Unfinished Business

Vancouver City Council’s two standout issues in the first half of 2011 landed for wrap-up on the same afternoon of 19 April 2011 as Unfinished Business.

Dozens upon dozens of speakers had come out for the public hearings on development proposals for their adjacent areas: Northeast False Creek and the Chinatown portion of the Downtown Eastside. Postponement of conclusion to a daytime afternoon meant that few of those speakers had the live opportunity to watch Council’s discussion and decision.

The Northeast False Creek items ran for eight sessions between February 17 and April 10. Out of a total of 193 speakers, 114 were recorded as “in opposition” — 59% against. Zoning for new height in Chinatown ran for five sessions between March 17 and April 14. Out of a total of 112 speakers, 82 were recorded as “in opposition” — 73% against.

Comparison of these two issues and their outcomes offers striking lessons in social class, exercise of power, and switcheroo politics of deferral. In both cases, affected local residents spoke up to defend the interests of their own communities, with considerable support from other concerned people across Vancouver.

The Northeast False Creek situation brought together a spectrum of formally educated professionals who rallied to the issue of gambling expansion under the leadership of the Vancouver Not Vegas coalition. As early as the February 9 public forum, it became apparent that focus on Council’s power to approve or disapprove gambling expansion would be key strategy. And that proved to be the wedge that made it possible for Council to intervene, at least in appearance. Along the way, Concord Pacific’s years of egregious foot-dragging on agreed-to amenities emerged as a strong secondary concern.

ART REVIEW | Everything is going to…

Recently Britain-based artrepreneur Martin Creed [1] brought his band into town to kick off a May-to-October exhibition [2] under the auspices of condo king Bob Rennie. This essay focuses on the Creed-and-Rennie performance at the 17 May 2011 Emily Carr and Rennie Collection Speaker Series [3].

Martin Creed started off his solo evening in the art school spotlight with tortured musings: “I just feel like a wanker, you know … It’s much more difficult to wank in public.” A little later: “You can’t talk … I’ll try and be fast … Ah, fuck!”

Further ramblings included: “I didn’t know what I was doing … It wasn’t making me feel good.” And: “I was trying not to decide what I was doing.” And: “If you walk away and have a reason you can take that with you.” This last, for me, was the most interesting thing I heard from Creed. But the kicker is, will Bob Rennie fork out art cash for that non-object?

Eventually Creed set his sights on dialogue and asked for questions or comments. After a few exchanges, he fell into a back-and-forth with a woman who pursued the nature of his relationship with another artist that he had collaborated with. Creed seemed to use the topic to veer off into repetitive put-on. If that is what he was trying to do, he lacked two of the requisites: stellar status and youth. Stellar is much more than a decade-old Turner Prize. Think Bob Dylan for contrast.

One theme that slipped in and out of Creed’s meanderings was making distinctions and separations amid the flux of experience. Creed did manage to describe the satisfaction of taking a shit and believing that the result was not himself.

More Trouble for Regional Growth Strategy

Thanks to a single municipality with clear vision and sturdy backbone — Coquitlam — the juggernaut Regional Growth Strategy (RGS) has at least temporarily failed to careen its done-deal swath across B.C.’s lower mainland. The RGS aims to provide a policy blueprint that would govern the “pattern and form of development” of Metro Vancouver (formerly Greater Vancouver Regional District) for the next thirty years.

Grassroots criticism of the RGS began to acquire momentum in late 2010. MetroVanWatch has established a base for information dissemination and communication on the RGS issue. Various representations were made (or frustrated in attempt) to Metro Vancouver itself and to the 24 constituent jurisdictions. [See appended note for an account of representation to City of Vancouver.]

Points of concern for ordinary people (not bureaucrats, not politicians, not developer interests) have included:

Dubious public consultation process that culminated in a few poorly advertised, ill-timed public meetings late in 2010 for the affected 2.2 million population (locations were Coquitlam, North Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby — nothing in Vancouver)
Effective disregard of the overwhelmingly negative feedback received through the perfunctory public process
Extensive powers exercised by bodies not accountable to an electorate
A “strategy” that seeks to substitute growth for livable region
Facilitation of sprawl growth through removal of land from agricultural reserve and through expansion of urban containment boundary

Coquitlam’s refusal of the RGS on 21 March 2011, following a unanimous vote of their council, has thrown the extended and complex policy project into a “dispute resolution process.” On 8 April 2011 Metro Vancouver set sights on recalcitrant Coquitlam, proposing binding arbitration to force acceptance. Nine Metro Vancouver directors opposed that move.

Ida Chong, the provincial minister responsible, has responded to notification and directed Metro Vancouver to initiate instead “a non-binding dispute resolution process by May 16, 2011.” In other words, the Province told the Region to take off the jackboots.

On Saturday May 14, the Vancouver Sun weighed in heavily on the RGS issue, running both a lead editorial and an opinion piece by Daphne Bramham. The editorial in particular aligns with already reported concerns emanating from the province’s “three biggest business groups” — B.C. Chamber of Commerce, Business Council of B.C., Urban Development Institute. In fact, business interests have sought

to participate in the dispute process, saying they weren’t given the chance to be heard during four years of public consultations. (Sinoski, May 6)

Black humor spreads its wings here. Grassroots critics have been told flatly and repeatedly that the years of process are so adequate they should not dream of making complaint. (Many meetings and passage of much time always provides bureaucratic grounds to assert worth of consultation — regardless of quality of advertisement, extent of engagement, or nature of response to criticisms.) Perhaps business interests will garner more respect?

