New regional plan to focus on industrial and seniors’ needs
Frances Bula
Sun
METRO VANCOUVER – In the next 25 years, the Vancouver region will see a boom in its seniors population, a struggle to create affordable housing as more people live on their own, and an increasing challenge to find space for 400,000 new jobs.
So planners are looking at dramatic changes to Metro Vancouver’s (the former Greater Vancouver Regional District) regional plan in order to cope with that. Some proposals include an industrial land reserve, a fixed urban-growth boundary to contain development, and a policy that would require developers to build affordable housing and turn it over to housing authorities as part of new residential projects.
Those ideas, and more, will be thrashed out over the next year, after Metro’s land-use committee voted Thursday in favour of going ahead with a process for developing a new plan to replace the 11-year-old Livable Region Strategic Plan.
That plan was revolutionary in its day, asking the 21 municipalities to reserve land for a Green Zone and agree to growth-concentration areas that would put most housing development close to transit lines and away from rural areas.
It has had some successes — keeping agricultural and other Green Zone land protected and developing town centres served by transit — but also seen failures, as some suburbs chose to allow development outside the growth areas, while business parks far from transit service proliferated.
Land-use committee chairman Derek Corrigan, also the mayor of Burnaby, said it’s time to come up with a new plan that responds to new trends, but also carries on with the good ideas from the last one.
“The guts [of the new plan] will be a reinforcement, but with a new generation that will be buying in.”
Planner Chris DeMarco said there will be more attention paid to the issue of room for industry and workspace because there has been so much pressure put on commercial space by housing development in the past decade.
“Each municipality making decisions on its own is not going to give us enough industrial land,” said DeMarco. The business community has been beating the drum for the past year about the drastic shortage of industrial land in the region.
The future plan will likely, in acknowledgement of the existing massive development south of the Fraser River, designate much larger areas of the region as urban and allow for urban-level services.
But, in a move to protect the rural land still left, DeMarco’s report suggests that the region look at identifying a defined urban-growth boundary, similar to what exists in Portland, Ore.
Regional planners are also grappling with mechanisms that could help provide affordable housing.
By 2031, the number of older people will expand substantially, with one in four people over 65 by then, which will drive a demand for more kinds of housing and especially affordable housing.
De Marco’s report suggests creating an “inclusionary-zoning” policy similar to what some American states with high housing costs have done. That policy would require developers by law to build some affordable units in any housing development, which would then likely be turned over to a housing authority to manage. In Montgomery County, Md., one of the pioneers of inclusionary zoning, an average of 15 per cent of all units in any project over 50 units have to be built for the affordable-housing supply. More than 200 cities in California have inclusionary-zoning laws.
The development of the new plan has already had some bumpy spots.
Maple Ridge Mayor Gord Robson said at Thursday’s meeting that Maple Ridge will to ask to be exempted from Metro Vancouver’s planning control, unless some reasonable method for making amendments were included.
Robson said 70 per cent of Maple Ridge’s land is designated as Green Zone, some of it mistakenly included because of mapping errors. The city has not been able to get any of it removed because the process for making amendments is so onerous, requiring the agreement of every other municipality along with neighbouring regional districts.
“But there’s something wrong if Vancouver and Burnaby point at Maple Ridge and say, ‘You have to keep that farmland but it’s at your expense.’ “
Corrigan said there does need to be a better way to make changes to the plan, perhaps by a vote with a two-thirds majority.
Port Moody Mayor Joe Trasolini also said the previous LRSP plan didn’t always work the way it was supposed to.
Port Moody, over some residents’ objections, did add the housing and population that the plan called for. But it still doesn’t have the promised rapid transit.
But Richmond Coun. Harold Steves, echoing others, said that overall the previous plan worked well. “In Richmond, we were the main holdout last time. But it’s worked for us and we didn’t leave [the district].”
Richmond has concentrated a lot of its population and development to the west, leaving the east half as agricultural land.
“Without that plan, God knows what would have happened in Richmond,” he said.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Some of the factors affecting Metro Vancouver now and in 2031
Population: 3 million (2.17 now)
Number of dwellings: 1.27 million (about 850,000 now)
Number of jobs: 1.53 million (1.1 million now)
Number of private vehicles: 1.8 million (1.3 million now)
Number of people over 65 in the population: One in four (one in eight now)
Source: Metro Vancouver Report
