Vancouverites say they want vibrant, walkable neighbourhoods. So why is the ‘villages plan’ so controversial?
Polling suggests people like the kinds of mixed-use, walkable neighbourhoods envisioned in Vancouver’s villages plan — but in recent weeks, it has turned into one of the more contentious land-use debates of the current four-year council term
By Dan Fumano
Last updated 3 days ago
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Catherine Jagger knew some changes were coming to her Mackenzie Heights neighbourhood near Kerrisdale, but she was still dismayed by the details in a letter in her mailbox in May.
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“Even if you know something is coming, when you see it in black and white it’s still a bit of a shock,” Jagger said this week.
Jagger’s home is one of more than 500 Vancouver properties that could soon be changed to commercial mixed-use zoning, if council approves what city staff call the “villages plan.”
The plan, which comes to a public hearing starting Tuesday, aims to create 17 “villages” spread throughout the city to expand existing commercial hubs and enable more housing options, including apartment buildings of up to six storeys.
The city envisions denser, more walkable neighbourhoods where people can access basic needs — such as groceries, pharmacies, services — with a short walk within their immediate area, more like the medium-density residential neighbourhoods in European cities or Canadian cities like Montreal, or even Vancouver’s older residential neighbourhoods, such as the West End.
The villages plan builds upon several years of direction and earlier decisions from successive city councils, and polling has found broad support for such a direction.
During a public survey for Vancouver’s city-wide plan back in 2022, 82 per cent of respondents said there was a need for more housing choices in Vancouver’s lower-density neighbourhoods, and 70 per cent agreed there was a need for more shops, services and amenities in these areas. Not everyone trusts City Hall’s own survey findings, but independent polls have yielded similar results. A Leger poll last December found almost half of respondents in Vancouver preferred spreading growth more evenly in four- to six-storey buildings across neighbourhoods, more than three times the proportion of respondents who preferred maintaining existing low-density character.
But in recent weeks, after details became public, Vancouver’s villages plan has garnered significant public opposition and evolved into one of the more contentious land-use debates of the current four-year council term. In written correspondence to council, opponents of the villages plan outweigh supporters nine-to-one.
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In most of the areas affected by the plan, in the blocks around the 17 intersections that form the centres of the proposed commercial nodes, a range of different housing types would be enabled, including detached houses, duplexes, townhouses, multiplexes and small apartment buildings. It would also be possible, on these side streets, to introduce certain kinds of commercial uses at street level, if the property owner wants.
But for some critics of Vancouver’s villages plan, the biggest concern is what happens to properties such as Jagger’s, in the small part of the plan designated as future high streets. Those properties will allow four- to six-storey developments with commercial space on the ground floor — and nothing else.
As Jagger and others understand it, this means if council approves the plan as proposed, these 500-some-odd property owners will not be able to do anything else with their property until there is market demand to redevelop it as a four- or six-storey mixed-use development.
Jagger is in her 70s and takes care of her adult daughter, who has developmental disabilities. She had considered potentially building a laneway house on her property at some point, where someone could live and also help around the home. But, she says, the new changes would prevent her from building a laneway house.
“I understand the city has to change, it has to grow. We wall want vibrant, wonderful, walkable neighbourhoods,” Jagger said. “I just hope they can come to some sort of decision to make things a bit more flexible, so that existing homeowners aren’t punished. … To not lock them down, to freeze them.”
Michael Geller, a long-time architect and planner in Vancouver, has never met Jagger, but knows “a lot of other people who have exactly the same concerns.”
Geller says he is “completely supportive of the idea of introducing community retail” and adding new, denser housing types to these neighbourhoods.
“I agree entirely with the objective,” he said. “But this just doesn’t make sense. The real concern I have is what does it do to those 520 properties. … You’re freezing all these properties.”
Bryn Davidson, whose company Lanefab specializes in medium-density residential buildings such as multiplexes and laneway homes, is also broadly supportive of the villages plan.
“It’s a shift 50 years in the making,” Davidson said. “For the last 50 years, we have put single-family character as the top of our planning priorities, and we’re now at a point in history where we really need small-lot apartment buildings to be part of our communities again, like they were a century ago.”
But he also thinks “it’s a problem to rezone in a way that doesn’t allow the existing residential uses to continue — so if you live there, you can’t build a laneway house, or if your house burns down, you can’t rebuild the house.”
By the city’s calculations, only four per cent of the properties in the villages plan are on future high streets and face this kind of rezoning.
But, Davidson says, this issue “has become the centrepiece of a lot of the opposition … and it’s creating a lot of conflict for the plan in general.”
“I think that that’s a problem, but I think it’s fixable,” Davidson said.
In a memo last month to the mayor and council, Vancouver’s chief planner Josh White seemed to open the door to potential tweaks to address this issue. White’s memo acknowledges public concerns about how the rezoning could affect properties on future high streets, and advises the mayor and council that if they choose, they can respond by proposing amendments to the plan based on what they hear at the public hearing.
Council may want to tweak the plan, but it’s also possible they may punt it back to staff for more work, especially considering how close it is to the October municipal election. ABC Vancouver ran and won a majority on a largely pro-development, pro-business platform in 2022 and supported most development proposals in their first three years in office. But more recently, as the municipal election date approaches, ABC’s majority has declined to approve some more controversial proposals, including a Strathcona tower complex and a West End hotel.
The villages public hearing begins Tuesday evening. But with more than 170 people already registered to speak as of Monday afternoon, council is unlikely to reach a final decision this week on whether to approve the plan, reject it, tweak it, or ask staff to do more work and report back next year, and let whoever sits on the next council decide.
