DEMOLISHING VANCOUVER

Nantes is a lovely medieval town in Brittany, roughly the size of Vancouver. I was there two weeks ago and had lunch with a ninety year old architect. He was at home the night Nantes was carpet bombed after the Normandy Invasion. “There was,” he says, "a lot of noise. It lasted about 20 minutes. When it stopped there was only one house left standing in the town centre. We thought that it was the Germans who were bombing. Actually, we learned later, it was the allies who somehow missed their military targets.”

NANTES POST BOMBING

He was interested to learn that it took investors  more than a year to demolish about 1000 Vancouver houses. The Allied armies accomplished this for Nantes in under 20 minutes.

There are other parallels. 

The Allies,  criticized by some Americans for taking out the entire residential town centre, explained that they had to destroy it in order to save it. Facing similar criticism, Vancouver politicians  have  instructed us that the demolition of character homes in Vancouver is necessary to produce better, healthier, more diversified and denser neighborhoods with a variety of housing types.

Paradoxically, Vancouverites seem to be more upset about the demolitions than were the surviving residents of Nantes. They welcomed the Americans with kisses and flowers. In contrast, Michael Kluckner, the author of Vanishing Vancouver says, “There are all kinds of anger type issues that are rolling together *** there’s a general sense that people are frustrated with things just not working,” he continued. (Globe and Mail, Friday May 30, 2014)

Both President Francois Hollande and  Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, have to deal with immigration issues and cultural conflicts.

There are today a great number of Chinese tourists in France, some of whom are investing in vineyards and castles. These investors do not demolish heritage buildings because Napoleon outlawed the practice. To the contrary, the French provide grants to owners to restore old castles.  

The problem for the French government is that the Chinese tourists do not use credit cards. They carry their castle money in their pockets. As a result, they are the preferred victims of pickpockets and thieves. 

 Quite naturally, they complain about their safety.

About two weeks ago, President Hollande suggested that the Chinese should stop whining. He told them to bring in their own police force to protect them while in France. The French media said that this suggestion proved that the president was as dumb as he looked. (The French are sensitive about foreign police forces occupying their country.)

The French dealt with the demolition of Nantes' town centre by restoring it in its original style. It took a while. Of course they preserved the one house left standing. Below is a picture of downtown Nantes taken two weeks ago.

ONLY HOUSE TO SURVIVE BOMBING

NANTES TOWN CENTRE TODAY

Investor led demolitions are more subtle than bombing.  For one thing, there is more than one house left standing. This gives the planners and engineers the chance to create heritage classifications and to recycle the components of demolished homes. The June 3 report from the General Manager of Engineering Services notes at p. 4 that “By using deconstruction techniques, wood and other materials can be separated, sorted and can be more easily reused and recycled. For example, if 80% of wood from a typical pre 1940’s one/two story family home is captured for reuse or recycling an additional 40 tons of waste could be diverted from landfill per demolished home.”

The Strategic Analysis section seeks to encourage retention of pre 1940s homes by increasing the burden on demolition which the report calls deconstruction. “The rationale for this additional recycling requirement is to recognize that character homes often have more character elements and material features that can be salvaged, reused, recycled and kept out of the landfill.”

Strategic Analysis will be required to deal with preservation of new components in old buildings. In 1978 Vancouver's Heritage Advisory Committee would not allow alterations to Umberto's restaurant.  They did not want to lose a part of our heritage described as "finely turned balustrades." Umberto, however, produced the invoices to show that these 'character elements' had been made five years earlier. 

Another issue is what to do with old components like getting nails out of old floors. If salvaging costs more than the value of the materials salvaged the stuff will just lie around and rot.

The Allies may have had a strategy as well to retain ancient homes by focusing on military targets,  but the bomb sight technology was not up to the task. As to recycling, I could find no statistics on how Nantes recycled the stone in the downtown but they probably did.

Vancouver ingeniously proposes to pay for recycling by moving stuff around in the budget. Even if that doesn't do anything for heritage, it promotes the more important Green Action Plan. 

All of this demonstrates the enormous advantages of a local government run by public relations specialists.

The engineering report says, “Additional resources may be required to implement certain aspects of the proposed C &D Waste Diversion Strategy; however any near term expenses will be covered through re-prioritization of existing budgets. Any financial implications not noted will be identified and proposed as part of the 2015 operating budget process”

Re-prioritization is a technical term for robbing Peter in one department to pay Paul in another.

