The More Livable Onesie

These are my speaking notes on a proposal before Council to update zoning within the Broadway Plan. You can read Russil Wvong’s post on the subject for more background.

Eventually I’ll have an embedded video of the speech here, but for now here’s a link to the appropriate point in the hearing.

I’m trying to imagine what it would be like if we treated every crisis like the housing crisis.

In a flood, it’d be like arguing over where to place the individual sandbags

In a forest fire, it’d be like refusing to build fire breaks to avoid disrupting the neighbourhood character – or forest character, as it were.

In a global pandemic, it’d be like refusing to take vaccines because we don’t know what’s in them…ahem.

It’s an imperfect metaphor because floods are, generally, bad. Fires are bad. People moving to Vancouver is not bad. Children moving out of their parents’ houses is not bad. The city growing and changing is not bad. This is more like refusing to buy your child new pants because you think their baby onesie was more livable and had better family character.

The fact is, we need more housing. We need a lot more housing, and we need it yesterday. If Vancouver continues to uphold the apartment ban on most of the city, that only leaves us the option of creating a new high-density zone – say along a new SkyTrain line. That’s what was discussed and approved by the last Council.

Yet for some reason Council decided to undercut the plan by failing to update the zoning, adding 12-15 months to every desperately-needed new building and condemning us all to this Groundhog Day public hearing experience of listening to the same arguments against housing over and over and over again. Meanwhile, because we aren’t building new housing, prices and rents continue to rise and more and more people are pushed out of the city or onto the streets.

People always find a reason to oppose any given building. It casts too many shadows, it’s too ugly, it blocks a viewcone, the children playing in it will make too much noise. “Don’t build it in MY backyard – build it next door.” “Don’t build it next door, build it next next door.” “Don’t build it next next door…” and so on. It’s one of the ways we ended up in this housing crisis: We focused so much on the trees – sometimes literally – that we missed how much trouble the forest was in.

This motion goes some of the way towards solving that problem, although I’m disappointed by how much of the Broadway Plan still requires spot rezonings. But I urge Council to approve it – because if we’re not going to build housing here, then where will we build it? Let’s treat this crisis like an actual crisis. Let’s build more housing.