Thread by @craigjorgens

Tweet storm: re Making Room as Chainsaw Massacre of the city oped Elizabeth Murphy – The delicate scalpel surgery she advocates for is actually the Chainsaw Massacre she fears so much. #vanpoli vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/… @VancouverSun

First, she misleads in the very first sentence. A committee passed recommendations to council. They started the conversation that we are having now. We are currently in the public debate and engagement period for this proposal.

Second sentence – straight up false. Council hasn’t pursued a policy of rezoning over the last decade. It's done policy changes. Most community plans, notably Cambie Corridor, have lacked any city initiated rezonings. Every development in Cambie Corridor has a been spot rezoning.

Contrast with the neighborhood of Norquay in East Vancouver (centered near Nanaimo and Kingsway) whose rezoning experiment the Making Room recommendations propose taking city wide.

On the very map Murphy features it is a notable hole in East Van that didn’t see huge residential properties inflated beyond the average.

Moving on to the second paragraph it is worth reiterating that nothing has actually been approved yet. Policy Wonks like me now have weeks to pour over Making Room before the recommendations go to council.

That said I am a little salty that they dropped so much because it was overwhelmed me and I shut down for a solid fortnight just processing the recommendations from this and the Broadway Terms of Reference.

I have been doing significant community outreach on the issue Making Room type development in the Cambie Corridor. It would have been nice if I administration would have signalled this was in the works.

But that doesn’t excuse the blatant lie of - rezoning across the city in all RS (detached) and RT (duplex/infill) zones to multi-family zones under the Housing Strategy, Making Room and Broadway Corridor Planning

Only one of these proposes actual rezonings - Making Room. It is the piece of the Housing Strategy that does this. Broadway Corridor Planning is a terms of reference for a community planning process that will be years away from initiating any rezonings.

It basically proposed allowing all ground orientated housing types in our neighborhoods by right. These aren't huge multifamily apartments or condos.

Third Paragraph - “They seem determined to ruin what’s left of the city”... Ok its time to actually explain what Making Room proposes and how it will enhance our neighborhoods.

At its heart Making Room cuts the red tape preventing neighborhood scale, organic densification from occuring. It provides an alternative to major developments. This isn’t a handout for big developers.

Big Developers don’t build duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes and other minor forms of multi-family housing. These are built by small, local construction companies, custom home builders and importantly by the longtime property owners that know and care about the neighborhood.

Making Room says that local neighborhoods should have the option to densify on their own terms. They should have a variety of options that all work within the existing grade orientated character of our neighborhoods.

Making room is the gentle scalpel surgery providing low impact density options for locals to DIY The Status Quo is the Chainsaw Massacre.

We Can Densify Better

Gosh Paragraphs 4&5 - It’s like she doesn’t even know where planning work has been done. The hotspots in 2016 residential properties inflating beyond average are Main Street, Sunset, Kensingon Cedar-Cottage and East Vancouver N of the Expo Line.

Planning work has been done in Norquay Village, Cambie Corridor, Grandview Woodlands, Marpole, Mount Pleasant, and the West End. These are not the hot spots according to her own evidence.

Did she even look at her own map?!?

That said we do have a problem with our older, more affordable stock being demolished and being replaced by more expensive new developments. Guess what is the worst offender for this… new single detached homes (or as Murphy calls them - Monster Homes)

In most neighborhoods we are tearing down affordable single detached homes to build unaffordable single detached monster homes. We are losing affordable homes and not even getting more housing out of it.

Making room proposes an alternative to this. It allows housing that is similar in cost to the monster homes but houses more people at a lower price point. That is the choice.

The insecure rental present in these homes will be lost either way. The city has no means of protecting those. If anything upzoning allows many informal duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes to have a path to legalization and protection.

What if our most affordable housing could be secure?

What if we has zoning that promoted renovations rather than demolitions?

Jumping ahead… As a volunteer advocate with @GenSqueeze I take personal offense to her slander of our work. Just go look at the publicly available expectations we have of any project we support. gensqueeze.ca/housing_supply

Ok and Zoned Capacity is an incredibly misleading statistic that can actually be quite harmful. In many cases the “spare” capacity is where our most affordable, older stock rental apartments are. They can be demolished and rebuilt up to the spare capacity over my dead body.

Next she attacks the principle of right supply by going off on a tangent about the HYPOTHETICAL RESULTS of a Broadway plan. That tangent literally goes on until the end of the op-ed.

But since we are talking Broadway… did she even look at her own map?

She then characterizes it a short subway to nowhere… WHAT PLANET DOES SHE LIVE ON??? Has she been to central Broadway in the last 40 years? It is a subway to the second biggest jobs hub in the province. A direct connection to the Canada Line. This is SOMEWHERE

The vision of street cars she advocates is nothing more than showy transit that doesn’t actually improve service. We have some of the best, most frequent and reliable busses in north america. Street Cars wouldn’t really improve on them.

I question if she actually takes transit at all. Our service is improved by better frequency better speed and better reliability. Building dedicated bus lanes does far more than a street car for improving service.

Broadway is important because it creates fast, reliable and high capacity connections East-West across the city and region.

And the next tanget of Matias… nothing prevents the demolition of single family homes. They are being demolished all across the city to build bigger single family homes. Making Room zoning may actually make it easier for him to stay in place.

All in all, this entire Op-ed demonstrates a distinct obliviousness to what affordable housing is and the very real barriers that restrictive zoning imposes on affordable housing.

Let's talk about Making Room because it has tradeoffs. But what it does do if give the hope of better density.

Dear Lord I need to go to bed