A stunning revelation has come to light: The City of Vancouver’s chief planner admits the City’s housing and development policies have been formed without any comprehensive data on inventory (past, present, or estimated future) of zoned capacity and development capacity. Without this data, making appropriate policy and correct zoning decisions becomes virtually impossible.

This calls into question major plans currently underway — the new city-wide Vancouver Plan, Broadway Plan, Streamlining Rental Plan, False Creek South, and other housing initiatives.

On Sept. 11, 2021, CityHallWatch published the shocking admission by head planner Therese O’Donnell in her response to a request for data by Kwantlen College Professor John Rose. In her message, O’Donnell reveals that the information provided by City staff (via an illustrative graph) on housing projections is both “inaccurate and misleading.”

The latest disclosure stems from a request Cllr. Colleen Hardwick made of City staff in May 2020. She asked that planning staff provide the data upon which it was basing its projections as well as its development and rezoning recommendations.

Among Hardwick’s concerns was why the City’s Housing Vancouver Plan calls for 72,000 new homes by 2027 — three times more than Statistics Canada’s actual projections (2016). Hardwick is still waiting for a full response. Now, with O’Donnell’s letter to Rose, we have some insight into the depth of the problem. In the words of CityHallWatch, “the head of the planning department admits the city’s zoning data is a hodgepodge of overlapping plans and PDF documents, and that the City’s methods of calculating zoned and development capacity are opaque. They are not transparent, even to the city planners.”

You can read the entire story here.

In light of this new information, the Upper Kitsilano Residents Association requests that City Council direct planning staff to take the Streamlining Rental Plan, which is going to public hearing this fall, back to the drawing board.