 Just as there were critics of the carpet bombing of Nantes, Vancouver has its own neighborhood fussbudgets. They say that the pre 1940 deconstruction rules might actually increase the rate of demolition of pre 1940 homes. They whine that the character designation was arbitrary and that existing density bonuses encourage destruction. They describe the whole thing as “poorly thought out.” 

They are right.

FOREIGN OWNED REAL ESTATE and the BOGGLED MIND

People in marketing are said to suffer ‘analysis paralysis’. Due to the sheer volume of data, analysts don’t really know where to start and how to go about fixing any particular problem.   http://tinyurl.com/plqcb3q

Not only that but data and diet obsessions are connected. A program called MyFitessPalCalorieCounter and DietTracker provides a database of the caloric values of 3 million foods. Users have  become anorexic because of all the data.  .

Which brings me to something like a point.

Mayor Gregor Robertson was in Hong Kong about a year ago. One Chinese English language paper reported that he brushed off suggestions that mainland migration might be to blame for Vancouver’s stratospheric property prices. 

He told the South China Mainland Press that the assertion was “ridiculous,” adding that mainlanders brought a “great influx of talent and culture”. [ http://tinyurl.com/plqcb3q ]

Understandably,  he had confused the law of supply and demand with Chinese talent and culture.

Until now there has been little backlash or even discussion about offshore investment in Vancouver.  There are dwellings all over town that are vacant. Asian investors often prefer it that way. Should this be addressed by taxation? No one in authority wants to talk about it.  

Why is that? 

• One reason is that there are a lot of us including homeowners, realtors, developers and governments who have a vested interest in seeing property values rising forever. 
• It could be our innate political correctness. 
•  Also,  better data will not be forthcoming so long as it has proprietary value, and its absence absolves the government from having to do anything about it. 
• Add to the mix, we suffer from a data obsession. We seem to feel that every  problem can be addressed only after there has been a poll, a referendum or a double blind study. We need to remember, however, that we are not testing medications. The standards required of medical research are not called for.

Columnist, Barbara Yaffe noted recently that the absence of data on the Vancouver real estate market is ‘mind boggling.’ http://www.vancouversun.com/touch/story.html?id=9729419

Even though we do not have the ontological proof of  whether buyers  from Luxembourg,  China or Toronto are driving up prices the government could address the issue, if it wanted to.  

It has to first recognize that when our residential property is used purely for passive investment by other countries, the inability of the younger generation to buy becomes a serious problem.  One of my US readers makes this comment: "Society in the form of community is unprotected by laws that have burgeoned as governments have discovered that there is more money in property than in community. The result is that so long as people can be kept just quiescent enough to maintain the civil order, property will remain ascendant."

There is plenty of information on what other countries do. China, for example,  imposed new restrictions on property sales in 2010. Foreigners can own only one residential property for their own use (permanent residents are restricted to two properties). Foreigners must reside in the country for one year before they can buy property. Foreign companies who buy commercial real estate must use it themselves. Australia, France, Switzerland and other countries have their own regulations. Britain is contemplating an annual capital tax on vacant residential buildings.

The lamest excuse, however, is that the government can do nothing without more data. 

THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO

Councillor Reimer has added new dimensions to the (UDEE) Unidentified Downtown Eastside Event. In an email published on Francis Bula's blog, the quasi judicial Reimer opines:

At this point, the DTES Plan isn't coming to Public Hearing: it’s a policy document coming to Council for debate and decision. The public has the right to access this process (speak at council, write to council, meeting with councillors) but it does not constitute a public hearing which is a specific legal designation that carries more rigid process constraints and is used to evaluate whether amendments to bylaw meet the tests set out by Council-passed policies.

So it is fair to ask, "What exactly were the festivities that happened at Council. Why was everybody talking? What if anything did Council do?"

If it was a hearing and Council in fact approved an ODP (Official Development Plan) but Reimer and her clones mistakenly thought it was not a plan, then the bylaw could easily be set aside. 

The legal basis for the Petition to the Court would be this: 

Divine forgiveness on the grounds that “they know not what they do” only works to achieve eternal salvation.  It won't work  to enact a bylaw.

