Cedric Jacques Yu thinks Vancouver City councillors might want to read this when deciding whether the upcoming planning process will be focused on city-wide strategies or be neighbourhood-based.
A newly popular urban planning buzzword is “community-based planning.” For example, the New York City Department of City Planning’s website states that “community-based planning is essential to the city’s vitality” because “people who are close to neighborhood issues can clearly identify community needs and advocate passionately for local concerns.”
The implicit assumption of this conventional wisdom is that when neighborhoods are given absolute power over planning, their wishes create no harmful externalities affecting the city as a whole. Some scholars argue, by contrast, that land use planning should be conducted on a citywide or even a statewide basis, because existing residents of a neighborhood may want things that are bad for the city as a whole (for example, exclusionary zoning that limits housing supply and raises housing prices).*
Neighborhood activists in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood recently created their own community plan. Which view does the Bushwick plan support? …
Bushwick is next door to gentrified Williamsburg, and people priced out of Williamsburg are starting to move to Bushwick. As a result, rents are rising more rapidly in Bushwick than in the city as a whole. So, naturally, the plan emphasizes the importance of affordable housing (p. 17). As one might expect in a low-income neighborhood, the plan supports redeveloping publicly-owned sites as “affordable” (English translation: subsidized low-income) housing. The plan even suggests that the city “consider higher-density zoning on publicly owned sites” (p. 20). Thus, the plan seems consistent with the citywide interest in housing the poor. …
But what the plan gives with one hand it takes with others. Generally, the plan’s guiding principles include “no more total units than the No-Action Scenario would produce, unless those additional units are deeply affordable” (p. 30). In other words, no new housing should be built unless it is for very poor people or is allowed by current zoning. In fact, the plan suggests that existing zoning allows too much housing, stating that current zoning is “overly lenient” (p. 25).
The plan complains that the neighborhood’s existing zoning does not have height limits, while in Brooklyn’s gentrified areas the city has created new zoning districts “with strictly defined height limits and density appropriate to the context of the existing buildings” (Id.). In other words, the plan says: rich people got to downzone so we should do the same. Of course, if everyone downzones, the city’s housing supply falls even further behind demand, and rents go even higher.
The plan excuses these policies by pointing to the great God of Context. It writes that in the absence of downzoning, there might be an “out-of-scale tower” or development that is not “appropriate to the context” (p. 265). This attitude illustrates the Myth of the Immaculately Conceived Neighborhood: the idea that no housing has been or ever should be different from its neighbors, and that the neighborhood status quo is eternal (emphasis mine). …
In sum, the Bushwick plan is an excellent example of what happens when neighborhoods are allowed to plan in the interests of local activists: they may try to lock out everyone else, creating a regionwide housing shortage. And that’s why community-based planning is anything but “essential.”
Full article here.
Price Tags welcomes other case studies, pro and con or both.
There’s a lot of disingenuousness associated with this phenomenon, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What “the community” wants is often pure horror from a planning perspective. It can be the very definition of parochial self-interest. The purpose of community based planning is really to steer the hateful lemmings towards a responsible outcome that they would otherwise never tolerate, let alone independently invent. Make them think that affordable housing and better public transit were things they really wanted all along. As with children and parents, this sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t and it often leaves planners simply hoping for the best.
But the possibility that this role of ‘community facilitator’ is the only future for Planning is a problem. It assumes that: 1) the public is not to be trusted to act in its own common best interest and 2) planners know that the public does not trust them to act in their best common interest. So the solution is to trick the public into acting in their own best self interest while being convinced that they are the ones doing the acting.
And all this further assumes that Planners really are correct about all of this. It’s not a great situation.
Nonsense. The author is describing a lase faire planning process. In any neighbourhood based planning process the City must superimpose each neighbourhood’s fair share of new density, and social services and housing as well as transportation and other Citywide requirements. These must be included in their local area plan in an acceptable manner by the neighbourhood Roundtable working in partnership with Planning. Set timelines must also be established and if the neighbourhood doesn’t comply the City will impose a local area plan.
Author
How does City determine what “fair share of new density, and social services and housing” to superimpose (dangerous word, that) without doing a city-wide plan, which if neighbourhood-based and approved, brings you right around to square 1?
Not that difficult really. The City has certain things to be included in an overall plan. In order to do so when planning at a neighbourhood level the City defines what those requiremnts are, for instance transportation (most are already known), sustainable neighbourhoods, etc. Fair share of density can be established. The Metro 2041 plan asigned 260,000 new people in Vancouver and in 2006 there were 120,000 unused zoning. These need to be updated. That works out to about 6,000 people per nieghbourhood, add a cushion and update so say +/-9000 per neighbourhood. The 6 Vision Local Area Plans had 15-20,0000 new people each. Those neighbourhoods and the others need to be assigned the density and social services and housing so that all nieghbourhoods are fairly treated. Part of this process needs to be a, say 6 week Citywide discussion. If everybody has to accept their fair share that’s step one in achieving acceptance. Nobodies being singled out as has been the case historically. All neighbourhoods across the City have acknowledged they know that and are prepared to accept it so along as it’s fair and they have a say in the decision making process. A key part of the Citywide planning process is to assign responsibilities at the appropriate level. The City has its overarching role and the neighbourhoods responsibilities are to decide what uses and building types go where in their neighbourhoods. They do so working in partnership with Planning. Planners roles change too, they are facilitators and participants alongside the neighbourhood stakeholders Roundtable in decision making. By doing this the neighbourhood takes ownership of their local area plan. And, given that spot rezonings will no longer be on the table, except in unique situations where the LAP will be amended, this buyin will neliminate the wasteful and destructive Nimbys’ constantly at the baracades at City Hall environment. Vancouver will become a place where citizens work together to build inclusive, diverse neighbourhoods with a high quality of life and civic pride, the opposite of the direction we have been going for the past few years.
I just know Elizabeth Murphy is going to have something to say about this.
I would be interested to know what percentage of the city’s planning department actually still lives in Vancouver, given the cost.