July 8, 2016

Grandview-Woodland Plan

Here are consultations (July 9 & 11), chances to learn first-hand about the plan, and to quiz City of Vancouver staff. Yes, it involves Commercial Drive.  Yes, there is bicycle stuff.
Gransview.Woodland
Major detail and document cache HERE.

From CoV web site:   The Grandview-Woodland Community Plan sets out a thoughtfully-managed framework for future change and anticipated population growth of about 10,000 people over the next three decades.
The plan protects the heart and soul of the neighbourhood’s character, while responding to challenges facing this community and building upon its potential.
Over the coming decades, the plan will preserve the independent and eclectic nature of the Commercial Drive and East Hastings shopping streets, as well as protect the apartment stock, heritage buildings, and the social diversity of the area.
The goal is for the community to continue to evolve as a mixed-income, socially-sensitive place that is transit-oriented and rich in heritage and culture.

July 9:   Grandview-Woodland Community Plan open house

Free

Come by an open house to learn about the Grandview-Woodland community plan. Staff will be on site to answers your questions and take your feedback.

Date and time:  July 9 2016, 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Location

Aboriginal Friendship Centre, Gym, 1607 E Hastings, Vancouver

July 11:   Grandview-Woodland Community Plan coffee talk

Free

Drop-in for a chat about the Grandview-Woodland Community Plan with the planning team over a coffee. Just come by, although space is limited.

Date and time:  July 11 2016, 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Location

Croatian Cultural Centre, Room B+C, 3250 Commercial Drive (at E 16th Ave), Vancouver

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Comments

  1. I haven’t read anything but the summary so far, and feel that it was a decent second go at the planning of this collection of neighbourhoods. There was certainly a lot of engagement with residents though the citizen’s assembly process. I wonder if it was even more extensive than with City Plan?
    It appears the community responded fairly to the responsibility to accept its fair share of growth (10,000 people in this case), with a surprising proposal to allow up to 18 storey heights at a “gateway” on Clark. And the max height at the Broadway Station is now 24 storeys. I don’t have a problem with that height at a major rapid transit hub that will only get busier once the M-Line is extended into the Broadway subway. The minimum height is 12 storeys, so there is the possibility the average heights will end up in the mid-rise range.
    Lots of opportunity for rental housing expressed, and that is of course desperately needed. The protection and ‘gentle enhancement’ of the character home neighbourhoods is noted while allowing 4-6 storey rentals and condos around it.
    There is mention of a plaza ion the Safeway site. I said it before, but deck over the Cut between Commercial and Victoria, and there is your plaza, plus a generous park if the community wants it.
    As always, there are some grinding conflicts between residents and the city (No Towers have no doubt been vociferous), and I wonder if anyone out there has some inside information they are willing to share? Otherwise, I interpret this as a pretty decent plan that followed a decent process.

    1. MB I agree about the plaza. Burying it into the Safeway site rather than in a highly visible and accessible public place makes no sense. Personally, I think the bank site at the southeast corner of the intersection would be perfect, but a deck over the west side of the bridge could work well, too, but would have a very very large cost.

    2. Fairly? Hilarious. That’s about 200 new units per year, on average, in an area of over 1100 acres, located close to the core of a major city, is hardly “fair share.” It is the inner-city, low-density inverse of high-density sprawl. Environmentally unsustainable when juxtaposed in a fast-growing region.
      Look at the Willoughby community on Langley, smaller at about 1000 acres. In the 7 years prior to 2013, they provided 750 homes annually, and since then the number has risen sharply. They will absorb eventually 65,000 people.
      One major distinction, Willoughby is 40kms beyond Gran-Wood. That is one of the side effects caused by selfishness of place contaminating the inner-city area.

    3. “Highly visible” public spaces? To me that reads “surrounded by cars and noisy smelly traffic”, which such a position would surely mean. I like the idea that we could have plazas and public spaces that are isolated from the automobile. The question isn’t whether that is a good thing but more whether our planners have the skills to pull it off. Europe is full of great little hidden gems of pedestrian only space.
      We have our own completely undervalued and under appreciated spaces: Blood Alley
      and Gaolers Mews. We should have more of them and they should be programmed to give us people powered people a respite from public spaces in which the car is still all too dominant.

