Vision Vancouver councillor Heather Deal suggests that if Mayor Sam Sullivan had stuck with the word sustainability, neighbourhood associations wouldn’t be feeling anxious about “EcoDensity”.

According to Deal, Vancouver residents weren’t really scared about increasing residential densities until the mayor coined the term EcoDensity in June 2006, which left people asking what the term really meant.

“He [Sullivan] put the fear of density into people,” Deal told the Georgia Straight on the sidelines of a city-sponsored workshop on Sullivan’s EcoDensity Initiative at the Chinese Cultural Centre on February 16.

The workshop was the fifth and last of a series running up to a special meeting by council on Tuesday (February 26). Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver, a cross-city coalition, stated in a news release that it expects hundreds of residents to sign up to speak before council to “oppose the city’s plan to densify neighbourhoods without plans to ensure adequate safeguards or amenities”. The alliance declared in a separate manifesto that the only section that it supports in the proposed EcoDensity charter is the one that talks about an “eco-city”.

That section pledges to “champion new, holistic ways to align density, design, and land use with other tools for environmental, economic, social, and cultural sustainability, to achieve mutual benefits—including strategies for transportation and parking, green building strategies, heritage conservation, affordable housing strategies, urban agriculture and food policy, recycling, new energy systems, social development planning, and the many other related City initiatives”.

Deal said that city staff have actually done a good job framing EcoDensity discussions around the need for sustainable neighbourhoods in the face of an increasing population, decreased housing affordability, and climate change. “We can’t put the density in and then try to create affordability and amenities after that,” she said.

Speaking at the start of the February 16 workshop, city planning director Brent Toderian said that the draft charter and initial action plan may “change dramatically” with the public input staff have received from 50 or so community meetings held so far regarding EcoDensity.

Toderian noted that residents have told staff that they want city hall to respect Vancouver as a “city of neighbourhoods”. He also said that residents want gradual—not sudden—change.

Former councillor Jim Green, who lost to Sullivan in the 2005 civic election, attended the same workshop to observe how Vancouverites are participating in public processes that may influence the future direction of the city.

“We’re perched on a place where we could go on the right way or the wrong way,” Green told the Straight.

Green explained that the bottom line is whether or not the city will give developers more space for market-oriented development in exchange for building social housing for low-income residents. “Those are the kind of issues that are going to make the city or break it,” he said. “Is it going to be a city for all people, or is it going to be a city for just the wealthy?”

The former Vision Vancouver councillor cited the condominium project by Millennium Robson Properties at the corner of Richards and Robson streets as one model to consider.

In 2004, when Green and Sullivan were members of council, the city approved the company’s application for extra space for market housing on the former site of the Passlin Hotel, a 43-room structure that housed low-income residents. In return, the developer agreed to build for the city 46 self-contained units in the same condominium project for singles who would otherwise live in single-room-occupancy hotels elsewhere in the city. A 2004 staff report noted that the estimated value of the 46 units is $5,765,000.

Rick Archambault is the chair of the Strathcona Revitalization Committee. Speaking with the Straight at the end of the workshop, he said that neighbourhood groups might be a little too worried that their concerns will be ignored by city hall. In the end, according to Archambault, communities may have to make some compromises to make Vancouver as a whole more livable and sustainable.