Broadway/Kingsway Rezoning - Workshop Venue Change

Broadway/Kingsway Rezoning - Workshop Venue Change

Dear Registrant:
Thank you for your interest in and registration for the Community Workshop being held on Sunday, March 20, 11:30 am to 4:30 pm, to discuss the Rize Alliance rezoning application for the site at Main, Broadway, Kingsway, and Watson St.

Please note that due to the tremendous public response to this workshop - we currently have 136 people registered and registration is not yet closed - we have had to change venue. The workshop will now be held at:

The Salt Building
85 West 1st Ave. (at Manitoba)
Parking is available along 1st Ave. A light lunch will be provided for participants. Please find attached a map setting out the location of the Salt Building.

Also, please find attached the Community Workshop agenda and a description of the workshop objectives and group process. We remind everyone that the doors to the Salt Building will open at 11:30 AM so you can preview the presentation materials and talk with the proposal proponents and City staff. This will be followed by brief presentations and then group discussion.

I am also including a link to the Mount Pleasant Community Plan http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/cpp/mountpleasant/pdf/MPcommunityplan.pdf which will inform much of the discussion on Sunday. Of particular importance are the 'Overarching Principles" and the sections on the 'Uptown Shopping Area' and the 'Rize Alliance Development site".

Thanks so much for your interest in this event, and I'm looking forward to seeing you on Sunday.
Yours truly,
Peter Burch
Planner
Mount Pleasant Community Planning Program
Community Planning Division
Vancouver Planning Department
604.873.7486 (phone)
604.873.7898 (fax)
peter.burch@vancouver.ca

Nancy Wormald
Planning Analyst
Planning Department
City of Vancouver
604.873.7388

26-Story Building aimed at Broadway at Kingsway - Have your say

The aunties have been saying ever since they happened in late 2009 that the two three-alarm fires at Broadway and Main and Broadway and Kingsway seemed to be property-owner arson to clear the lots for development. Now one of those properties is being proposed for a 26-story building!

"The City of Vancouver has received an application from Acton Ostry Architects Inc. to rezone the block bounded by Broadway, Kingsway, 10th Avenue, and Watson Street from C-3A (Commercial) District to a CD-1 "

Quite apart from the question of whether these owners are arsonists who should not profit from their crimes, such a building would be quite a travesty on that corner, since the next tallest building anywhere near there is only nine stories. It would grossly overshadow and shade the neighbourhood. It would cram a huge amount of mostly wealthy single and childless people into what is still basically a working-class family neighbourhood, and the people in the tower will be literally looking down on everyone and tend to be socially disconnected from the rest of the community. Plus, they will all be trying to find parking places on the street (and at Kingsgate Mall).

Yes, property owners will be supposed to provide a quota of parking spaces; however, conversations with property managers, people who live in apartments, and their neighbours reveal that apartment dwellers in Vancouver prefer not to pay the stall rent and the very considerable tax on such spaces, preferring to drive around and around poaching places wherever they can. In most cases there are not nearly enough spaces for all the cars anyway.

A further objection to a 26-story building is that if one tower is allowed to be built then the zoning will be broken in for additional towers of that magnitude. That will throw the longtime Mt. Pleasant Community Plan the city and neighbourhood have been developing - featuring three-to-six-story dwellings above stores - into the ashcan. Chinatown just went through a battle to prevent this invasion of the giants there, and now Mt. Pleasant will have to fend them off with our activism if we don't want them.

Here's what the Mt. Pleasant Community Plan says about what's supposed to happen to Main street - just to the west of this corner:

5.1 Uptown Shopping Area
Overall Concept Plan
• Retain the existing scale and character of Main Street (from 7th to
11th Avenue).
• Ensure that Main Street be kept more local in scale with smaller
frontages. Retain the ‘high and low’ rhythm of building heights
along Main Street. Retain older more affordable housing (e.g., 3
storey walk-ups) for low income families and individuals.
• Create an improved pedestrian environment linking important sites
along Main (e.g., IGA site, Heritage Hall).
• Allow additional density and height for mixed-use buildings of up
to 6 storeys to increase housing opportunities along South Main

One nearby precedent for neighbours resisting height was the change in plan for Broadway and Fraser, where the city intends to build a building for the hard-to-house. Through a series of planning and zoning hearings, those plans were reduced from 12 stories to 11 stories to finally 9 stories. The proposed 26-story building sits right in between Broaday and Fraser and Broadway and Main - how long can we keep heights in human scale around there if we allow the first oversized erection?

