Vancouver is Not a Bonsai – Let it Grow!

This piece was originally written as an op-ed for The Daily Hive Vancouver in November 2024, based on a speech I gave at a City Council rezoning hearing. Since then it has taken on a life of its own, making appearances in other op-eds and even City Council hearings. This is thanks in no small part to Russil Wvong’s excellent Substack posts boosting the idea, but I like to think it’s because it’s a powerful image that resonates with people, housing activist or no.

After almost a year of circulation I’ve decided to bring this piece home to my own website. This is the version that was originally submitted to The Daily Hive, with some light editing to clean up awkward phrasing and grammar issues.

This past Sunday saw an angry crowd gather outside Vancouver City Hall. Infuriated by the City’s vision to allow 30,000 new homes along the new SkyTrain expansion, various Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) groups came together to demand a pause on the Broadway Plan, in the name of preserving their nostalgic view of Mount Pleasant and Kitsilano’s quiet, tree-lined residential streets.

The fight over the Broadway Plan is emblematic of something I call Bonsai Vancouver. Bonsai, if you’re not familiar, is a Japanese art form in which an artist takes a young sapling and, with a pair of shears, prunes it down to their desired size. Leaves are plucked, branches are stripped, and buds are snipped until the sapling resembles an ancient tree, at one-tenth scale. Thus cropped, the bonsai is transferred to a shallow pot and put on display, to be appreciated as a living statue and conversation piece.

It’s remarkably reminiscent of how the City of Vancouver has treated its neighbourhoods over the years. At some point in the past century, Vancouver decided that the end goal was a perfectly manicured city. Vancouverites were promised access to a quiet, suburban low-rise house – white picket fence and all – with unobstructed views of our mountains, oceans, and forests.

To deliver on this promise, the City picked up its shears and set to work. Apartments were banned on over three-quarters of residential land and restrictive view cones were instituted to limit the skyline, while larger buildings had floors slashed away for fear of their shadows darkening the sidewalks below. Today, any branches, buds, or leaves that don’t fit into this vision of a picturesque urban bonsai are now rapidly hacked away.

Bonsai Vancouver has become such a key part of our city’s identity that it’s now self-regulating. Fearing the loss of the perfectly designed neighbourhoods they were promised, NIMBY municipal parties and neighbourhood associations have wholeheartedly joined the pruning process, reacting furiously to even the mildest suggestion of increased height or density. While high-rise towers have been a particular focus of NIMBY ire, even low-rise apartment buildings with six storeys or less – the same ones Broadway Plan opponents now claim to want – have been repeatedly cancelled in the face of neighbourhood opposition.

The thing about bonsai, however, is that your sapling is a living thing – one that still wants to grow. Bonsai artists must constantly trim their trees to avoid the natural growth ruining their deliberately cultivated aesthetic. So it is with Bonsai Vancouver – with the notable difference that this city wants to grow so much bigger and faster than even the most ambitious tree.

Every year thousands of new residents flow into the region from within and without Canada – and with the vacancy rate sitting at less than 1%, Vancouver needs to grow to accommodate them.

Unfortunately, Bonsai Vancouver has been so effective at pruning its new branches that the city has very few places available to grow. A City Hall less hostile to apartments might have allowed its neighbourhoods to adapt to increased demand by gently upzoning over the years, allowing people to fill into modest apartment units rather than vying for space in a limited number of detached houses. Instead, a stubborn insistence on preserving low-density neighbourhoods has left the city with a very small supply of homes to supply a rapidly growing population, plunging us into our current housing crisis.

Developers are now stuck trying to fit decades of pent-up demand onto smaller and smaller parcels of land, resulting in the 20+ storey towers NIMBYs so love to hate. In the end, life finds a way, and Bonsai Vancouver’s endless attempts to stamp out new growth have resulted in only the strongest and most obtrusive branches breaking through.

This brings us back to the Broadway Plan, which represents Council finally giving in to overwhelming pressure and tilling a patch of soil for the city’s natural growth. Its tall buildings are an enormous change from the carefully manicured suburban idylls promised by Bonsai Vancouver, but one for the better. The Plan is not perfect, but 30,000 new homes will enable people to build their lives in Mount Pleasant and Kitsilano, making the neighbourhoods better with their contributions to local businesses, services, and culture.

A well-kept bonsai is a beautiful thing to look at, but Vancouver deserves better than a strange, stunted, ornamental half-life. If we want to live in a great city, we must let it grow.