Metro Vancouver needs new rules for smart-growth development

Affordable-housing creation starts with overhaul of regional government

Bob Ransford
Sun

In my last two columns I attempted to shed some light on the less-than-impressive track record of the provincial government in addressing the important issues that affect our quality of life in urban British Columbia, especially in Metro Vancouver.

At best, provincial policies have contradicted the current government's talk about making housing more affordable and addressing urban growth's environmental impacts that are contributing to climate change.

The current provincial government has completely neglected its role in establishing effective and workable ground rules for local and regional governments when it comes to coordinating land use and transportation planning.

It is this coordinated planning and growth management that is so desperately needed to address the supply side of the housing supply-and-demand equation and keep housing prices within an affordable range. It is also this kind of regional and local planning that is required to shrink our urban ecological footprint and begin reversing the climate-change trend.

Now that I have criticized, I want to offer my view on what the provincial government can do to make housing more affordable and better address urban growth's environmental impacts.

It can start by mandating an overhaul of regional governments in B.C., starting with Metro Vancouver.

Step one would be amalgamating the Metro Vancouver and Fraser Valley regional districts so that we have one metropolitan government for the entire metropolitan area. We're one big urban area already, with one transportation spine, a shared air-shed and with common geographic constraints.

Both regional governments are toothless in managing regional planning and growth. TransLink, serving Metro Vancouver, is both severely constrained in securing the funding it needs and disconnected from the decision making around regional and local planning. TransLink needs to become part of the new amalgamated regional government.

The current regional governance structure doesn't work. It relies on consensus-based decision making by a group of politicians who spend too much time spinning their wheels grappling with problems that go far beyond their parochial interests. Collectively, the voters who live in Metro Vancouver have no way of holding these politicians responsible as they are not elected, but instead appointed to Metro Vancouver's board by their respective municipal councils.

An overhaul of regional government needs to start with a new governance structure. An effective regional government needs a board that is accountable to taxpayers. Perhaps the best model would be a hybrid model that includes half of the board members elected directly by voters in Metro Vancouver and the other half appointed by municipal councils.

An overhaul of metropolitan Vancouver's regional government needs to include new ground rules for a regional plan that clearly spells out how smart growth will be accommodated over time and allocates growth to municipalities at various density levels that reinforce smart growth and support a robust and diverse transportation network. The regional government needs authority to ensure that municipalities follow the plan and accept growth by zoning land adequate to meet growth targets.

Adequate land needs to be identified for industrial and commercial growth as well as residential growth so that we can ensure a healthy balance between jobs and homes and maintain a strong regional economy. The regional government needs to have enough clout to stop the conversion of industrial and commercial lands to residential uses.

A progressive metropolitan plan shouldn't simply focus on existing growth centres and downtowns but should also recognize that the greatest opportunity to improve urbanism and achieve real gains in quality of life is in the suburbs, especially at the metropolitan edge.

It is simply not good enough to draw an arbitrary growth boundary on paper without looking at finer design details of how we might best integrate suburban and rural areas.

Huge opportunities exist to not only preserve farmland forever but to make that farmland viable for farmers to farm.

Farming can be carried out on a more human scale with a focus on local food security.

The current approach with the Agricultural Land Reserve does little more than create a stand-off at the urban-rural interface, leaving farmland vulnerable to political whim instead of making it valued as part of our urbanism.

Real enforcement of a regional plan requires more than the current murky dispute-resolution processes that currently exist under provincial legislation. Regional governments need to be able to order compliance when a municipality fails to live up to the plan. Full compliance with the regional plan should also be a condition of receiving provincial and federal infrastructure funding as well.

A new regional government needs to be given all of the necessary powers to closely integrate land use and transportation strategies, including the taxing authority to raise the funds necessary to build transportation infrastructure.

Metro Vancouver expresses it best in one of their documents on regional growth: "land-use patterns are a key determinant of transportation demand. Transportation supply and demand measures, in turn, have an impact on land-use patterns and travel behaviour."

Only with a new more effective regional government will our governments, all of them, be successful in making housing more affordable and addressing urban growth's environmental impacts.

The ball is in the provincial government's court.

- Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with CounterPoint Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer who specializes in urban land use issues. E-mail: ransford@counterpoint.ca

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