Now the city planning department has just announced "community workshops" to test the waters about the zoning hearing on the Broadway and Kingsway location. Here's the text of the letter they sent out to parties who had registered as interested (sans the pictures - :

COMMUNITY SERVICES GROUP Planning
Current Planning - RezoningMar

March 4, 2011

NOTICE OF REZONING APPLICATION AND INVITATION TO COMMUNITY WORKSHOP

Dear Sir and/or Madam:

RE: Proposed Rezoning of 228, 236 and 246 East Broadway and 180 Kingsway
(Broadway, Kingsway, 10th Avenue and Watson Street - See Map on Reverse)

The City of Vancouver has received an application from Acton Ostry Architects Inc. to rezone the block bounded by Broadway, Kingsway, 10th Avenue, and Watson Street from C-3A (Commercial) District to a CD-
1 (Comprehensive Development) District to allow development with a mixed-use commercial and residential project, including the following components:

• a 6- and 7-storey base with retail and commercial uses at grade on the Broadway, Watson Street, and
Kingsway frontages and residential units above;
• a 26-storey residential tower at the 10th Avenue and Kingsway corner;
• 62 rental dwelling units and 206 market dwelling units (total 268 units);
• a 9,200 sq. ft. artist production space at the 10th Avenue and Watson Street corner;
• 6,600 sq. ft. of additional public open space at street level through additional sidewalk widths;
• 362 bicycle parking stalls;
• three levels of underground parking for 319 vehicles; and
• access to parking and loading facilities on the Watson Street frontage.

A facilitated Community Workshop will be held to discuss the project. The details are as follows:

Date: March 20, 2011
Time: 12:00 Noon – 4:30 p.m.
(Doors open at 11:30 for viewing the proposal)
Place: Native Education College, 285 East 5th Avenue

RSVP REQUIRED – Please contact us as soon as you can to confirm your attendance at the Workshop. We need to know the number of participants in order to properly plan the event. RSVP to:

Nancy Wormald - (604) 873-7388 nancy.wormald@vancouver.ca

The workshop will begin with brief presentations regarding the City’s rezoning process, an overview of the recently approved Mount Pleasant Community Plan as it relates specifically to this site, and a description of the rezoning application that has been submitted. During the workshop we intend to collect neighbourhood input on several different aspects of the project through small group discussions and reporting out.

A follow-up Open House event is planned for April 12 at Heritage Hall, 3102 Main Street. This will be a drop-in event so that the community can view the response made by the project design team to the input provided at the March 20th workshop, and provide additional comments. The Open House will run from
4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

If you are unable to attend the March 20th workshop, please consider sharing your comments via letter, email or online at vancouver.ca/rezapps. The drawings and information about the project are posted there.

All community input will be taken into account in our analysis of the application and ultimately staff’s recommendations to City Council. Council will consider policies, the public interest and staff recommendations when making its decision to approve or deny the rezoning application.

If you would like to view the plans which have been submitted with the application, please enquire at the Planning Department reception desk on the Third Floor, in the East Wing of City Hall, at 2675 Yukon Street. For additional information you can also contact the applicant, Alan Davies, Acton Ostry Architects Inc. at
604.739.3344.

The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act deems any response to this notification to be public information. If you have contracted to sell or lease all or part of your property to any person, firm, or corporation, we strongly urge you to deliver this courtesy notification letter, as soon as possible, to the prospective buyer or tenant.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss the application, please call me at 604.873.7727. You may also send written comments to me at the address below, by fax to 604.873.7060, by E-mail to alison.higginson@vancouver.ca, or online through www.vancouver.ca/rezapps.