Besides reinforcing the editorial focus on economic factors, Bramham blasts Metro Vancouver as “probably the most egregious example of Canadian citizens having no voice in decision-making.” Finally grassroots opposition has succeeded in generating this echo in mainstream media.

The worry now is that RGS will be taken to task for the wrong reasons. For example, if the Urban Development Institute wants to affect the current version of policy, it’s hard to believe that things like preservation of agricultural land, respect for a strong urban containment boundary, or maintenance of adequate industrial land will stand at the top of their agenda.

Where all of this RGS debate goes from here depends in part on how well you the reader understand the issues, and whether you take opportunities to speak up.

Assessing the China Factor

It is two months since The Mainlander hosted a story on new Chinese housing policy that is exporting real estate investment pressures — especially to favored locations like Vancouver.
Vancouver Real Estate Frenzy

Aspects of the situation have taken interesting turns, beginning with a big story on Chinese surge that appeared the very next day in the Vancouver Sun. That article found irony in the fuel that Chinese “crackdown” on real estate speculation is pouring on Vancouver’s price fire. According to entrepreneur Cam Good, “There are literally planeloads of Chinese coming here to buy real estate.”

Over a month later, Vancouver business publisher and former municipal politician Peter Ladner called for action “to discourage overseas property speculators” — and mentioned “spreading high single-family lot land costs over two or three homes on the same property [to] drive down the unit price of the new (smaller) homes and discourage the trophy homes on large lots beloved by so many overseas investors.”

The April 5 Ladner article sparked an immediate response from Vancouver City Councillor Geoff Meggs: a tout of Vision Vancouver’s controversial STIR giveaways to incentivize developers.

A week later Ethan Baron reacted with a weird equation: that Canadian purchase of Chinese goods (cheap here because of offshored worker exploitation) somehow means that Vancouver then owes a wide-open real estate market to the fortunes made by the overlords of those workers!

A few days after that, developer mouthpiece Bob Ransford pushed back at Ladner with what amounted to a call to develop as much as possible as fast as possible: “We need to focus on removing all the barriers that stand in the way of supplying the housing stock that is required to meet the demand.” In other words, whatever the degree of speculation, it must be sated, and attendant profits realized, regardless of any consequence to anything else. (Ransford also digressed to claim that the 1988 giveaway of the huge Expo 86 site to Li Ka-shing has been so good for Vancouver.)

Within a week, Cam Good — protagonist marketer in the February Vancouver Sun story — weighed in with a head-on assault against the Ladner protectionism that might impair the profits he is realizing from his Beijing office and his planeloads of buyers. After all, “in meccas like Richmond, 98 per cent of the hundreds of homes we’ve sold are to buyers who are Chinese.” Toward the end of his piece, this promoter went on to promise, “real estate is the best investment you’ll ever make.”

That promoter also cited a March 29 Wall Street Journal article, digging through cautionary freight to latch onto this sentence: “Chinese buyers have stampeded in to Vancouver and to Toronto, two of Canada’s hottest markets.” The unmentioned sobering part of that same article tots up these three factors: “the now-inflated ratio of house prices to income [which means] Canadian housing prices could be in for a 25% drop in the next three years,” a “debt-to-disposable-income ratio for Canadian households [that] rose to 148.9% last fall … surpassing U.S. borrowing for the first time since 1998,” and “Canadian recourse law [that] makes it harder for buyers to walk away from bad debt.”

Following in the footsteps of the Wall Street Journal, Gord Goble responded to Cam Good by highlighting a Vancouver unaffordability ratio of ten times income, a figure that points to the mania that precedes a broken bubble.

Near the end of April, David Ebner quantified the situation in broad and simple terms:

There are nearly 600,000 high-net people worth at least $1.5-million in China this year, according to the consultancy Bain & Co. About 10 per cent of them have already left, another 10 per cent are planning to apply for immigration, and about 30 per cent are considering it.

It remains to be seen whether China will continue to permit this flight of entrepreneurs and capital.

On May 2 Jay Bryan waved red flags about general real estate overvaluation in Canada and attributed the exceptionalism of “the rocket-propelled Vancouver market” — current annual increase of 13.4% — to “a flood of wealthy Asian buyers [that] continues to support sky-high prices.” He concludes with the obvious: “Few seem confident that the Vancouver market is stable.”

Three Telling Sidelights

One. Weeks after hitting the panic button on January 20 to abort the agenda set for city council, Vision Vancouver eventually handed Chinatown over to developer interests after five nights of hearing from the public why they should not. Who can resist the offshore money that stands poised to dehistoricize the core of Vancouver through “revitalization” with condos — especially after massive parking structures failed to do the job? (See Vancouver approves Chinatown condo for an overview.)

Two. In an April 19th marathon, all morning and all evening at Council, Vision Vancouver cobbled together some trailblazing last-minute repression into a bylaw that requires permits for protest structures and threatens to levy thousands of dollars in fines for infraction. In the lead-up to this decision — a decision deplored by the BC Civil Liberties Association — city officials admitted to direct involvement with the Chinese consulate.