One small victory for a park . . .

. . . and one giant leap for democracy, activism, and organization

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

It might have happened in a cloistered room on the third floor of an old building with harsh fluorescent lights, broken down air conditioning and inaudible sound system, but it was citizen-driven, progressive-activist, and pure-as-the-driven-snow democracy nevertheless. Despite the learned professional opinion of Bill Boons, City of Vancouver director of current planning, that no citizen attending a Board of Variation appeal at City Hall on August 24 had said anything relevant to the question the board could consider, nevertheless that board of four voted, just before midnight, three-to-one in favour of the citizens’ appeal before it. A slight victory for the citizens, perhaps, but one which sings in resonance with small victories by citizens of cities down through the ages.

At issue was a development permit application that had been approved by the director of planning, Larry Beasely. New owners of an East Vancouver residential property planned to build two duplex houses on the site. But it turns out, the site had over the course of a century been adopted by locals as their own secret garden and park. It features 100-year-old trees—nothing to sneeze at in a former forest that had been brutally clear cut—a tended garden, a unique and tiny cob house, two small workers’ homes that are the earliest houses in the area, and overall a wonderfully calming oasis and refuge from the otherwise noisy, rushing and crowded city. This was not a widely known park, but it was arguably used by as many people on a roughly regular basis as many parks situated among the much more expansively acred homes on the city’s west side.

The Vancouver Heritage Commission had neglected to list in their inventory the two ancient—by Vancouver standards—workers’ homes, and the modest cubes are indeed far from remarkable-looking. But if “heritage” is to mean whatever is important from the past, then they are notable, since more early-Vancouverites experienced life in this city inside this kind of tiny, unadorned, stuccoed house than inside the grandiose and beautiful fine craftsman constructions that fill out the bulk of what is listed by the commission in its registry. It is an oversight, one a more attuned and sensitive curator might in the future correct. The park and garden itself may become, if local residents manage to pull their plans off, a tiny public park of a unique kind with a wall to protect it as a secret garden with a bit of nature inside where kids can while away afternoons touching dirt and peering under rocks.

It would appear as though the real estate agent, who admitted at the appeal to being close friends with both the new buyer and the previous owner, may have failed to warn the new buyer that there was a history of intense local public interest in the fate of the park, the garden, the cob house and the two workers’ homes. Alerted to the threat to this home-grown public amenity, City Council attempted to purchase the property from the new owner. That offer failed to pry the property loose. At the appeal, he expressed the notion that, as owner of the property, so long as the conditions for the building permit were met, he was free to develop the property as we wished.

And that was indeed the central nut of the issue: private property rights versus public commons. It was true, as the planning department made clear at the appeal, that the director of planning made no error in the discharge of his responsibility. The site is zoned in a way that allows for the owner’s development plans. But a question was raised by two of the board members that sowed the seeds of doubt in what the planning department had said. These questions asked whether the director of planning, while addressing the letter of his instructions from City Council, was perhaps in this case failing to address the spirit of those instructions. The facts that City Council had taken steps to purchase the property, that well-regarded experts spoke of its value as a heritage institution and public amenity, and given that a very large crowd of neighbours numbering seventy or more, stayed from 5pm through nearly to midnight to attend the appeal and offer their testimony about the park and garden, the door was opened for the members of the board of variation to consider whether the director of planning had indeed erred in failing to address the spirit of his instructions from council.

The door was open enough for three of the four members to slip through and support the appeal (a minimum necessary since a two-two split would deny the appeal), effectively killing the permit to develop the property, and likely ending any further development that threatens the workers’ homes and the gardens together. The final and critical vote by the chair of the board was delivered a full three seconds before the main protagonists in this story realized they had won a case no one had given them the slightest chance to win going in.

But this little battle victory did not come easy. The main drivers of the effort knew early on they stood no chance of winning at the board of variance appeal. Nonetheless, they canvassed the wider neighbourhoods and gathered support from important area institutions. They spread pamphlets that explained the issues in clear fashion. They pulled resources from where they were available to produce, for example, a video presentation that illustrated the role of the property in many lives, and most of all, they focused on the one issue at hand rather than committing the most common error of tying it to larger more intractable issues, like erstwhile east side-west side tensions, They also did themselves a huge favour by projecting a position of reasonableness, often invoking the interests of the owners of the property and demonstrating their concern to see that those owners walk away without being harmed significantly.

It was also doubtless harder, more time-consuming, and certainly more numbing to the senses to sit through hours of inaudible discussion in front of a poker-faced board of variance in a hot and tiny City Hall room, than sending out email lists or blocking equipment and chanting. But the method of democracy this night was successful, and in that achievement, the success comes with the imprimatur of an official body and all the immutable authority it carries, and more importantly leaves behind a quite useful precedent that other similar neighbourhood groups can seize on.

There in that room, though lacking the more familiar drama and spectacle of thousands of citizens marching and chanting against big, rich and powerful overlords, was an illustration of active, direct, and progressive democratic politics unfolding and reinvigorating itself right before our eyes. These people won something tonight the rules say they shouldn’t have; too bad for the rules.

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