Yours truly,

Alison Higginson Rezoning Planner alison.higginson@vancouver.ca Phone: 604.873.7727

AH/ws


F:\VanDocs Offline Records\Offline Records (VP)\236 E ~ Land Administration and Planning - Rezoning - Rezoning Case Files\236 E Broadway - Notification
& Community Workshop - March 5th - 2011-02-23.DOC(09 IA)
City Hall 453 West 12th Avenue Vancouver BC V5Y 1V4 vancouver.ca
Current Planning - Rezoning tel: 604.873.7038 fax: 604.873.7060

The plan is artfully written to include six stories on one side, as if that would hide the tower looming over it. It also includes an artist's studio space - perhaps a tribute to the artist whose studio burned at that site and who lost 500 paintings, though she might not be able to afford this one. And it includes a larger than average number of rental units. However, how often have we seen these amenities peeled off one by one as the developers run crying to the city that they hadn't foreseen the inevitable cost overruns?

-FW

Shaw Snoops on Subscribers to Sell

Shaw Cable told one of the aunties that they have 17 "auditors" going around town right now looking to see if anyone has renters living with them in their homes. They send people around to snoop on your property and talk to unsuspecting people who are at your house. If they think that you are not just a single-family unit, Shaw will leave you a note signed by a "technician," threatening to disconnect the cable to that part of the house the very next day unless you sign up for a whole second subscription. According to offers they are sending out in the mail right now, the introductory offer on a subscription is about $75 a month.

When you call Shaw up to dispute the disconnect order, they say that you have to let them send an "auditor" into your house to "inspect" who is living in there. One man who answered the phone in the residential department that takes new and changed subscriptions at Shaw said that "legally" you have to have a separate subscription if you take any money from anyone who lives in your house, even if you rent out a room temporarily.

The auntie advises not to let anyone from Shaw inspect your house, as this is a company getting waaay too intrusive into their customers' lives!

The company may be getting desperate as so many people are watching TV on the internet instead of getting premium cable subscriptions. But what is happening is that they are getting formerly satisfied, regular-paying customers in an uproar and now starting to look around for other options for not only their cable television but also their phone and internet services.

Red-light District Proposed by Council

Actually, this was in the Flashback column in the BC section of today's Globe & Mail - an article about something that happened in October 1985. It says that the Harcourt-led Vancouver City Council created a red light district in response to complaints about "rampant prostitution" in Mt. Pleasant. The council spent $36,000 on street lighting and wooden barricades in the area between Alberta and Ontario on the west and east and Second and Fifth avenues on the north and south. This designation of an old warehouse district as "red light" was supposed to keep prostitution activity off the streets of Mt. Pleasant, where residents were complaining. The article quotes Marie Arrington, from the Alliance for the Safety of Prostitutes, as saying that the designated area was too deserted and that the lights wouldn't make it safe.

Now that that Main between 2nd and 5th is being subjected to a city development project, those 12 square blocks are likely to be more in demand and much less deserted soon. I wonder if it is still officially on the books as a Red Light Area.

One of the things not mentioned in the Globe piece is that 1985 was also the year that Federal Bill C-49 "expanded the definition of soliciting to include the act of stopping or attempting to stop a person to communicate for the purpose of engaging in prostitution." ( http://www.statcan.gc.ca/kits-trousses/justice/8104309-eng.pdf )

According to the Rape Relief Files on prostitution, "On April 10, 1986, because a prostitute challenged the new law, a Vancouver provincial court judge ruled that C-49 was unconstitutional. The police put 67 cases on hold; women continued to work the streets." However, they add that

May 7, 1986. The B.C. Supreme Court ruled that the law was not unconstitutional and overturned a lower court ruling. Since then, 341 arrests have been made. The police are back at the entrapment, harassment and brutal treatment of prostitutes and so are the courts. The convictions since the Supreme Court ruling in May now include probation restrictions to stay out of particular named areas of cities, and one woman was confined to her home between the hours of 6 pm and 6 am. The courts have been forced by women's necessity and women's defiance to use the injunction tactic again, in addition to fining and holding without trial.

http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/herstory/rr_files86.html

The Statscan page I cited earlier http://www.statcan.gc.ca/kits-trousses/justice/8104309-eng.pdf graphs reported prostitution-related "incidents" between 1981 and 1997. Among the comments on the page is a note that reporting varies with trends in police enforcement practices, and that as of 1997, 89% of the incidents were about communication - only a few about pimping or bawdyhouses.