If, on the other hand, it was not a plan ( the “Non-plan”) and the intention was to create a policy that would  oblige the council to pass the same plan later on, what was it? 

It was more akin to a conspiracy to evade the legal requirement to provide a fair hearing.  

Whatever the thing is, I learned this morning from Michael Geller’s Blog something even more strange. A report considered by council relating to affordable housing, a central component of the plan/non-plan, was not presented to the public.

Geller refers to a study by the firm Coriolis that relates to the economics of affordable housing. Geller makes a number of astute observations:

"For reasons I still cannot understand, the City refused to release the study. The only explanation is a comment recorded by Doug Ward in an interview with Andrea Reimer which I reported during the Council meeting. When I referenced this at the Council meeting Councillor Reimer said she was misquoted.

Here's a link: http://www.thetyee.ca/News/2014/03/12/A-Vision-Beyond-Main-and-Hastings/ Here's the excerpt:
Reimer said the planning department isn't prepared to release the Coriolis analysis because the data on potential land values could undermine the city's ability to promote rental development in the DEOD.

"If we released the exact range of what we were looking at paying for land -- which is what the Coriolos report does -- then the maximums in that report would become the minimum current landowners would set as the asking price," said Reimer. "Put another way, no one goes into a real estate deal letting a seller know the maximum they can pay."

If  the UDEE (Unidentified Downtown Eastside Event) was as Reimer says, conceptually like a "real estate deal" that is one thing. It doesn’t have to be set aside because ethereal concepts do not require quashing. They just float off into other dimensions to join other gases.

[Although Reimer says she was misquoted by Doug Ward I suppose the world could contain that fact.] 

If UDEE was a hearing then this is a splendid ground for asking a judge to set the bylaw aside.  The law in such case requires everything Council had before it to be disclosed and made available to the public in enough time that they can read it and address it. 

While on the topic of neighbourhood busting, Ms.Bula gave us the text of Clr. Louie’s motion during the Oakridge rezoning. Louie attached conditions to that bylaw relating to kitchens and stuff like that.  This raises the question whether the conditions were intended by Council to be met (a) prior to, or (b) after enactment.  If "prior to" then the plan  has not yet been enacted. 

 If after,then it has been enacted but might be set aside on other grounds. 

Moral: It is entirely possible that we live in 9 separate parallel universes. In some of those other worlds a plan was passed. In others it was defeated. But in our greenest and best of all possible worlds a plan/non-plan has  both passed and not passed. 

THE LAW ACCORDING TO COUNCILLOR REIMER

A Vancouver City Councilor’s pronouncements on the law of zoning and public hearings gave me an idea for a game. We would produce fridge magnets with legal phrases like quasi judicial, torts, volente non fit injuria, public policy, policy making, public hearing, fettering discretion. The players would toss them at a fridge and whoever produces the most incomprehensible doctrines of law would win.

Councillor Reimer, interviewed  in the Vancouver Courier,  lectures that “when Council sits as a Council it’s a policy making body but in a public hearing its not.”

http://www.vancourier.com/news/developing-story-the-truth-about-council-and-public-hearings-1.866627
In fact, when Council sits in any properly constituted formal meeting whether at a zoning hearing or at a meeting to declare National Potato Chip Week, it is sitting as a Council. Period. Council performs many different functions. It acts in various capacities, often simultaneously. These have been characterized by the courts as legislative, administrative or quasi judicial. Decisions made in any capacity are referred to as “statutory powers of decision.”

Reimer and her VISION colleagues already know how they are going to vote. Have they ever split on any vote? Her lecture on the law is for the sole purpose of persuading those whose neighborhoods she will destroy,  that she and her colleagues have no choice. They are driven inexorably to wreck the neighborhood by a higher law.

Reimer would have you believe that if the City has a policy respecting rezoning, a Court would take a dim view of any councillor who votes  for the public and against the policy. How can that be? Because, she says, that Council must act quasi judicially.

But quasi judicially means fairly and impartially. So, according to her, to act fairly and impartially she can only vote one way.


The law may be an ass, but it is not that big an ass.

Suppose Council passed a resolution stating that it shall be a policy to always increase the density of the city in every zoning application for properties near arterials or transit. Assume the policy was adapted without any public hearing. Assume it was not enacted as a bylaw.

