Development proposals for the West End have local residents bonding together to make their voices heard.

Credit: Doug Shanks

NEWS: West End residents unite over City zoning plans

West End residents presented city council with more than 2,000 petition signatures last week in support of developing a neighbourhood community plan. The petition was circulated in response to mounting concerns among local residents about West End rezoning applications that have been introduced under Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Short Term Incentives for Rental (STIR) program. The program, intended to speed up rental-housing development, allows for expedited permit processing. But the program has caused worry among many people living in the community, due to the allowances it makes for building height, density, and affordability. In response, they have launched neighbourhood campaigns and blogs, such as WestEndVision.ca, and circulated the petition, which urges the City to reconsider the applications. The petition, called “No Rezoning Without a Comprehensive Plan,” asks that the City maintain its six-storey maximum building height for the West End (in contrast to a proposed 22-storey apartment building at 1401 Comox Street), and engage in a consultation process with residents to protect neighbourhood livability and character.

The residents’ petition was delivered to Mayor Gregor Robertson and Vancouver City Council in advance of a nine-hour council meeting on April 8. The meeting was largely dominated by debate concerning COPE councillor Ellen Woodsworth’s motion to engage the West End community in an open discussion of its needs and provide a timeline for a community-planning process.

“I think that everybody is pretty well unanimous that they want some kind of comprehensive plan for the West End, that spot rezonings mean that individual developers are being lobbied by individual groups, rather than [there being] a comprehensive plan of what’s needed in the community,” Woodsworth said in an interview with WE. “Neighbourhoods are the strength of this city. You’ve got the heritage, you’ve got parks, you’ve got livability and sustainability. We can only maintain them if we engage the neighbourhood in a visioning process.”

Vision Vancouver councillor and West End resident Tim Stevenson has been working on West End housing issues since he was elected to council in 2005. He called parts of Woodsworth’s original motion redundant. City staff, he says, are already working on a community plan for the West End, but other neighbourhoods are ahead of it on the list.

Grandview-Woodlands will be the City’s next stop for developing a community plan, after it finishes with Mount Pleasant this fall. The process, Stevenson says, takes about two years. “All that’s going on in the West End is part of a very transparent, open process that the City has always engaged in,” he says. “This is not different except for the fact that we now have put into the mix rental housing.”

Rusty Ker, who has been participating in an ad-hoc group of fellow West End residents who share information about neighbourhood development, believes he speaks for many when he says the rezoning applications do not mean business as usual. “The big impact [on] the community is the apparent unwillingness of the planning department to listen to the concerns of the community [with regard to] the 1401 Comox development,” he says. “It is a five-fold increase in [floor-space ratio, the size of a building’s footprint in relation to the size of the lot it’s built on].”

Ker adds that a rezoning application for 1215 Bidwell Street, currently home to the nightclub Maxine’s Hideaway and a grocery store, is an increase of three times the allowable density under the City’s current zoning, “with minimal return to the West End community in the form of contributions that would allow improvements to area amenities such as the library, the aquatic centre, and other area amenities that the West Enders sorely need.”

Another West End resident, Randy Helten, is supportive of city council engaging in discussions about the community’s future, but he is critical of the way the city’s planning department is communicating to council. “People who understand the language of land-use planning are quite disappointed that the planning department was not portraying correct information to the council,” he says. “[West End planning issues are] the tip of the iceberg. It has to do not only with single-site rezoning, but the whole way that planning decisions are made in the city right now.”

Members of the public are invited to attend an open house about the 1401 Comox Street rezoning application on Tuesday, Apr. 20, at the Coast Plaza Hotel (1763 Comox), 4-7pm. A West End town hall meeting takes place later that week on Thursday, Apr. 22, also at the Coast Plaza, 7-8:30pm. Details will be posted at WestEndVision.ca