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Grok says : there are 78000 units already in the pipeline, enough for 160000 people. Enough for at least 20 years. Who are these villages for ?? vancouversun.com/opinion/col…

DRAFT: Open letter to Vancouver Council on the "Villages Plan" Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan Dear Mayor and Council, I write to challenge key elements of the Villages Plan. With this plan, along with the recently approved Official Development Plan and Broadway Plan, the City now entitles private owners of over 80,000 city parcels to build around 700,000 units of new housing. This is enough housing to accommodate an additional 1.4 million people in this city of 670,000. This massive landowner "entitlement" is provided free of charge with no expectation of payment for these new land rights. These land rights are worth many, many billions of dollars. The city is giving them away for free, all in the faith that this will somehow make housing more affordable.  This is an odd notion for our planners to hold. If adding hundreds of thousands of new units to existing neighbourhoods truly lowered prices, Vancouver would have North America's cheapest housing. It has North America's most expensive housing. It defies logic to expect an "unleashing of the housing market" - the primary justification provided for the Villages Plan - to produce affordable housing when we have spent decades trying to do just that. Vancouver has tripled its housing stock since the 1970s, all within a by then largely built out city. This is a higher percentage increase than any other North American centre city - yet our prices remain North America’s highest. Based on this evidence it is clear: if affordability is the main justification for this plan it obviously fails the test. Massively over zoning a city above reasonable expectations for population increase has little purpose. The only purpose it serves is to support the false narrative that only "restrictive zoning" stands in the way of affordable housing. It doesn’t. It never has. It can’t. The claim is false. On the contrary, If any city proves that it is possible to use zoning as a positive public policy tool, it is the City of Vancouver. We tripled density city wide. No other centre city did that. An unheard of achievement. While this sadly it did not make the city more affordable, as we had hoped, it did make the city better. Much better. How was this 200 percent growth accomplished? By working with residents, not against them. Community planning with local communities was the means to this achievement. Planning with communities was not an impediment, as some now claim. It was the democratic path to a better city. But sadly it is now obvious that our decades long effort to encourage the housing market, in the hope that housing would stay affordable, has failed us. Given this evidence it seems foolish to upzone so aggressively, hoping against hope that, in 30 or 40 years, housing will be more affordable. Achieving durable affordability much sooner than this requires a major change in direction. We don't lack housing, we lack affordable housing. Given this fact, we should follow a path that other similar cities have charted - one where the bulk of new housing built is affordable to average wage earners. This can be done by reviving the Vancouver tradition of building non-market housing at scale. Our own internationally famous False Creek South serves as a storied precedent. Service workers to business owners have found homes in that lovely self sustaining community. The pattern is obvious. Reuse it. This Villages Plan, sadly, moves us in the opposite direction. This plan eliminates any thoughts of inclusionary zoning entirely, driven by what seems like a dogged adherence to an inapplicable theory of supply and demand. I urge you to revise these plans by deeply involving residents from every corner of the city. Do so in a highly collaborative, bottom up, neighborhood focussed planning process. One that might arrive at much stronger inclusionary zoning requirements. The people of Vancouver would rally behind such plans - plans  that ensure that their sons and daughters and the service workers who keep this city running can afford to live in the very neighbourhoods they serve and call home. Do not pass this plan. Let us turn instead to plans that are sustainable in scale, equitable in outcome, and shaped not for the market alone, but for the people who live and work here. Thank you, Patrick M. Condon, Vancouver