At the zoning hearing there are the usual, enraged protesters. Some speakers support the rezoning for various reasons. Others oppose it. “In Oakridge,” they shout, “a Maginot Line of towers will block our light, air and views”

After the hearing the vote is called.

Reimer wouldn’t want the voters to misinterpret her support for the developers as being – er, um support for the developers. What’s a gal to do?

Blame the law. The Reimer doctrine as set out in the Courier is as follows:

“We’re making a decision on land use that is based on existing policy. In fact it would likely to be tested poorly in the courts if we tried to make policy as we go in a public hearing,” she said. “The challenge is if you’re a member of the public, you come in and see the same 11 people that you see making policy and you assume we can do everything in a public hearing that we can do in a council meeting, which is not the case.”

She has the law backwards and upside down.

The Council must not unlawfully fetter its discretion.

In the case of

Hospital Employees’ Union, Local 180 v. Peace Arch District Hospital (1989), 35 B.C.L.R. (2d) 64 at 30-31 (C.A.) it was held:

“A body entrusted with a discretion must not disable itself from exercising its discretion in individual cases by adopting a fixed rule of policy. In modern administrative law this issue arises most often when an administrative agency of its own volition seeks to structure its discretion by formulating and following policy statements, guidelines, and the like…

An authority can fail to give its mind to a case, and thus fail to exercise its discretion lawfully, by blindly following a policy laid down in advance. It is a fundamental rule for the exercise of discretionary power that discretion must be brought to bear on every case: each one must be considered on its own merits and decided as the public interest requires at the time.”

The law as set out by the Court of Appeal in Save Richmond Farmland Society v. Richmond (Township) (B.C.C.A.)(Affd. SCC)

"There must be a degree of open-mindedness; there must be a capacity to be influenced by persuasion. But provided that the alderman is not acting improperly in the sense of having been procured to vote in a certain way, (of which there is no suggestion whatsoever in this case,) and providing that he retains the capacity to be influenced by a yet unheard and perhaps unexpected argument, he or she will not be disqualified from participation in this particular process of zoning bylaw consideration by attitudinal views of the kind that are inherent in the political nature of our form of municipal government, and which may well have been exposed by the cut and thrust of that political process."

After a zoning hearing council makes a legislative decision to rezone. It must also act quasi judicially and conduct the hearing fairly and impartially. The council has the broadest discretion in making its decision. It must not completely fetter its discretion by following a pre-existing policy that has not been adapted as law.

Reimer has every right to vote any way she wants following the public hearing. That's politics.  

The voters have every right to throw her out of office at the next election. So's that.

VANCOUVERISM - THE ART OF SPIN

The term, Vancouverism, has acquired a new meaning, namely- the art of being disingenuous, deceptive and manipulative at the municipal level.

Mayor Sam Sullivan made an enormous contribution to the deceptive arts with his copyrighted phrase “Eco-density,” an expression that replaced the clumsy “block busting by incompatible developments.” This is spun as Smart Growth in the United States.

Eco-Density was so unpopular that Sullivan failed to get his party’s nomination for a second term. The voters replaced him with Mayor Robertson and his VISION party who, once elected, adopted Eco-Density in its entirety. To avoid the potentially sensitive point that he had deceived the voters, his party, VISION renamed Eco density. It became the Greenest City Initiative.

There is more than one PhD thesis to be developed on Vancouverism as the Art of Spin. What do you do if you have a policy to eliminate homelessness if after several years homelessness seems to increase?

You suggest that those afflicted by homelessness are mentally ill and demand that higher levels of government address the problem of mental illness. Changing the name solves the problem and shifts the costs to another pocket.

How do you solve the problems associated with life in the most overpriced city in the world? You subsidize developers by giving them increased density (see Eco-density or Greenest City), exempt them from usual development charges, and allow them to build rental housing at high market rates that few people can afford? You call the product “Affordable Housing” of course. As a bonus, you insist that you have reduced everyone’s carbon footprint.

How do you spin a land use system that confers enormous discretionary powers on bureaucrats with “guidelines” that can be changed outside of the required public hearing process on an ad-hoc basis without planning?

Call it a Plan, as in West End Plan.