The Rape Relief prostitution pages document that after C-49 passed the numbers of "escort services" and "massage parlours" openly advertising increased dramatically. Also that police charged to arrest men beating women generally failed to arrest if the woman was a prostitute.

So one might infer that pretty much from day one, the federal anti-prostitution law was used primarily against street prostitution, not against pimps, bawdyhouses, and prostitution outcall services "living off the avails."

On September 28, 2010, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that all three provisions of the federal anti-prostitution law violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and called on parliament to write new legislation to prevent the proliferation of "unlicensed brothels." http://jurist.org/paperchase/2010/09/ontario-court-strikes-down-anti-prostitution-laws.php

If that were to happen, perhaps Vancouver's Red Light District (or another so designated) might become a site of licensed sex trade. It should be noted that both major strains of feminist opinion on prostitution/sex work support some form of decriminalization and neither has shown support for licensed brothels. For more on this split, I refer you to my previous post: http://mtpleaseaunt.blogspot.com/2008/10/libby-davies-work-on-sex-worker-issues.html

What's being built by the VCC Clark Skytrain Station

Remember the very active volleyball area that used to be right beside the VCC Clark Skytrain station? As you came down the escalator you could watch a bunch of games going on at once. Then nearly a year ago the games left and construction started. For months, we were treated to the noise of pile drivers from early in the morning until evening. I was hoping that this might be construction of a link between the two sky train lines, Millennium and Expo, which come so close to each other at this point you could almost sail a paper airplane across.

But no. Today, looking from the top of North China Park to where the yellow crane was towering, I could see the skeleton of a building coming up there. As someone sensitive to the loss of public views, I feared another Hong Kong style skyscraper could be rising between the park and the mountains; so I walked the dogs down the hill and along the sidewalk between the fish plant and the Shaw service truck parking-lot, to see if there was any identifying sign. (The dogs loved the whiff of rotten fish.)

Thanks to Harper's obsession with signage on federally-funded projects, there certainly is a sign. Two signs, actually - one of the infamous ones about your federal dollars creating economic stimulus, and one that states simply "Police Property Office and Forensic Storage Facility." I repeated that all the way home until I could make a note of it and check the internet.

Search result: despite the sign touting federal money, the project is actually being funded with $10 million from the fed, $10 million from the province, and $10.3 million from the city for a total of $30.3 million. Of course, all three are our tax dollars. Ottawa has said it will only pay invoices for work completed by March 31, 2011. Since the province and city also have funds in this project, hopefully they are presenting Ottawa with the first $10 million (probably just about enough to cover the rebar already in place). Since the other levels are capping their contributions at $10 million each, if there are cost overruns, the city will presumably end up paying that bill.

The scope of this project, as found in a backgrounder online is that it will be a new, consolidated facility of 65,000 square feet "for receiving, storage and safekeeping of found and seized property and evidence, and the construction of vehicle forensic laboratories and associated storage." While "forensic" sounds like a morgue, I don't see any evidence that people bodies will be there - just auto bodies. I wonder if the proximity to the railroad tracks is intended to be useful for bringing vehicles in and out.

Given the square footage listed and the dimensions of the building, I think that the steel skeleton you can see now is likely pretty close to its full height - so, not a view-blocker. And there may yet be room in that railroad corridor to join the two Skytrain lines, giving a direct way from VCC Clark to downtown.

Mt. Pleasant Neighbourhood House AGM & Bylaw Changes

Mt. Pleasant Neighbourhood house held their AGM today. It has now been moved from October to July. Despite summer doldrums, about 50 people were in attendance.

