City Planners Terminate Norquay Working Group
City planners came back to Norquay on 3 February 2011 after a three-month absence. Sudden diktat set a meeting for Chinese New Year. Once again, the majority of Norquay residents suffered crass cultural insensitivity.
When staff took their plan before City Council last November, they disparaged many of their own Norquay Working Group (NWG) as a vocal minority. Planner assertion of broader support had no data to back up the claim. The Vision-NPA Council responded with a knee-jerk jackbooting of the neighborhood. That ruthless vote to approve the plan in the face of strong opposition
Assaults thousands of residents and hundreds of acres in the heart of East Vancouver
Abuses immigrant cultures unwilling or unable to contend with government
Disrespects long-term community residents
Paves the way for senseless gentrification at little gain in density
Aims to dispossess the balance of 32% low-income family already present
Asserts that brand-new strata duplex or triplex construction will be 'more affordable'
Incentivizes developers to build out-of-human-scale shadow-casters
Condemns Kingsway to become a canyonized stream of motor vehicles
Aggravates Kingsway's existing north-south wall across the community
Assumes that a 'neighbourhood centre' can be manufactured from a dedicated truck route
Unleashes counterproductive land speculation (and medium-term de facto expropriation through arbitrary property tax increase)
With their 'revitalization' prescription already rammed down Norquay throats, why did city planners bother to return? The short answer that is that planners are forced to play out an ongoing charade of consultation. The "plan" itself requires further engagement with the neighborhood about three considerations – considerations that the community never saw, considerations that the NWG heard of only at the last minute.
Those considerations are for developers, not for the neighborhood. The City spent $10,000 to have a consultant tell them in October 2010 that developers needed more incentive. Results: New base height of eight to ten storeys stretching for a mile along Kingsway, and four-storey apartments scatter-gunned into single-family neighborhoods. Perhaps the only point of agreement among all of the NWG was desire for a human-scale neighborhood, not a sprouting of outsized condos. Bye bye to all that.
The main reason for the NWG meeting was to pre-announce more Norquay open houses (scheduled for February 19 and 21). As usual, none of the content for the upcoming open houses was prepared, or made available to NWG for review in any form. This will be the sixth set of open houses that the City has lobbed at Norquay since the March 2006 kick-off event.
The two-hour NWG meeting started out with mention of a three-point agenda: debrief on the November 4th plan at Council, next steps, retrospective on lessons learned. Present: three planners [two of them – Yan Zeng and Tai Lam – never seen before, the other – Neal LaMontagne – on the verge of departure after little more than a year] and nine NWG members. Lack of planner continuity became a matter of discussion. (City planning's frequent rotation of shock troops minimizes their battle fatigue. Meanwhile the unfortunate Norquay community is left to muster its own unpaid volunteers.)
One resident reported developers already knocking at his door, offering $1.5 million for an older house on a double lot. Current assessment: $1.1 million.
Lead planner Neal LaMontagne adopted a demeanor of pained gravitas and announced that planners do their job on Norquay to address a 'profound affordability problem.' (Never mind where density is already found and where it is not – consider this density map for all of Vancouver.) Planners only aggravate affordability by putting large swaths of real estate into play, letting land lift evaporate in frothy speculation, and then throwing life-preserver financial concessions to developers who jump in over their heads. This is Vancouver's big ugly secret: the City is a junkie for development fees and construction jobs, and the City will break into any neighborhood to feed its manic addiction. (What can affordability matter anyway, when offshore money is allowed free run to find a haven in unoccupied condos that serve as safe deposit boxes?) The word affordability in the mouth of any planner or politician is an automatic lie.
An all-too-typical rambling gripe session served its unstated function: eat up time, have a meeting, allow planners to tick off 'met with the neighborhood' on their checklist. Quite a few experienced NWG members played a limited game, and said little or nothing. Of course, their warm bodies in the room were all that the City really cared about. Thus played out one more scene in the City's endless, meaningless farce of connecting with the community. Substance had nothing to do with the exercise – except perhaps to offer planners one more opportunity to pick and choose from whatever they heard, especially when it matched up with what they have already set out to do.
Some of the exchange covered the function of the open house tactic so favored by the City. The planner said: "I feel pretty good about open houses. … What do we do to make sure we're talking to everybody?" Open house events are a set-up to generate fraudulent soft data and enable the City to avoid the rigor and greater expense of legitimate social-scientific survey. Everybody that walks through the door of an open house gets counted as a statistic for broad community consultation. A one-sentence written comment from a naive resident or a self-interested property developer – "I like the plan" – weighs just as much as pages of informed and detailed criticism. One pro, one con. That is how the open house scam works. [Personal fantasy: A roving squad of 300 people shows up at every City of Vancouver open house and leaves 300 distinct brief written comments: "I do not support this planning."]
Out of the few bits of solid information provided by the planners, only one seems likely to interest many outside of the Norquay area. The City is about to embark on an amenity and benefits strategy for Norquay (as directed by Recommendation C of the plan). Planners said they were not sure how such a strategy would work, since it's 'the first time we've done this.'
So Norquay becomes the subject of experiment piled on top of experiment. May this first-time experiment be too big to fail! Planner talk of need for amenity fund-raising sounded ominous. (Perhaps councillors could start off by putting on a bake sale for the Olympic Village, into which they have already channeled more than $150 million.) The Norquay community – a much bigger entity than that fabled runaway Olympic boondoggle – probably would be happy to shut up if allocated $40 million or so for a decent community arts centre on the city-owned 2400 Motel site. Planners themselves have demonstrated that Norquay is an amenity desert. Unlike Southeast False Creek, though, the area already has a lot of people and many buildings. (Trying to make something out of nothing does not come cheap. Why else did the City funnel more than $10 million into Woodwards?)
Near the end of the February 3rd session, one of the never-seen-before planners declared that the current Norquay Working Group is 'over.' The upcoming February 2011 open houses are supposed to feature sign-up sheets. (Maybe those will be less concealed than the ones in November 2008?) City planners say they anticipate 'a new round of enthusiasm' for Norquay planning. Hardened veterans wonder where the old round of enthusiasm ever was.
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