What do you call a scheme to allow large property owners and speculators to reduce payment of taxes on vacant land? Community Gardens of course.

What do you call citywide protests against all of the above?

Community Participation is as good as anything!

How do you describe the protesters?  They are the Disengaged. 

What do you do about disengaged people? Let them eat cake in restaurants with special,  long community tables.

And, speaking of the Devil:

 Retweeted 4 times

Kevin Quinlan ‏@KQ_VanCity  Feb 22

climate action, food security, energy efficiency: proud of work @MayorGregor + City have done @greenestcity http://ow.ly/tTqeR  #vanpoli

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MUNICIPAL CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM

The Province is nearing its deadline for receiving submissions on municipal campaign finance reform. 

Municipal legislation in BC distinguishes between a councilor’s conflict of pecuniary interest and his or her conflict of political interests. A conflict of political interest arises when a politician votes for a matter that directly concerns a constituent who has funded his or her campaign. As the law stands, it is not treated as a conflict at all if the contribution has been disclosed. 

 A conflict of pecuniary interest (where a councilor has a direct or indirect financial interest in a matter) can result in an immediate disqualification from public office. 

Conflicts of political interests are treated as the norm. It is not an offense for a councilor to vote on a matter that involves a significant contributor to a politician’s campaign as long as the donation to the party or individual has been disclosed.

The law engages the legal fiction that an incumbent politician does not have a direct or indirect pecuniary economic interest in remaining in office. This enables a form of systemic corruption. It has become wide spread and corrosive on every continent and all countries are trying to deal with it one way or another.

Harvard Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig, in his recent book, “Republic Lost, how money corrupts Congress – and a plan to stop it" describes systemic it this way:

“This corruption has two elements, each of which feeds the other. The first element is bad governance, which simply means that our government doesn't track the expressed will of the people, whether on the left or on the right. Instead, the government tracks a different interest, one not directly affected by votes or voters. Democracy on this account seems to be a show or a ruse; power rests elsewhere. The second element is lost trust: when democracy seems a charade, we lose faith in its process. That doesn't matter to some of us – we will vote and participate regardless. But to more rational souls, the charade is a signal: spend your time elsewhere, because this game is not for real. Participation thus declines, especially among the sensible middle. Policy gets driven by the extremists at both ends.”

Lessig’s observation perfectly describes the situation at the municipal level in Vancouver and much of BC today. Two major parties are primarily funded by large donors. Voter turnout has fallen precipitously.

Vancouver’s at large system of elections doesn't help. Each candidate represents the entire population of the City. They can only become known if they belong to a well-funded party. Reform of any kind is promoted primarily by one group of candidates- the unelected. It is opposed by those who made it to office under whatever system exists. The Electors' Action Movement (TEAM) in the 1970s promised the Ward System when it was out of office. So did COPE. Once they were elected however, their reformist zeal quickly dissipated.

The Provincial Government, correctly in my view, insists that the laws dealing with election reform must be province wide.  They should not be left to each local government. To accomplish reform truly requires the wisdom of Solomon because it involves compromises of fundamental principles that are central to democracy.

In any big city that has an at large system where candidates can win only if they belong to a well funded political party, the electorate’s choice is filtered and thereby restricted by the party. 

If you have faith in democracy, the filter should be removed. One way of doing that is by limiting the maximum amount that can be donated by any one individual, corporation or union.

That solution is deceptively easy.  The obvious way to evade the dollar limit is by 3rd party advertising. So we also have to limit advertisements and public comments, at least around election time. But this involves an even more difficult trade off. Free speech is a fundamental right. Democracy requires that people be free to advocate what they choose particularly at election time. It is drastically abridged by limiting and punishing 3rd party advocates.

Another approach is not to impose limitations on donations at all but to treat as a conflict of interest  voting on a matter concerning the interests of donors who contribute more than some predetermined amount. If a developer contributes, for example, less than $1500 to a  political party or individual, and then later in the year has a matter before council, as long as the councilor has disclosed it he can vote. If the donation, however, is above the prescribed limit then he must not participate in a debate or vote.

One problem with that solution, however, is that it conflicts with Newton’s third law of politics: For every ethical action there is an equal and opposite chance for evasion.

