The City

The NPA—a party for the speculators

By allowing market forces to determine zoning ahead of reasoned planning, the City of Vancouver has evolved into an exclusive resort that does no work

By Reed Eurchuk

“Urban planning is the coordination of land monopoly” —Robert Fitch

Vancouver’s downtown development has been celebrated in a couple of high profile books over the last few years. John Punter’s The Vancouver Achievement and Lance Berelowitz’s Dream City both laud Vancouver’s downtown development over the last twenty or so years. But a couple of recent articles offer a reassessment of that development. Critical minds have found cracks in downtown Vancouver’s airbrushed sheen.

Last summer, Trevor Boddy wrote a trenchant analysis of Vancouver’s sparkling new downtown entitled, “Downtown: A Fool’s Paradise?” in the Vancouver Sun. In it, Boddy humourously ponders a “Whistlerized” Vancouver with a “destiny as a short-sighted residential resort.” He suggested—given the dearth of new office buildings downtown, together with the never-ending condominium developments—that Vancouver’s future may be “as a dormitory suburb.”

Boddy pointed to two culprits. First, a powerful economic fact propels Vancouver’s burgeoning inner city suburbs, like Coal Harbour and Yaletown, ever upward: “There is now a five-to-one ratio between the economic return per square metre of new condominium apartments built in downtown Vancouver versus a square meter of new office.” Secondly, Boddy criticized “some ham-handed rezoning” of a part of the downtown peninsula in 1991, zoning then promoted by the City-governing NPA. As Boddy says, the rezoning in 1991, coupled with the economic fact of extremely high economic returns on residential property, “means that developers . . . would be out of their minds to build places to work here, rather than places to sleep, such as hotels and condos.”

In an article that can be read as a sequel to Boddy’s, Frances Bula of The Vancouver Sun recently reported that “city planners are . . . looking at every option to provide space for office-based business.” Bula echoes Boddy when she writes that planners found “everything was going residential” because “the ability to sell condos for $350 a square foot and more was trumping office space that rents for $15 to $25 a square foot.” Bula interviewed UBC economist Tim Hutton, who said Vancouver needs “to develop a new plan for fostering production jobs in an expanded downtown.”

Hopefully, Boddy and Bula’s writings signal a change in thinking about downtown planning. Beginning in the 1950s, but accelerating with Walter Hardwick and then City-governing TEAM in the 1970s, successive city councils consciously chose a path aimed at assisting the expulsion of blue-collar industry from downtown. One by one, the industries that used to ring the perimeter of False Creek from the north side of the Granville Street Bridge all the way around to Granville Island, left, mainly due to rezoning by the City, and the subsequent inflation of land values.

Heralded now as a visionary and key theorist of the modernizing of Vancouver’s downtown, Hardwick promoted the idea of a “post-industrial” Vancouver largely shorn of its blue-collar manufacturing industries. Hardwick promoted “policies directed toward increasing the densities of population-income in the inner city,” as he wrote in his 1974 book Vancouver. And he promoted “the idea of downtown as a centre of power (economic and political) and the services to power.” He criticized the continuing industrial sites located downtown, noting that their survival was lasting, he wrote, only because “land rent was low.” And he applauded CP Rail’s development arm Marathon Realty’s decision in 1969 to begin charging “economic rents.” So Hardwick promoted a neo-liberal urbanism where land values, freed from restrictive zoning by government, determined land usages.

The city signed on whole-heartedly. In a key City document, the 1991 “Central Area Plan,” the author’s own figures found that the proposed changes would see 8.81 million square feet deleted from the downtown peninsula office-zoned capacity.

Now with Hardwick’s dream a reality, Boddy and Bula reflect on the outcomes. Boddy sees Vancouver resembling more a resort or tourist destination than a working city. The effects of the astronomical rise in land values are everywhere. Elderly people, poor people, average wage earners, students, artists, and single parents, will be expelled from the neo-liberal city. People who remain will slave away for years to get control of their mortgage or to raise the $1,000 per month they need for a single bedroom apartment.

Left to itself, the market in land looks for the highest returns, not the best uses. Speculation takes over. All investment in land is necessarily speculative. In the words of geographer David Harvey, land is a form of “fictitious capital,” that is, it represents “a flow of money not backed by any commodity transaction.” Land “treated as a pure financial asset,” says Harvey, “is in principle no different from similar investments in government debt, stocks and shares of enterprises, consumer debt and so on.” And like the stock market and various forms of financial speculation, the land market is prone to wild speculative fevers and manipulation by land monopolies and oligopolies. We are currently living through one of these irrational speculative fevers right now.

Why, as both Bula and Boddy ask in different ways, would a sane person invest in production-oriented industry when the casino economy beckons? Blame the successive NPA-dominated councils, who long ago abdicated their role in directing positive investment in Vancouver for the benefit of all types of Vancouverites, in favour of working in complicity with the speculators.