The chair explained that while the neighbourhood houses are required to hold individual AGMs they are not in fact autonomous legal entities but are actually branches of the Association of Neighbourhood Houses of British Columbia. The chair emphasized several times that this was not a "legal meeting."

Highlights of the event: A new website has just been rolled out. It's mpnh.org

The daycare has a waiting list of about 50 children, an increase because of the closure of other daycares in the neighbourhood.

Repairs and upgrades were dwelt on lovingly with before and after pictures. Most changes related to new flooring and more environmentally efficient lightbulbs and appliances.

Sad news: Broadway Connection has had its funds eliminated by Coastal Health and the program may end in October unless reinstated. It's a therapeutic peer to peer self-help group for disabled adults that has been funded by Vancouver Coastal Health for twenty-five years. The previous beneficiaries mounted a publicity campaign but have so far been unable to get those funds restored.

Bylaws* changes that had been decided by the board were ratified by those assembled.
A major change allows persons to serve on the Community Board [formerly called the Board of Managers] who do not live in the neighbourhood.

There were several changes around membership. One was that those who take out a family membership will only be allowed to have one adult vote per family at the AGM, unless they take out an additional adult membership. (Adult memberships are now $4 and family memberships $6. Not including a now-voluntary $2 ANHBC membership.) The most surprising change was that free memberships will be given to children 12 to 18 and that these will be voting memberships.

As the meetings are conducted, however, voting doesn't mean very much. In the interim between the previous AGM last October and this one, the board and staff made their own decision about filling all but 2 of the previously vacant board seats. They presented a "slate" nominee at this AGM for one of the remaining seats and announced that unlike in the past there would be no nominations from the floor. They say they are holding the last open seat vacant for a youth member.

Mt. Pleasant Neighbourhood House's activities are primarily aimed at programs for low-income and immigrant residents of this neighbourhood area, so it's rather a contrast to see who is on their now-self-appointing community board. The new board member - approved, of course - is a nurse with a masters in public health. Nearly every other member of the board also has a master's degree, and/or is a business owner or an administrator.

With such a highly educated and well-connected board, one would hope for some high-powered fundraising. This past year, donations and fundraising accounted for only $34,000 of the more than $1.5 million dollars in revenue - an increase over previous years of about $11,000. A "business fundraiser" was described as having been "controversial" and therefore a financial failure. There was no time allowed for questions to clear up what this meant. Fundraisers initiated by members were not mentioned.

For fiscal year 2009-10 (which ended March 31) there was about $200,000 more income than the previous year, but MPNH still ended up more than $63,000 in the hole. The treasurer said staff hours have now been cut. (Salaries & benefits had increased by about $200,000, to $1,249,645. The number of staff this covered was not reported.)

If you want to know more about Mt. Pleasant Neighbourhood House, it's at the corner of Prince Albert & Broadway. Check it out.

------------------------
*One change was to rename the house's Operating Guide to the Bylaws. As MPNH is not in itself a legal entity, there is some question about whether these are legally binding bylaws; and some of the things in the bylaws, such as who may drive the house's cars, seem more appropriate for Rules and Procedures than for bylaws.

Willow Blight in Area

On a trip today to Trout Lake, we observed many weeping willows looking seriously blighted on both sides of the lake. A similar blight seems to have affected a curly willow in our yard. Leaves blacken, curl up and die. The stems look as if burnt.

I googled "willow blight" to read more about this disease, and apparently it has been moving steadily from the East Coast for decades, and had been observed in Vancouver as early as the late 1970s. It's fungal - actually, a combination of two fungi - and there really is no treatment, as the fungus hides inside the tree. According to one article, the blight flourishes during wet summers, and not only rain but also mist or fog can worsen it. Planting trees too close together also helps it spread.

Trout lake has a great many willows that add a lot to its beauty - I'm sad to see that we may be losing so many. The large willows that are farther away from the lake and on higher ground seemed to be healthy, but most of the trees that are closer, and close to the other undergrowth, are not. The new growth on the recently constructed willow fence looks fine, so far.