US, still reeling from a devastating recession, is far from recovery. Several economic performance measures, including a new index of combined affordability of housing + transportation, which costs households at least half their available income, are being tested with encouraging results. This lecture will review the state of knowledge of the value of location efficient communities and regions and suggest a strategy for getting beyond flying blind in the pursuit of sustainable economies.

It was a strange week last week, as various mayors from around the region talked about TransLink with the kind of critical commentary usually adopted by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Why would a group that nominally has some control over TransLink be criticizing their own creature? Because they feel as they don’t have much control ever since Kevin Falcon, as transportation minister, removed a big part of the decision-making from them in 2007 and passed it on to an newly created, appointed board. (Yes, they get to appoint the board, but that still doesn’t give them direct powers.)

What we’re left with five years later is mayors feeling as though they have to put through tax increases for TransLink to pay for services, but they have little direct say in the billion-dollar operating budget.

That has resulted in tussles over getting an audit, which I reported on here today and here last week. It is also resulting in ongoing discussions between the mayors and Transportation Minister Blair Lekstrom about possible changes in the governing model. More, as they say in the magazine business, TK (to come).

A lengthier interview here than any of us have done locally, with lots of fodder to ponder as Brent Toderian gives a tour of the city and his thoughts on city management to a reporter for Atlantic Cities.

For those looking for a city-planning consultant, by the way, I note that Brent has now set up his own company, Toderian Urbanism, according to LinkedIn.

I reported before Christmas that many municipalities on the coast are scrambling to alter their long-term guidelines for building on the coast following a provincial report that upped the estimate of how much the sea will rise in the next hundred years.

Word was just issued this week in Vancouver that, as an interim guideline, all builders are being told they should raise the level of their land by a metre. Memo below

CMO – SUS – Adaptation Sea Level Rise – Interim FCL Memo to Council signed – 2012

The discussion continues.

Re: Recent Stories and Blog posts on the firing of Brent Toderian, City of Vancouver Director of Planning

We are recently retired Assistant Directors of Planning who worked with five Directors, including Brent, and many City Councils.

Brent worked tirelessly to address the urgent issues of sustainability and affordability, while maintaining Vancouver’s tradition of good urban design and liveability.  He inspired City staff with his enthusiasm. Brent has a very strong commitment to neighbourhood consultation: we witnessed him working hard to revise proposed plans based on public input.  Regarding relationships with developers, we observed Brent’s openness to and encouragement of new forms of development for “density done well”.

In addition to the often conflicting pressures of neighbourhoods and developers, Brent faced new challenges including filling the shoes of  the two previous co-Directors, major staff retirements, hiring freezes, economic downturn, and Councils’ diminished respect for professional advice.

We are pleased to have worked with a Director as principled and passionate as Brent.

Trish French

Ronda Howard

Rob Jenkins

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Time to nerd out, people. For those of you not up at 6 a.m. to get the first wave of census news, here’s the link.

A few of my thoughts before I open the floor to all of you:

– Isn’t it odd how so many people are high-fiving each other over having MORE PEOPLE in their province/city/region at a time when the world is generally staggering under the weight of increased population

– I’d like to hear some explanation from the data nerds on why the city of Vancouver’s population is only 603,000 when all the provincial projections have been pegging it at around 630,000 for the last couple of years. Were the projections based on the numbers of units built and, in fact, those units are not occupied by people counted in the census?

– Finally, can we pleeeease stop with the ill-thought-out observations that Vancouver is not growing as fast as Surrey, Richmond and Burnaby. Of course it’s not. Because it’s starting with a much bigger base popuation for one, so 30,000 people here will show up as a smaller percentage increase than 30,000 people elsewhere.

And, secondly, it’s a mature city more limited development opportunities than Surrey or Langley. When those places have the density that Vancouver does and they’re still growing faster, that will be news. Right now, it’s not a surprise that emptier places get a higher percentage increase than already-dense places.

Go to it. I await your discoveries of unreported treasures in these numbers.