Image by Jennifer C. Vancouver is perceived throughout North America as a vanguard in refocusing growth in the urban core. But the reality is that for decades, there has been a tragic mismatch between where people want to live—Vancouver proper—and where the region has built most new housing—the surrounding suburbs. Metro Vancouver is currently updating its regional growth strategy, the official road map for how the region will grow through 2050. But while lifting bans on townhomes and small apartments in detached-house neighborhoods has widespread support across the city of Vancouver, a recently released draft plan calls for the city of Vancouver to be the slowest-growing part of the Metro Vancouver region over the next 30 years. If things play out as envisioned in this draft, the result will be even higher home prices and more exclusion in Vancouver. Elsewhere in the region, it will mean longer commutes, more climate pollution, and accelerating loss of farms and forests. The Metro Vancouver 2050 plan is a critical opportunity to create a better future for the region by reversing that trend and reining in a half century of sprawl. Allowing growth in the city of Vancouver instead of pushing it away is the key to a more affordable, low-carbon region. Both Vancouver’s image of itself and the one projected throughout Cascadia is of gleaming glass condos above seawall bike paths. Douglas Coupland’s 2000 book title, City of Glass, captures this idea. And when Vancouver Sun columnist Douglas Todd writes that, “a strong case has been made that the 'condofication’ of Metro Vancouver has done more than anything else to define this West Coast city,” for many of us, the image conjured is that familiar view of downtown condos silhouetted by the mountains behind them. This idea that Vancouver’s condo towers on the downtown peninsula define the city is common but misleading. The vast and increasing majority of... |