City Council

I went to a city council meeting tonight, the first I've been to in Vancouver, the public forum doesn't count. I sat in the wrong area the whole time, with the press and the signed-up speakers, totally oblivious that I was in the wrong area. I started to get embarrassed and then realized that I was going to city council meetings for fun, and am past being able to get embarrassed for things like that.

Anyway, it was a specific public meeting about building an apartment building in the Vancouver neighborhood of Dunbar, a community curled around the outskirts of the really rick area of Vancouver, Point Grey. Many residents have been there 20, 30, even 60 years, and would never be able to afford to buy a house there now. But many are urban professionals, lawyers, professors, living in two-story post-war houses under A-shaped roofs, lush, BC gardens spilling out of their front yards. The Knox Unitarian Church has a giant plot of land in the neighborhood, and in order to keep itself out of the red (their halls are near-empty on Sundays,) they have agreed to sell a lot of their land to the developer of a proposed apartment complex for seniors. In exchange for that sale, the developer would build an annex for the church on that land.

Many/most of the residents of Dunbar are opposed to this proposed seniors home. Eleven years ago, a committee of residents got together and created a "Dunbar Vision" document that outlines what they wanted and didn't want for their neighborhood, and it was ratified by council.

This seniors home is technically five stories. No building in the area can be higher than three except seniors homes. It is over what that document outlined in terms of density, except in the case of seniors homes. In other words, if that building wasn't a seniors home, there's no way in hell it would ever get approved.

Also, that annex is going to force a very high brick wall onto the periphery of a few peoples back yards. and they want to put a playground on its roof. The whole building is going to block the sun and dwarf many houses along its street.

So what makes it a seniors home? You have to be 55 or over to live there. That's it. There is nothing else special to the design of the building, including the width of doorways for the inevitable wheelchairs, communal space, library, care attendants, a common kitchen, nothing that actually makes it a seniors home. And if you're under 55, you can pay a fine of an undisclosed amount to an unnamed company that will exempt you from that rule.

It was pretty apparent what the residents thought. The developer (the idea that he was foreign skirting around the edges of their comments) was going to sell his condos for $1.5 million each after having found a way to bust through the laughable "Dunbar Vision" and resulting bylaws for that hood.

It's sometimes boring and uncomfortable at public forums such as these (see last post.) But everyone was amazing tonight. One 90 year old woman walked to the podium and gave a tongue in cheek relaying of what the developers had proposed. "There are plenty of bike racks in the plans for the front this so-called seniors building. Because that's what we seniors need. Bike racks."

Another woman spoke, in an accent that hinted at long-ago Britishness, to all of the points in an astoundingly articulate and thoughtful way (she was the chairwoman of the Dunbar Vision Committee for a reason I guess.) She made the point that there is no law or regulation higher than city council that would force a landlord to stick to an age restriction on a building, making that building a seniors home. It happened to another building in Dunbar - they went back to council and asked that that amendment be changed, and council approved it. This developer can do the same.

The woman sitting beside me, wearing a bright pink scrunchy in her hair and pants that looked as if they were made out of upholstery, was nervous all night. She kept crossing out lines of type on a crumpled piece of paper, then writing them back in. Finally her name was called. She had what sounded like an Eastern European accent. She told council that she had watched as traffic became more and more dense in that neighborhood over the years, and how kids were having too many close calls with cars. That was one reason why she didn't want the thing to go through, the high traffic density.

The other was that in order to build it, they were going to tear down her home, and she had no where else to go. She had been on a waiting list for a co-op, the only other thing she could afford in this city, for nine years. Because her two children are different sexes, by law she needs to find a three-bedroom apartment, and that will be impossible. She is a single mom with two kids in Vancouver. She knows her options.