  2. Under the heading of Transportation, the plan calls for improved routes and safety for walking and cycling. Sounds like a couple of great principles to me.

    1. Sure. Like saying water is wet. Let’s see some substance. These sorts of generalities are so obvious that they shouldn’t even need mention. What do they have in mind, real substantive improvements or that which will please the fearful misinformed merchants?
      I think of the big deal they made about improvements to Main Street a few years back. “A Showpiece” I believe they called it. What a joke!

      1. I disagree. The way things work is that civil servants refer constantly to the guidebook and its principles to make decisions. If basic obvious things aren’t mentioned they won’t happen.
        We’re seeing a few good examples of modern cycling and walking infrastructure in this city and in others recently but there is still a giant machine we all live under that still wants to force monomodal automobile-only design on the world. We need to counter that whenever we can if we want to live well.

      2. The comment was in response to a since-deleted comment complaining about principles.
        The full plan does have some further detail, including sections 8.1.1, 8.2.1, and 8.3.1

      3. RV, it was “Showcase”. I was a citizen in the workshops and felt they did a great job with consultation and implementation, especially considering that they had a pathetic six million bucks to spend between the Inlet and the river to improve primarily transit. Pedestrian signals and corner / bus stop bulges are not cheap. They even had a bit of budget left over to plant new trees. Bus signal priority was addressed but for some reason is not evident today.
        Frank Ducote can take some credit for leading that one. Back then he wore black; the white John Lennon suit was nowhere in sight.

    2. Are the Granview Woodland plans “Conceptual” or “Detailed” or “Final Detailed” and so-labelled with definitions of these terms provided to the public? Will the decisions made be “in-principle only” (“no agreement whatsoever”) but in reality a done-deal by City engineers? What actual consulting contributions by the public have any chance of being adopted by City engineers? Will these details be made clear to the public or hidden?

      1. None of the above. The plan is labelled draft.
        You may want to read the section titled Principles.
        Very heavy on the consulting opportunity, since the plan is the result of much work by the Citizen’s Assembly, and there is a section discussing alignment .

  3. The glaring hole in this plan is any the lack of any pretense of addressing affordability or of checking rapidly increasing home prices and rents. The majority of the land remains duplex-zoned (i.e., >$1,000,000 per unit). Other than that, I guess, it’s not too bad.
    I fear this is unintentionally a plan to make Grandview Woodland an elite neighbourhood for incumbent homeowners, while renters and the young are priced out to where growth is happening, in Surrey and Langley.
    Thankfully, the Drive still has a legacy of co-ops from forward-thinking governments in the 1970’s. But even if the feds come up with funding for new co-ops, where will we put them under this plan? Not in Grandview Woodland.

    1. Well, our lack of affordability is way beyond one neighbourhood plan to fix. Some of it comes from outside our borders and is therefore international in scale.
      There are several references to social or subsidized housing in this plan, and some of them appear to be area-specific. The city may well have land it can devote to social housing in GW and elsewhere, but it does need to buck-up and start building it again on its own to complement the limited amount built by the province. The feds are several months away from announcing its national housing strategy, and we could expect a significant increase in funding for social and subsidized housing, which would be like bringing water to a desert considering how the Harper government treated the topic.
      There was a comparison above to the greater planned densities for Willoughby in Langley. It’s a good point. However, the key difference is that GW is an older established residential community and therefore requires a deeper and more complex set of consultation rules and layers of planning. Willoughby was primarily upland farms prior to development, and presented a clean slate to developers and council. GW is looking at absorbing 10,000 more people — not exactly a pittance — and the good thing here is that long established residents had a say in planning for that, and therein acceptance. Two different communities, two different plans.

      1. The big dif between GW and Willoughby is that the former has complete infrastructure to accommodate housing; there is planty of capacity. If you don’t understand the enormous initial and ongoing costs of providing housing 40km distant from the core, well … oh don’t bother.
        GW is not unsustainable; its anti-housing residents are; a collective crime against humanity & urbanity.

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