It is not just the elected politicians who are vulnerable to corruption. Dealing with the problems relating to staff is just as difficult if not more so.   Planners and engineers can look forward to continuing their careers as consultants. Most of their outside the hall job offerings do not come from community groups. 

 Previous municipal experience looks very good on a resume’ when applying to a large firm of architects or engineers or as a consultant to a government. Even being fired by the City can be used as an effective promotional tool. The Provincial Program on electoral reform does not deal with maintaining the integrity of the bureaucracy but it is every bit as important.

The Supreme Court of Canada in a series of decisions has favoured local governments over citizens whenever there are ambiguities in legislation. The legislature has followed suit. The Local Government Act and Vancouver Charter require that bylaws be very broadly construed in favour of the city. The fact that municipal bylaws are hopelessly ambiguous is an open invitation to corruption. If neither a neighbor or a developer knows what a bylaw is trying to say then the matter is left to a planner's or engineer's discretion. The Province should delete the presumption in favour of the government. 

The proposed West End Plan as well as the Vancouver Budget are open invitations to pay offs. Therefore, to the extent that electoral reform takes aim at corruption, the amount of discretion that can be delegated to officials should be curtailed. That is what the rule of law is all about.

I would favour the creation of an independent municipal tribunal that deals with issues of ethics. Whenever one of these questions arises as to whether a proposed vote or other action complies with the conflict of interest regulations, a Councilor could request a prompt decision as to whether he may vote or participate in the matter or whether he is in a conflict and should step down. If the City of Vancouver can afford a flock of twitterers in its PR department, it could pay for a one or two person ethics commissioner who does not report to the manager and who would provide decisions in writing. 

AFFORDABLE FABLES FOR OUR TIMES

James Thurber recounted the  fable of the Little Girl and the Wolf.  One afternoon a  big wolf waited in the forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food for her grandmother.   When the little girl arrived at her grandmother's cottage, she saw that there was somebody in Grannies' bed with a nightcap and nightgown on.  Not taken in by the disguise, without a word, the little girl pulled out a Colt 45 and blew the Wolf’s head off.  

Moral:  It is not so easy to fool little girls  nowadays as it used to be.

Time passed. Wolves were driven out of town, forests were clear cut and affordable housing became  extinct.   

One day the Council asked the City Manager to restore the dwindled stock of affordable housing. 

The Manager said, "Sure. How affordable would you like it to be?"

Without blinking the Councillors  explained, “You know, Whatever.”

The Manager invited the developers to a costume ball and said, "The Council wants affordable rental housing.  Can you do this?"  

The Developers snapped back, “It Depends on a variety of factors including finishing, size,  fixtures, landscaping and such.”  

The Manager said, “Whatever?” 

The Developers explained, "Exactly."

A year later 1,917 rental units were completed.   

When a little girl in the West End  learned  that the rents were way higher than  current market rates,  she sued. She claimed that  "They had no right to delegate legislative powers to the Manager and the standards are inadequate. They have taken my money, handed it over to developers for these high priced chicken coups?"

Unlike the hapless wolf in the fable, the councilors, anticipated this reaction. "It is not about law," they opined. "It is all about spin."  They hired a battalion of professional  twitter persons.  “Tweet Like the wind,” exhorted the Mayor! 

And so they did. Here are the twinkling tweets the twitterers tweeted:

 Van Mayor's Office ‏@VanMayorsOffice29 Dec

The @CityofVancouver is now 1,917 units above its target for new rental housing by the end of 2014: http://ow.ly/s84bL  #vanpoli #bcpoli

1.    Van Mayor's Office ‏@VanMayorsOffice29 Dec “Making housing more affordable means residents & families can live closer to where they work" -@MayorGregor http://ow.ly/s845u  #vanpoli

2.    Kevin Quinlan ‏@KQ_VanCity26 Dec  Housing affordability, oil tankers, transit referendum: @MayorGregor year-end Q + A with @SunCivicLee http://ow.ly/29vohv  #vanpoli

3.    neal lamontagne ‏@nlamontagne26 Dec In cities working to enable new cultures of walking/bicycling, police are often slowest to change. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/us/in-a-car-culture-clash-its-los-angeles-police-vs-pedestrians.html … #vanpoli #walkLA

Moral:  It remains to be seen whether it is any harder to fool little girls today than it was when James Thurber composed his fable. Whatever.