margaret munro @margaretmunro - Twitter Profile

10 days ago

Bulk liquids aren't permitted at Roberts Bank. How does that impact the plan for a $44-billion oil terminal and #pipeline? In the 1970s, a federal panel concluded that the shipment of bulk liquids would pose “unacceptable risks" to the #RobertsBank ecosystem. https://t.co/JU2wnavb21

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Patrick Condon

@pmcondon2

18 days ago

Draft 2 of letter to Vancouver Council on the "Villages Plan" Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan Dear Mayor and Council, I write to challenge key elements of the Villages Plan. Combined with the Official Development Plan and the Broadway Plan, the City, with this and the other plans, entitles privately owned city parcels to build around 700,000 new units to accommodate an additional 1.4 million people to our city of 670,000. This massive oversupply of pre zoned land is promoted as the path to housing affordability. Yet there is no historical evidence to support this claim. Vancouver has already approved, and has in the development pipeline, approximately 25,000 housing units, mostly along the Broadway corridor where they are best located. This is already a 30- to 50-year supply based on trend rates of city population increase. There is therefore no real purpose served by the Villages Plan. The only purpose it serves is to support the false narrative that restrictive zoning stands in the way of affordable housing. It doesn’t. It never has. It can’t. The claim is false. Vancouver has tripled its housing stock through infill housing additions since the 1960s - more than any other major North American centre city - yet our prices remain North America’s highest, not the lowest. If adding hundreds of thousands of units truly lowered prices, our housing would be the cheapest in North America. It is the most expensive. It defies logic to expect an "unleashing of the housing market" - the primary justification provided for the Villages Plan - to produce affordable housing when it has utterly failed us before. Our housing market, driven by globe-wide speculative inflation, has failed us. Our plans are feeding this speculative beast rather than taming it. True affordability requires mandating that most new housing be affordable to average wage earners, primarily through non-market housing development. Our lack is a lack of affordable housing, not housing itself. Don’t simply zone for affordability - insist on it by radically increasing inclusionary zoning requirements. This plan eliminates them entirely, while at the same time the City has further weakened these requirements elsewhere in the city to the point of irrelevance. I urge you to revise these plans by insisting on a much deeper inclusionary housing requirement and by deeply involving residents from every corner of the city in planning organic collaborative development. The people of Vancouver would rally behind such a plan — one that ensures their sons and daughters, and the service workers who keep this city running, can afford to live in the very neighbourhoods they serve and call home. Let's turn instead to plans that are sustainable in scale, equitable in outcome, and shaped not for the market alone, but for the people who live and work here. Thank you, Patrick M. Condon, Vancouver

pmcondon2's tweet photo. Draft 2 of letter to Vancouver Council on the "Villages Plan"

Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan

Dear Mayor and Council,
I write to challenge key elements of the Villages Plan.

Combined with the Official Development Plan and the Broadway Plan, the City, with this and the other plans, entitles privately owned city parcels to build around 700,000 new units to accommodate an additional 1.4 million people to our city of 670,000.

This massive oversupply of pre zoned land is promoted as the path to housing affordability. Yet there is no historical evidence to support this claim. Vancouver has already approved, and has in the development pipeline, approximately 25,000 housing units, mostly along the Broadway corridor where they are best located. This is already a 30- to 50-year supply based on trend rates of city population increase.

There is therefore no real purpose served by the Villages Plan. The only purpose it serves is to support the false narrative that restrictive zoning stands in the way of affordable housing. It doesn’t. It never has. It can’t. The claim is false.

Vancouver has tripled its housing stock through infill housing additions since the 1960s - more than any other major North American centre city - yet our prices remain North America’s highest, not the lowest.

If adding hundreds of thousands of units truly lowered prices, our housing would be the cheapest in North America. It is the most expensive.

It defies logic to expect an "unleashing of the housing market" - the primary justification provided for the Villages Plan - to produce affordable housing when it has utterly failed us before. Our housing market, driven by globe-wide speculative inflation, has failed us. Our plans are feeding this speculative beast rather than taming it.

True affordability requires mandating that most new housing be affordable to average wage earners, primarily through non-market housing development. Our lack is a lack of affordable housing, not housing itself. Don’t simply zone for affordability - insist on it by radically increasing inclusionary zoning requirements.

This plan eliminates them entirely, while at the same time the City has further weakened these requirements elsewhere in the city to the point of irrelevance.

I urge you to revise these plans by insisting on a much deeper inclusionary housing requirement and by deeply involving residents from every corner of the city in planning organic collaborative development. The people of Vancouver would rally behind such a plan — one that ensures their sons and daughters, and the service workers who keep this city running, can afford to live in the very neighbourhoods they serve and call home.

Let's turn instead to plans that are sustainable in scale, equitable in outcome, and shaped not for the market alone, but for the people who live and work here.

Thank you,

Patrick M. Condon, Vancouver

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Lady Pepper @greenladypepper

20 days ago

@sitkamedia @KenSimCity @ParkBoard When was the last time anyone from the park board swam at a Vancouver pool Let alone Kits. Ride your bike, go for a swim. Play tennis, go for a swim. walk to the beach, go for the swim. What’s the big deal?

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margaret munro

@MargaretMunro

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